Why can’t Britain and the US build? China has an answer

IT’S LONG BEEN obvious that something has gone askew with Britain’s ability to build.

- By Matthew Brooker

The planning paperwork for a modest-sized apartment block in London can run to more than 1,000 pages whereas a few decades ago it might have been a handful. The documentation for the Lower Thames Crossing, a road and tunnel project under consideration since the early 2000s, exceeds 350,000 pages. The planned HS2 high-speed railway has become smaller and smaller, yet its cost continues to spiral to multiples of the original price tag. And so on.

The reality struck home for me when I walked around the vast and moribund HS2 terminus site at Euston in London a couple of years ago. It was remarkable — and dispiriting — that we would rip up such a large tract of central London, disrupting businesses and condemning residents to live beside an eyesore, only to leave it lying fallow into the indefinite future (some skeptics doubt the line will ever reach Euston).

Britain just can’t seem to break out of its rut of subpar economic growth, and address challenges such as inadequate housing and energy supply, without overcoming this syndrome of bureaucracy and inertia. What to do?

Things were very different in China. I first visited Shanghai in 1993, when cars moved at a snail’s pace through narrow streets that were clogged from curb to curb with bicycles. Returning a decade later, the city was barely recognizable. I took a taxi from Hongqiao Airport along an elevated highway that cut a swathe through the center of the city to the Huangpu river, where on the eastern bank a cluster of modern skyscrapers had materialized that resembled the Manhattan skyline. The pace of development was hard to take in. During the five years I lived in Shanghai, it didn’t slow down. And this was only a sliver of what was being replicated throughout the country.