Why Lower Thames Crossing is taking so long … 36 years and counting
The saga of the road linking Essex and Kent, with endless consultations and £300m spent on the planning application, illustrates why Britain struggles to build infrastructure
Some 36 years ago — or to put it another way, 22 transport secretaries ago — the words “Lower Thames Crossing” first appear in the parliamentary record.
The Department for Transport’s 1989 white paper, Roads for Prosperity, argued that this road across the Thames estuary might just be the sort of road that would make us prosperous.
Ministers went, governments changed. Tony Blair came to power, Blair lost power. There was Gulf War One, and its less critically acclaimed sequel Gulf War Two. John Prescott became transport secretary. Prescott ceased to be transport secretary. He did so having never driven even one of his two Jags over a Lower Thames Crossing.
Then, in 2009 — ten transport secretaries ago — Britain was at last ready. The Department for Transport once again backed a Lower Thames Crossing, this time in earnest.
A mere four transport secretaries later we had an agreed route, and had agreed it was a tunnel. It took just two transport secretaries more for planning to be submitted.
And what now, as we await the decision on the application? Last week the chancellor, Rachel Reeves, confirmed that she very much intends for the crossing to go ahead, describing it as “the infrastructure that our country desperately needs”.
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Paul Channon, the Tory transport secretary who commissioned Roads for Prosperity, will be pleased. Or he would be, if he hadn’t died in 2007.
How has it taken so long?
The case
Today, as every day, 150,000 vehicles, 40 per cent of them lorries, will cross the Thames at Dartford. As with most days, there is a good chance they will be delayed. They have no choice but to wait it out: for traffic crossing the river east of London, this is the only option.
It is, says Jim Dickson, Labour MP for Dartford, “a single point of failure” in critical infrastructure. The gridlock is also, for his constituents, really annoying. “I see every day the missed hospital appointments, the inability of people to get to work or get to school on time.” So, he says, we need another crossing. And not just because it will help Dartford.
In the summer, three former transport secretaries — or nearly one of five of the surviving holder of the post since 1989 — wrote a letter to The Times calling for the construction of the Lower Thames Crossing, “supporting tens of thousands of jobs and adding tens of billions to the UK economy”.
Kate Willard, the government-appointed envoy for the Thames Estuary, called the plan — a 14.3-mile road, including a 2.6-mile tunnel— a “game-changer for the estuary and for the national economy”.
As with every major infrastructure project, there are detractors. Jen Craft, Labour MP for Thurrock, argues it will only be a temporary relief from congestion.
Transport Action Network, a campaigning group, disputes the economic benefit, and says better options, such as improving public transport, had not been considered. “The people tasked with solving the problem are the National Highways agency,” says its director, Chris Todd. “The only thing they know about is highways.”
The Woodland Trust laments the destruction of “six veteran trees”. There are, of course, newts to consider.
But the newts, for once, are not so important in the tale of what comes next. Nor are the campaigners. Because even if it is yet to be built and whether doing so is desirable, there has long been political consensus that the crossing is needed. That dates back to 2009. And as the British state lumbered into gear, it meant only one thing: it was time for a consultation.
The consultation(s)
Michael Dnes, head of transport policy at consultants Stonehaven, likes to refer to a flow chart used in infrastructure planning. It has 300 steps.
To understand why the planning process is so exhaustive, he says, you need to understand what this flow chart really is. It’s not a set of instructions. “It’s more like a map of a minefield, through which you must travel without losing a leg.”
The incentive is to invest in absolute certainty — £100 million-bat-tunnel-certainty, to use an example from HS2 — that you have covered every concern. The reason why is because what can happen if you don’t. There is a final, terrible hurdle that can appear, reanimating like a horror movie baddie, even when you think you have won. This has a name: judicial review.
“If you get it wrong, opponents can take you to court,” he says. Even if you win, doing so can take months and cause tens of millions of costs in delays. “This creates a risk-averse culture where delivery comes second.”
So the consultation process is very important.
The first consultation was about where the crossing should actually be. There were three options, and from the 5,776 responses, the report concluded that they could exclude the middle one. That meant things were ready to move on: to the second consultation.
The second consultation had 47,034 responses. It meant that, by 2017, we had the final route. Now the project was at last able to progress: to the statutory consultation.
Once that was over, the hope was that things could be wrapped up speedily, with the Supplementary Consultation and the Design Refinement Consultation.
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Planning
In 2020, the Lower Thames Crossing at last submitted its planning application. It was considered not detailed enough and withdrawn. Two years and two more consultations later, it was resubmitted. It had cost £300 million — or, as has been pointed out, somewhat more than Norway took to actually build Laerdal, the world’s longest road tunnel.
The final document was big.
How big?
There is, it needs to be made clear, some disagreement. Britain Remade, a group in favour of more infrastructure investment, calculates that if you printed off all the Lower Thames Crossing planning documents and laid them end to end, they would stretch 66 miles. Transport Action Network, their nemesis, disputes that figure — claiming that once duplicates are excluded it comes to less than 12 miles.
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Whether it is 25 times the length of the planned 2.6 mile tunnel or merely 4.5 times, the problem, says Dnes, is not that what is contained in those pages is absurd. It’s that it’s not.
“Every single thing that the planning system considers is reasonable in its own right. Few people actively wish to harm scarce species, worsen flood risk or release pollutants into the breathable air,” he says. “But taken together they have created a workload that often can’t be shifted in a five-year parliament.” It is now, he says, impossible for politicians to promise they can do something. “Planning and democracy do not always point to the same outcomes.”
Juliano Denicol is director of the MBA Major Infrastructure Delivery at University College London. He and his colleagues conduct research into the delivery of megaprojects, and the reasons they fail. He says regulations are crucial but in a democracy, especially for significant infrastructure projects, so is getting the balance right. Too often, he says, we see projects caught in the same morass. “We are observing an expansion in the requirements, scale, and duration of planning applications, with thousands of pages that are often too open to legal challenges.”
The tale of the tunnel borer is instructive, argues Sam Dumitriu, from Britain Remade. In the original plans for the tunnel, there were two boring machines, working in parallel on each carriageway.
Then someone had an idea. Why not use just one? It could cross one way, then return. It would cost less, reduce disruption and, the project managers calculated, wouldn’t actually add any time.
It was a good idea, says Dumitriu. But as a significant change to the plans it also required they go back with more paperwork to gain amended approval. In a small but telling way it added another delay.
“Whoever figured out that only one tunnel boring machine is needed has saved taxpayers millions of pounds,” he says. “They deserve a medal, but under our planning system they get a meeting with legal instead.”
What happens next?
Just because the tunnel hasn’t started, it doesn’t mean that nothing is getting done. So far, the Lower Thames Crossing has backed dozens of individual projects. They include two community farms, exercise classes in Tilbury, a pop-up immersive dance experience and LGBT social nights in Thurrock.
The tunnel itself though? A summer decision was postponed by the election. Another before Christmas was postponed again.
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One of the problems now is how it will be funded. It has seen political epochs come and go. It was first planned in the era of private finance initiatives. Then, when PFI became a dirty word, it was going to be publicly funded. Now Reeves has indicated that she wants private backing after all, probably with the inducement of a toll. A final decision will come in the spring.
Then, if in favour, comes the simple bit: building it. It should take six years.
What are the lessons? Stephen Hammond is one of the many transport ministers the Lower Thames Crossing has seen come and go. He worked on it when the planning application was young. He wishes Labour well in reforming planning. “We’ve got to find a way of agreeing certain projects are of national significance and streamlining the process, otherwise we won’t build anything.”
Dickson, the Dartford MP, has a graphic timeline of the project planning. It is titled “Lower Thames Crossing, 15+ years in the making”. Under “May 2025”, he has the entry: “decision due”. That is not, though, the last entry. Immediately after, with a certain weariness, comes “anticipated judicial reviews”.
“I wouldn’t want to look like I was expecting it,” he says. “But there are always people who want to continue the conversation.”
In a sense, he says, that’s absolutely as it should be. On “a crowded island” consultation and planning are crucial. Conversations are the cost of democracy. He also, though, agrees with Hammond. “There is something wrong with a process in which the construction takes half the time of the decision.”
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