9th September 2026
Britain is once again facing a huge infrastructure challenge.
We need new electricity transmission lines, upgraded railways, new housing, roads, renewable energy and the infrastructure needed to support a rapidly changing economy.
Yet major projects can take years to get through planning, consultation, environmental assessment, objections, inquiries and appeals.
It raises an interesting question:
How did the Victorians manage to transform Britain so dramatically in such a short period of time?
During the 19th century, Britain was transformed by railways, canals, docks, bridges, water supplies and other major engineering projects.
The railway revolution was particularly extraordinary.
Between 1826 and 1836, hundreds of miles of railway opened. Then came the great railway boom of the 1840s. In the three years from 1845 to 1847, Parliament authorised more than 8,500 miles of railway.
Imagine trying to approve that amount of infrastructure today.
But there is an important difference.
The Victorians did not have anything resembling our modern planning system.
There was no environmental impact assessment as we know it today. There were no biodiversity assessments, landscape assessments or extensive public consultations involving multiple statutory bodies.
Instead, major railway schemes were frequently taken directly to Parliament through private Bills.
Parliament effectively decided whether the railway could be built.
If the Bill was approved, the railway company could obtain powers to acquire the land it needed, including through compulsory purchase. The system was subsequently formalised through legislation such as the Land Clauses Consolidation Act 1845.
There was certainly scrutiny. Landowners could object, Parliament examined railway schemes and compensation arrangements were established.
But the system was fundamentally different from today's.
Once Parliament had decided that a railway should be built, the presumption was essentially that it would be built.
That made it possible to push infrastructure through the country at a remarkable speed.
The Great Western Railway, for example, was authorised by Parliament in 1835. The line from London to Maidenhead was completed in less than three years, and the railway to Bristol followed soon afterwards.
But there was a price for this speed.
Victorian Britain was not necessarily better at balancing competing interests. It was simply prepared to give much greater weight to the objective of getting infrastructure built.
Communities could be disrupted or demolished. Land could be compulsorily acquired. Landscapes could be transformed. Environmental consequences that would trigger major objections today were often barely considered.
And the system was hardly democratic by modern standards.
So it would be wrong to romanticise the Victorian approach.
The question is not whether we should return to Victorian planning.
It is whether modern Britain has gone too far in the opposite direction.
That question is particularly relevant to the enormous expansion of the electricity grid now being proposed across Scotland.
Take the proposed Spittal–Loch Buidhe–Beauly 400kV transmission line in the Highlands.
There is a clear argument for examining such a project carefully. It crosses sensitive landscapes and peatlands and raises legitimate questions about wildlife, heritage, communities and construction impacts.
Highland Council has objected and the project is now heading towards a public inquiry before a final decision is taken by Scottish Ministers.
That is the modern system working as it was designed to work.
But there is a bigger question.
If governments are telling us that the electricity grid must be expanded urgently to allow new renewable generation to connect and to support the transition away from fossil fuels, can the consenting system deliver that infrastructure quickly enough?
This is where the Victorian comparison becomes interesting.
The Victorians understood something that modern governments sometimes appear to struggle with: infrastructure requires decisions.
Once they had decided that a railway was necessary, they established the legal powers to acquire the land, raised the money and built it.
Modern Britain has developed much stronger protections for communities and the environment — and rightly so.
But we have also created a system in which responsibility can become spread across numerous organisations and stages.
A major project can move from developer to local authority, from consultation to environmental assessment, from objection to inquiry and finally to ministerial decision.
Each stage may be perfectly reasonable in isolation.
The problem is what happens when they are added together.
The result can be years of process before a shovel ever goes into the ground.
The answer surely isn't to abandon environmental protection or community involvement.
Nor should every objection simply be swept aside in the name of economic growth.
But perhaps we need to ask whether nationally important infrastructure should have a much clearer and faster route through the system.
Could environmental assessment be carried out earlier?
Could related projects be assessed together rather than one after another?
Could there be firm deadlines for consultations and inquiries?
Could governments make an early decision on the strategic need for infrastructure, leaving the planning process to concentrate on the best route and the least damaging design?
And could communities be given a stronger voice early in the process, rather than being drawn into increasingly lengthy procedures after routes have effectively been established?
These are increasingly important questions.
Britain is attempting an enormous transformation of its energy system. Thousands of miles of new transmission infrastructure may ultimately be required.
That means we need to find a balance between building quickly and building responsibly.
The Victorians showed what can happen when a country is prepared to make decisions and then act on them.
They also showed us the dangers of doing so without the safeguards we now take for granted.
Perhaps the challenge for modern Britain is to take the best of both approaches:
keep the scrutiny, keep the environmental protection and keep the public voice — but make the decisions much faster.
Because if Britain really does need the infrastructure governments say it needs, endlessly debating whether and how to build it could eventually become just as serious a problem as not building it at all.