He’s cost taxpayers £200m: Meet Britain’s biggest Nimby
"[Chris] Todd, 58, has a claim to be one of Britain’s costliest Nimbys. Over the past six years, the group he runs, Transport Action Network (Tan), has brought numerous legal cases against the Department for Transport (DfT). Some challenged official policies defining so-called nationally important road infrastructure – big programmes where ministerial decisions can override the conventional planning process. But Todd has also brought court challenges against individual road schemes in the North of England and East Anglia with a total value of £2.5 billion. And while none of these cases has so far succeeded, the delays and uncertainties they brought with them have raised the costs of those schemes by £200 to £300 million.
Decades ago, campaigners occupied construction sites when they wanted to stop road-building. Now they occupy the High Court, seeking permission for judicial review of ministers’ decisions when they grant consent for projects. Even Sir Keir Starmer, a staunch supporter of those using the law to assert their human rights, is exasperated. In January, the Prime Minister wrote an article condemning “Nimbys and zealots gumming up the legal system often for their own ideological blind spots to stop the Government building the infrastructure the country needs”. Activists were bringing cases they had no chance of winning, he said, hoping to drag things out to the point where the Government or industry gave up.
“They want to win for themselves, not for the country,” he went on, likening them to “Extinction Rebellion activists who block the motorway at rush hour, without a care for the hard-working people going about their lives”. Starmer singled out former Green Party councillor Andrew Boswell, who has brought a number of failed actions against a road scheme near Norwich, one of which was dismissed by the Court of Appeal last year for having “no logical basis”. People close to the DfT say he also had Todd in mind, but could not mention him because Tan had cases outstanding that he did not want to prejudice. One former DfT official, Michael Dnes, even posted about it on X, calling Todd “the Nimby the PM can’t name”...
He sees his group as the Government’s conscience, helping it to frame a transport policy that fits with the many environmental goals adopted in recent years, including new air-quality targets, the Paris climate accord and Theresa May’s decision to go from an 80 per cent carbon-emissions reduction by 2050 to net zero. “Maybe if someone in government could point out to me where we are on track to meet net zero, then I’d put my hands up and agree we were wrong to do it. But no one has.”...
True, direct action in itself never stopped roads being built once the works had started. But by imposing delays, protesters could sap the will of ministers, outlast a government, and even, through the media, win the PR battle...
The roads programme was already on the skids by the mid-1990s, as economic pressures squeezed the transport budget. The coup de grâce came with the arrival of Tony Blair in 1997. The new Transport Secretary, John Prescott, belied his “Two Jags” sobriquet and scrapped 113 of the 150 schemes he inherited from the Conservatives, promising to find radical new ways of beating the scourge of congestion. Roads were put on the back burner. “I will have failed if, in five years’ time, there are not many more people using public transport and far fewer journeys by car,” Prescott said...
In a country that took four years in the 1950s to build the 73-mile first section of the M1, from plan to opening, it’s sobering to discover how long modern road projects take. This 10-mile stretch of dual carriageway was first conceived in 2015, when Chancellor George Osborne revived road-building from its long slumber as a way of digging Britain out of its post-2008 economic malaise. The scheme went through three rounds of public consultation before the design was fixed in 2020; two years later it finally got planning approval, being signed off by then transport secretary Grant Shapps.
And that’s before a single digger came on site. Then came Todd’s challenge, on the grounds that the new road would generate excessive carbon emissions and destroy too many habitats. This added another year (and £150 million to the bill, according to National Highways), despite being thrown out twice by the High Court and then by the Court of Appeal. The scheme won’t now be finished until 2027.
It’s impossible to build a dual carriageway without having some sort of environmental impact. But I’m struck by the new road’s wiggliness as it carves through the countryside. “It’s designed to navigate around areas of environmental value – habitats, woods, hedgerows and so on,” says Gareth Moores, programme manager at National Highways. As we drive across the site, he points to a stand of trees in the distance: “We spent four months unable to work within 500 metres because an owl had nested there with its young.” Workers were only able to resume when the owlets learnt to hunt and left.
It’s tempting to attribute the slower pace of development to the fact we no longer disregard the natural world in the way our heedless predecessors did. But that’s not wholly fair: back in the 1950s, the M1’s developers might perhaps not have been quite as attentive to the welfare of bats and owls, but the route was shifted for environmental reasons. What we have undoubtedly done is create a hugely cumbersome system that is both slow and fantastically expensive. The Black Cat to Caxton Gibbet scheme is estimated to come in at £100 million a mile – eight times the £12.6 million a mile (in present-day terms) cost of the M40 extension north of Oxford in the late 1980s.
Many attribute this extreme inflation – at least in part – to the kind of legal warfare that Todd has made his stock in trade... He remains convinced that moving cars off roads and investing in buses and trains offers far more bang for the buck than new roads, and (ironically in light of how others see him) regards himself as a sort of public-spending watchdog. “The good use of taxpayer’s money is a key part of what we campaign on because wastage prevents investment in better alternatives.”...
By the late 2010s, new avenues were opening for legal action, ironically as a consequence of government efforts to streamline infrastructure decisions. Concerned by the time that it took to deliver Heathrow’s Terminal 5 in the 2000s, Gordon Brown’s administration moved to shield “nationally significant” projects from the vagaries of planning. The last word would rest with ministers on the basis of policies that laid out national requirements in relation to each sector: roads, aviation, etc.
Yet for all the speed ministerial override gave, it also widened the doorway to judicial review, especially if it could be argued that a decision conflicted with some other area of official policy, such as the UK’s increasingly complex skein of environmental and climate commitments...
Sam Dumitriu, head of policy at Britain Remade, a campaign group that champions planning reform, sees the growth in “lawfare” as a disaster for public infrastructure. “More and more projects are caught up in these challenges,” he says. “Each one takes a year even if it’s unsuccessful, and can add hugely to the cost of an already expensive scheme.” A recent review by planning barrister Charles Banner cited National Highways calculations that the added cost comes to £66 to £121 million per road project. While not rejecting the numbers, Todd says it’s “total bulls—t” to blame him for the high cost of roads, saying his challenges are just a “small part” compared to the epic wastage caused by poor governmental and National Highways decision-making.
It’s not just the direct legal costs or the need to keep construction crews hanging about. Judicial review reinforces a pre-existing problem: the tendency of developers to gold-plate everything to ensure it passes environmental muster. “It’s the chilling effect,” says Dumitriu. “Developers become more belt-and-braces about their planning application. Let’s say in the past you did one bat survey; now you do three or four. You worry that one public consultation may no longer be adequate, so you do more of them.” He points to the Lower Thames Crossing, a proposed £9 billion road tunnel east of London. This has consulted the public no fewer than seven times, and even paid £4 million to fund a bankrupt local council’s opposition to the bridge so it could show it hadn’t disregarded contrary views. Not that this will necessarily stop Tan from challenging the project, which the Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander cleared for development last month. Todd responded to the announcement by saying the scheme was “madness” that would block “better, cheaper, smarter alternatives”.
The biggest worry for the taxpayer is that the financial incentives to bring legal action are so skewed in favour of organisations such as Tan. Under the Aarhus Convention, an international treaty, the UK Government is bound not to seek damages from citizens challenging it on environmental issues, and only to recover nominal costs (£5,000 for an individual complainant and £10,000 for an organisation). “It basically means that groups like Todd’s can crowdfund a few tens of thousands and tie the taxpayer up in costs worth millions over issues they know judges have rejected time and time again,” says one transport expert. “I understand there are issues around access to justice but this is ridiculous: it’s just a free hit.”
Michael Dnes, the consultant who used to work at the DfT, also perceives an agenda to piggyback on media interest, just like Swampy did years ago. “Every case gets lovely media coverage – ‘planners bad’ when started and ‘sad defeat for plucky campaigners’ when chucked out,” he wrote in January. This PR, he thinks, is priceless.
It’s easy to see why many are cynical about Todd’s motivations. When we meet in Brighton, he struggles to justify why Tan builds so many cases on arguments the courts have consistently rejected. One of his first challenges, against the then government’s £27 billion road investment programme, was based on the claim that extra carbon emissions from the road-building programme were incompatible with net zero. Yet despite the judge dismissing its argument as “unreasonable”, Tan has used variations of it again and again.
Todd’s answer is to say it’s not him but the judicial review process that’s defective...
The suspicion remains that winning in court isn’t the only point. While Tan routinely loses, sometimes the delays its activities impose can be decisive. After last July’s election, its long-running support of campaigns against two big road schemes got its reward when the new Government cancelled two projects – the upgrade to the A303 around Stonehenge and the A27 Arundel bypass – after years and many millions spent on preparation...
Embarrassed by stories about the HS2 high-speed rail project spending £100 million on a so-called “bat tunnel”, for example, politicians are trying to make it harder to drag out challenges. Banner’s review, set up last year by Rishi Sunak, proposed cutting the number of appeals a plaintiff can bring in planning cases from three to two – an idea Starmer has endorsed. Few, however, believe this will change much. Sam Bowman, an economist and pro-development activist, would like to see the Government pull the UK out of the Aarhus Convention and seek damages from those who bring cases that fail. “If the Government and the developers could claim back 10 per cent of what they’d lost, you could solve the problem tomorrow,” he says. If such a rule had applied with the Black Cat to Caxton Gibbet challenge, it could have left Tan nursing a bill of some £15 million. That compares with the £10,360 the group crowdfunded to pursue the case.
Such radical action seems unlikely under Starmer. So the only real recourse is to reform planning law to speed things up and make it mesh more smoothly with the UK’s environmental and climate laws; both to give developers more clarity about their obligations, and to reduce the scope for legal challenges. That’s a huge task and many think the Government’s new Planning and Infrastructure Bill, while welcome, is too cautious. But it’s essential, Bowman argues. “The process has gone mad,” he says. “People have to accept there are trade-offs between development and the environment. Nothing would have been built in Victorian times if we had anything like this.”"
Climate change hysteria is costly in so many ways
