THE FIVE GIANTS - gridlock
Gridlock is the barrier to proportionate regulation that makes building faster and cheaper.
The quality of delivery of major capital programmes in Britain has declined dramatically in the last century. A poor delivery record ultimately deters investment and results in a lower stock of infrastructure and housing than there otherwise would be. There is a well-established link between infrastructure and economic growth.
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Author
Bertie Wnek
introduction
When it works well, regulation helps markets work efficiently and equitably, protects consumers, encourages innovation and incentivises long-term investment.
Effective regulation is an essential part of any functioning society, often directly leading to higher living standards and outcomes for people in every corner of society.
But rules themselves are neither inherently good nor bad. Over time, the regulatory state, defined by the number and restrictiveness of new rules, has expanded steadily in Britain. Whilst much regulation is hugely valuable, the regulatory framework is also riddled with disproportionate, costly, overly burdensome rules.
In many cases these rules have unintended consequences, limit growth and fail to solve for whatever it is they have been designed to solve.
The purpose of this paper is to understand how the UK's regulatory state increasingly fails to work well, creating gridlock for businesses trying to build and entrepreneurs trying to invest.
The UK is heavily regulated by the Government’s own admission, and the burden is measured badly. The Government’s 2025 Regulation Action Plan suggests that the cost of red tape could be as high as 3 to 4% of GDP, although this estimate is based on one study from 2005 which extrapolates from analysis of the USA and the Netherlands.
The government’s annual baseline published in October 2025 puts the administrative burden of regulation on business at between £19bn and £25.9bn a year, with a target of cutting it by 25% by the end of the Parliament.
Planning evidence · 1990–2026
Each block is one document or assessment required. Illustrative greenfield site of c.40 homes, August 2026 prices (RPI); the year shows when each item could first be required
Hover over a block to see the document or assessment it represents.
† Since August 2026, only where a local plan policy requires it.
Source: reproduced from LPDF and Lichfields, Small Builders, Big Burdens (2023); ONS RPI; NPPF (August 2026); Public First analysis.21
At over £13,000 per kilowatt, Sizewell C’s budgeted cost is more than twice that of Sizewell B, which cost £6,200 per kilowatt in 1995.
The National Infrastructure Commission found that the average time to consent a nationally significant infrastructure project rose 65% between 2012 and 2021, from 2.6 years to more than four.
Hinkley Point C is on course to cost £46 billion, or £14,100 per kilowatt, which will make it the most expensive nuclear power station ever built: roughly six times South Korea's cost per kilowatt, 27% more than France's Flamanville 3 and about twice Finland's Olkiluoto 3.
Heathrow’s third runway was first approved in 2009, and the £33bn investment is now due to be completed in 2039, after the approval has been repeatedly overturned and subsequently revisited
The Lower Thames Crossing is expected to cost £10.6 billion, including almost £300 million on a planning application running to some 360,000 pages, before consent was granted in March 2025, 16 years after the scheme was first proposed. That planning bill alone exceeds the entire cost of Norway’s Laerdal tunnel, the world’s longest road tunnel.
Only 1,220 sites for private housing were granted planning approval in the first three months of 2026, the fewest for at least 20 years, whilst over £23,000 in regulatory costs have been added to the building of a house since 2020 alone. Zoopla estimates that building new homes is unviable across 48% of England.
Administrative cost is only a fraction of the total cost: it excludes delay, uncertainty, forgone investment and the cost of decisions not taken. Regulation can undermine competition when incumbents, more able to devote resources to compliance, are handed a structural advantage over challenger firms. Ultimately, regulations impose costs in much the same way as taxes, and subsequent costs to economic growth can be substantial and may well outweigh the benefits. Importantly, even where individual regulations make sense on a cost-benefit basis, the overall burden of regulation can be much greater than the sum of the parts. This can be especially important in impacting dynamism and protecting incumbents.
The impacts are most emphatically demonstrated by the UK’s recent record on infrastructure and housing delivery:
Our focus for the gridlock giant is therefore on how improving regulation can support businesses to operate efficiently, the delivery of major capital programmes, and healthy competition across the economy.
