Infrastructure Planning Blog

… I’ve joined TLT today (well, 1 October), Newark, Newark. The Infrastructure Planning Act blog team has a new member!

This week's entry takes stock and then looks at the recently consented A46 Newark DCO application.

Decisions, Decisions

In December, the Prime Minister pledged to make a decision on 150 DCO applications during this Parliament. How is it going so far?

According to this press release, it seems to be going smoothly and the government is suggesting a record breaking year, but does that stack up?

First year after:

• 2010 general election - no decisions
• 2015 general election - 15 decisions
• 2017 general election - five decisions
• 2019 general election - 14 decisions

21 decisions would look to be a record breaking number, but that figure is not quite correct. The actual figure is 20, as Gatwick Airport's 'minded to' decision on 21 September 2024 was not finally approved until exactly a year later, on 21 September 2025 (see previous blog entry). However, even then this doesn't make a difference to the claim of record-breaking – 20 was already well above the previous record. 

If the current administration lasts for the full five years, then between 100 and 105 schemes would be approved during this time. This is not enough – in order to meet the target of 150, there needs to be 130 in the remaining four years or 32 1/2 per year. There have been another five schemes approved in the first quarter of the second year (including Gatwick), which keeps up the first year hit rate but still falls short of the needed rate.

Another area which has been flagged as a potential blocker to achieving the number of schemes needed is the initial restoration of on time, and early, decision-making has also been impacted, with two recent delays of a couple of months for the H2 Teesside and Five Estuaries offshore windfarm applications. On the plus side, a hit rate of decisions needs a good supply of applications and the government is trying to encourage that. Though there is a concern that it is falling into the mode of 'let's make some changes even before we know whether the previous ones we made have worked'. Let's hope the changes work well together and don't reduce confidence. 

At the same time, we seem to be in a developer sweet spot where it would seem that all projects are being consented, even those where the Examining Authority (ExA) recommends refusal. For developers thinking about going down the DCO route, there has never been a  better time but we would recommend moving swiftly before this changes. 

And the latest one

On 1 October, a week early, the Secretary of State (SoS) for Transport (or actually Lord Hendy) granted the A46 Newark Bypass DCO application. I was following this one as I was acting on a project also affecting the A46 (at Coventry) that is about six few months behind Newark.

As its name suggests, the project is to build a 6.5km bypass to the north west of Newark-upon-Trent in Nottinghamshire.  It received 80 relevant representations as a gauge of its level of controversy, and after a six-month examination the ExA recommended approval, with a question mark around funding and Crown land.

The application is the last one for a highway to which the old National Policy Statement applied, the new one being designated a month later. Nevertheless the project was deemed to be compliant with the new one as well, as an 'important and relevant' document.

The 38-page decision letter can be found here. As with the last couple of decisions, the letter only covers issues where the SoS disagrees with the ExA, wishes to add qualification, or consulted further on something. This is a new convention which could avoid a lot of repetition. My only comment is that the earlier summary of impacts not covered further in paragraph 19 should mention that the full list of impacts is summarised later in paragraph 101.

Carbon and climate impacts are not mentioned in the letter. The impacts with negative weight were climate and carbon, geology and soils, material assets and waste, population and human health (slightly negative), landscape and visual (moderately negative), and cultural heritage (greatly negative). The SoS's conclusion is the same as the ExA's in all regards – that could be a first!

On cultural impact, reference is made to the Civil War Siege of Newark (actually three sieges) in 1643-6 which is where the great negative weight comes in, but it was concluded that there would nevertheless be less than substantial harm. The moderate harm to visual receptors would only last for 15 years. On human impact there was an issue relating to new bridges near a mental health facility, but the SoS decided on review that the bridges were far enough away.

The Crown land issue was in relation to a sole plot that was 'bona vacantia', i.e. ownerless, land, which defaults to the Crown. The Applicant maintained it had been disclaimed and therefore was no longer Crown land; the Crown Estate did not reply to two letters from the SoS and so the SoS agreed with the Applicant that there was in fact no Crown land. As funder for the project, the SoS was able to deal with the hangover funding issue.

There are quite a few modifications to the DCO, mostly of the usual kind (removing tailpieces, restricting things to as assessed in the Environmental Statement, removal of provisions that don't apply), plus a removal of 'unusual subjective wording'.

The next DCO due to be decided is for the Outer Dowsing Windfarm application, by 10 October.

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