Any Government seriously planning ahead would put adaptation to climate change at the centre of their plans, because without that, planning for anything else just isn’t going to work.

The Planning and Infrastructure Bill, currently in the House of Lords, fails to do that, being mostly concerned with setting up ways for developers to buy their way out of their nature conservation obligations. [1]  The UK Government has now followed that up with a 10-year ‘Infrastructure Strategy’, which doesn’t do it either. Both documents mention climate change but neither put it anywhere near the centre of the future they envisage. [2]

Some of the schemes mentioned in the new Strategy will make things worse for the climate, such as Heathrow airport expansion, while others will improve things, such as upgrading the electricity grid to make it more welcoming for renewable energy projects. The Infrastructure Strategy is pretty much indiscriminate in its drive to just build stuff. [3]

It is mostly a compilation of existing policy but brought together in a more integrated way and with an intention to organise implementation more systematically. This will be achieved through Treasury control, covering not only infrastructure for transport, energy, water, etc, but also ‘social infrastructure’ such as housing, schools, and GP surgeries. This is to avoid the classic failure to co-ordinate which can produce housing with no public transport, or a transport route with no-one to make use of it, with different government departments, local councils, and businesses all waiting for each other to make a move before they commit their own expenditure.

However the downside of this idea is that, despite proposals in the Blair/Brown era to create a Department for Infrastructure, this co-ordination is going to be done by the Treasury. The Treasury has its own way of thinking about things. Its civil servants have a tendency to regard themselves as a responsible elite, restraining their spendthrift colleagues in ‘OGDs’ (other government departments) by demanding a proper business case for everything they might want to do.

This is where Treasury attitudes are likely to come into conflict with the stated aims of the Strategy. The Strategy wants to think long-term but the Treasury operates a system of discount rates in its calculations which make the future far less significant in economic terms than the present, a problem for any project that costs money in the next few years and only brings in benefits a lot later. [4] The Treasury also likes to evaluate spending proposals on the basis of their impact on GDP. The Strategy wants to favour the north of England and other less wealthy areas, difficult to do, because if there is less money around in an area, any benefits from infrastructure won’t register as big a gain in GDP terms as the same project would in an area of high profits and salaries. So Treasury attitudes and calculations will have to change unless its civil servants are going to end up undermining the Strategy they are supposed to be in charge of implementing and driving forward.

There are also problems specifically about climate adaptation and resilience, which brings home why we need campaigns such as SAFER to educate the politicians. Four problems in particular –

1. There is no serious local dimension to adaptation plans. This is necessary in order to bring home to people the reality of what climate change will mean for the area they live in, and also in order to carry out the detailed contingency planning which will be required, often needing to differ substantially from place to place.
2. The Strategy refers to the most likely climate outcomes, but apparently doesn’t seek to anticipate those that have a less than 50% chance of occurring but are still significant possibilities that ought to be planned for.
3. The Strategy promises money for flood defences but recognises the need for a wider adaptation and resilience agenda. However this wider agenda is a can kicked down the road, as paragraph 3.91 makes clear: “As a result of this work, any new or strengthened resilience standards should then be in place for the digital and telecoms, energy, transport and water sectors by 2030”.
4. Despite the money promised for flood defences, there is an inconsistency in the Strategy about what the money will be spent on. The two versions are brought together on page 10. There is to be “… a £7.9 billion 10-year pipeline of capital investment to maintain existing and invest in new flood defences, nature-based solutions and property level resilience measures.” And the Government plan to be “…unlocking £7.9 billion investment in water resources in the next 5 years – including in the development of 9 new major reservoirs and 9 water transfer schemes.”

These two £7.9 billion figures probably aren’t a coincidence, so it is presumably a single amount, although that isn’t made clear. And if it is, does it cover major reservoirs, nature-based solutions, or only flood defences, or some combination? Politicians can’t always be expected to read draft documents carefully, but someone senior in the civil service ought to have sorted this out and hasn’t done.

The Starmer Government still hasn’t grasped the reality of the climate crisis. It has a Department for Energy Security and Net Zero, which itself has a mixed record, and is often losing out other departments, in particular the Treasury (as in this Infrastructure Strategy) and Angela Rayner’s Department for Housing, Communities and Local Government (as in the Planning & Infrastructure Bill). At the same time, the Tory Party has stepped away from the long-standing cross-party consensus which has, in theory anyway, accepted the conclusions of climate science. This is not where we ought to be in 2025.

[1] Material on the Planning & Infrastructure Bill:
https://cieem.net/i-am/influencing-policy/planning-and-infrastructure-bill/?

https://bills.parliament.uk/publications/61398/documents/6670

[2]  Rupert Read & Caroline Lucas:
https://www.resilience.org/stories/2025-06-20/the-new-infrastructure-strategy-is-notstrategic/

[3]  Infrastructure Strategy: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/6853c5db99b009dcdcb73649/UK_Infrastructure_A_10_Year_Strategy_Web_Accessible.pdf

[4] House of Commons Environmental Audit Committee report (2016): https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201617/cmselect/cmenvaud/181/18106.htm#_idTextAnchor012

Teaser image credit: Flooding on the road to Nether Heyford from Upper Heyford Northamptonshire in April, 2012. By Richard Smith, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=22878001