LONDON (Reuters) -Britain gave the green light on Tuesday to a new 10-billion-pound ($13 billion) road tunnel for the River Thames in southeast England, in its latest backing for an infrastructure project to help revive a sluggish economy.
The Labour government has put speeding up the planning process to deliver new energy and transport projects at the heart of its growth agenda since it was elected last year, backing expansion at London’s Heathrow and Gatwick airports.
“When I said I would back the builders, not the blockers, I meant it,” Prime Minister Keir Starmer said on X.
“Giving the Lower Thames Crossing the green light will drive growth and make journeys quicker, safer, and more reliable.”
The Lower Thames Crossing, consisting of a tunnel and roads 23 kilometers (14.5 miles) in length, was granted development consent by Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander, the Planning Inspectorate said.
The tunnel will connect Kent, south of the river, to Essex, on the north side, improving connectivity and providing more road capacity for goods to travel between ports and central and northern England.
The idea for an additional crossing in this part of the river east of London was first mooted as far back as 1989.
Formally proposed by the then-Labour government in 2009, the crossing has been held up as an example of the difficulties faced in trying to get infrastructure projects off the ground in Britain.
Planning can take years, involving multiple consultations with the need to satisfy what critics say can be overly stringent environmental concerns, and is often stalled by local community objections.
Finance minister Rachel Reeves said in January that the government was committed to the Lower Thames Crossing, adding that it was exploring options to privately finance the project.
Reeves is expected to announce a sharp downgrade to the UK’s economic growth forecasts this year when she provides a fiscal update on Wednesday. That, along with higher borrowing costs, is likely to force her to cut plans for spending spikes in coming years, potentially endangering government-funded projects.
The estimated cost of the Lower Thames Crossing, which is expected to take six years to build, has now risen to 10 billion pounds from 5-7 billion pounds in 2017.
The planning document for the project runs to 359,070 pages, equivalent to nearly 300 times the complete works of William Shakespeare.
($1 = 0.7734 pounds)
(Reporting by Sarah Young; editing by Sachin Ravikumar and Mark Heinrich)
