Reuters: Britain Is Wrong to Reject Fracking Application - Kemp

“The first shock of a great earthquake had, just at that period, rent the whole neighborhood to its centre,” is how Charles Dickens described the coming of the railroads to north London.

“Houses were knocked down; streets broken through and stopped; deep pits and trenches dug in the ground; enormous heaps of earth and clay thrown up; buildings that were undermined and shaking, propped by great beams of wood,” Dickens wrote of the railroad driven through Camden Town to connect London with Birmingham.

“In short, the yet unfinished railroad was in progress; and from the very core of all this dire disorder, trailed smoothly away, upon its mighty course of civilization and improvement” he wrote in “Dombey and Son”, published between 1846 and 1848, at the height of the country’s railway building mania.

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Britain’s railroads would never have been built, however, if their promoters had had to deal with the country’s modern planning bureaucracy, which has left the country with a chronic shortage of housing and mostly paralyzed the development of infrastructure.

Lancashire County Council’s decision on Monday to reject an application to drill and hydraulic fracture up to four wells at a site in the borough of Fylde on the grounds of "noise" and "visual impact" is a symbol of everything that is wrong with the country’s planning control system.

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