Britain made objecting free, and then wondered why nothing gets built
The government has begun naming the first places where living beside a new pylon will come with money off the bill: up to £250 a year, for ten years.
Crossbencher · 12 August 2026
The government has begun naming the first places where living beside a new pylon will come with money off the bill: up to £250 a year, for ten years. Most of the coverage has filed it under bribery. It's worth asking how paying somebody for something they lose came to sound like corruption, because there was a time in this country when it was simply how anything got built.
The Victorians built the railways by purchase. A company that wanted a line had to go to Parliament to gain the right to acquire land for the line, and then buy it from whoever owned it. It was slow, it was expensive, and it made a good many landowners rich. It also worked. In 1846 alone, at the height of the mania, 263 Acts went through for new railway companies, and the schemes authorised in those few years put more than six thousand miles of track on the ground. The country was covered in a generation, by argument and cheque.
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