Key Takeaways

  • Consent risk covers both pre-approval hurdles, like contested examinations, and post-approval obligations that can be used as a tool for control for years after a scheme is signed off.
  • The average time taken to reach a Development Consent Order decision rose from 2.6 years in 2012 to 4.2 years in 2021, and the time taken for the consenting process for major infrastructure projects in the UK rose by 65% between 2012 and 2022
  • A stalled tunnel drive on a major urban programme can cost upwards of £100,000 a day, and every consent sitting upstream of that drive carries the same value.
  • Winning consent is only the start, since the resulting conditions and undertakings must be discharged and honoured for the entire life of the works, sometimes across thousands of individual obligations.
  • Understanding where consultation and concessions typically go wrong can help developers avoid the most expensive and avoidable delays.

Major infrastructure projects rarely fail because the engineering was wrong. They stall because of consent risk, the tangle of planning hurdles, community pushback, and legal challenges that sit outside the technical scope of a project entirely. The UK experts at Evermark say that understanding what consent risk actually is, and where it bites hardest, is the first step to protecting a scheme’s budget and timeline.

Consent Risk: The True Cost of Delay

A delayed Development Consent Order, Railway Order, or Hybrid Bill does not simply push a project back by a few weeks. It shifts an entire funding and delivery envelope by years, and that lost time is rarely recovered later in the programme. Investors, funders, and contractors all plan around a consent date, so when that date moves, everything built on top of it moves too.

Once construction is underway, the arithmetic becomes brutal. A stalled tunnel drive on a major urban programme can run at upwards of £100,000 a day, and every consent, approval, and permit sitting upstream of that drive inherits the same value the moment it is delayed. If daytime working is refused and operations are pushed into the night instead, the programme absorbs a premium on labour, traffic management, and supervision, all while spending down the community goodwill it will need later.

Why UK Consenting Takes So Long

Consenting in the UK has become measurably slower over the past decade, and the reasons are structural rather than accidental. Fragmented decision-making, inconsistent planning outcomes, and a system that invites legal challenge at multiple stages all add friction that a well-run project cannot simply engineer around.

DCO Timelines Increased by 65% Between 2012 and 2022

The average time taken to reach a Development Consent Order decision for Nationally Significant Infrastructure Projects rose from 2.6 years in 2012 to 4.2 years in 2021. The time taken for the consenting process for major infrastructure projects in the UK rose by 65% between 2012 and 2022. Political turnover among the ministers responsible for signing off major energy projects has been named as one contributing factor, alongside the sheer complexity of environmental and planning evidence involved.

58% of Major Project Decisions Face Court Challenges

Legal exposure has grown alongside timeline slippage. The number of major infrastructure projects subject to judicial review rose by 58% between 2012 and 2022, and a low threshold for bringing such a challenge means a legal bid can come from an individual, a local group, or a national campaign body. HS2 has faced multiple legal challenges since 2017. Reforms have been proposed to cut the number of times a single claimant can bring the same challenge, but until they bed in, judicial review remains one of the sharpest tools available to project opponents.

Two Faces of Consent Risk

Consent risk is often treated as a single problem to be solved at the examination stage, but it actually has two distinct faces, and most advisers only ever deal with the first. Recognising both is what separates a project that gets through consenting cleanly from one that carries hidden liabilities for a decade afterwards.

Before Consent: Contested Examinations

Before consent is granted, the risk is a contested examination and a statutory body whose real position only becomes clear once it is too late to accommodate. Objection to a major scheme is close to inevitable from someone, somewhere; the danger lies in being surprised by it rather than having planned for it.

After Consent: Concessions as Tools for Negotiation

After consent is granted, the risk changes shape entirely. The concessions made to secure approval can become a tool used against the project for years, sometimes for the better part of a decade, as parties who remember what was promised return to test whether it is being honoured.

Where Engagement Goes Wrong

Most consent risk traces back to how engagement is run long before any examination begins. Two failure patterns show up again and again, and both are avoidable with the right preparation.

Consultation as a Compliance Exercise

Pre-consent engagement is frequently run as a compliance exercise: consult, log the responses, file the report. What rarely gets established is what the authority genuinely wants, what pressure its members are under, or what it feels institutionally obliged to be seen resisting. A lack of trust compounds this, with more than half of people believing planning decisions happen behind closed doors specifically to avoid public backlash. Treating consultation as a box-ticking exercise all but guarantees that objections land as a surprise rather than something the project has already priced in.

Conceding Ground Without Pricing It

The second failure is more expensive and far more common. Engagement is a form of negotiation, and every concession has a downstream owner: someone has to build to it, and someone has to operate and maintain it for the next sixty years. Conceding ground in the consenting room without modelling that cost buys short-term programme certainty at the expense of construction, operation, and maintenance costs that only surface much later. Sometimes the right call is to hold the line, build the evidence, and defend the position rather than give way. Knowing which situation calls for which response is arguably the most valuable skill in managing consent risk.

A Consent Is Not Permission to Build

Winning a consent feels like the finish line, but it functions more like a starting gun. A consent is a set of obligations, conditions, undertakings, assurances, and commitments that someone has to discharge, evidence, and honour for the entire life of the works.

Thousands of Obligations, Decades of Exposure

Every obligation attached to a consent is a promise made to a party who will remember it, and a lever that party can choose to pull later. On a major scheme, those obligations can run into the thousands, each one owed to a statutory body, local authority, landowner or community group with its own priorities. That scale is why post-consent management deserves the same rigour as the examination itself.

Consent Risk Defines Project Success

Consent risk touches every stage of a major infrastructure scheme, from the first stakeholder meeting through to decades of post-completion obligations. Projects that treat it as a one-off hurdle to clear before construction tend to discover, expensively, that it never really goes away. Projects that treat it as a continuous discipline, priced, tracked, and actively managed, are the ones that protect their budgets and their relationships with the communities they depend on.

For teams weighing up how to build this discipline into an upcoming scheme, consent risk advisory support provides a practical starting point for getting ahead of both the pre- and post-approval challenges covered here.

Evermark

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