Bill Blain is best known for his long-running “Morning Porridge” market commentary — sharp, opinionated, and unafraid of a mixed metaphor. In The Battle for Hamble, he turns that voice on a subject closer to home: a proposed gravel quarry on the edge of his own village, Hamble-le-Rice, the sailing town on the Hamble River where he has lived for years.

The premise is deceptively parochial. A developer wins planning permission to dig a gravel quarry — really, Blain argues, a landfill operation dressed up as one — on land near the village, threatening flooding, pollution, and congestion, and putting thousands of local jobs at risk. Blain frames it as a tale of greedy corporates, bad planning, economic illiteracy, and plucky Hampshire villagers fighting back. But the quarry itself is really a pretext. What Blain is actually scrutinising is the machinery of British planning bureaucracy, and why so much of the country’s institutional decision-making produces outcomes that serve no one’s evident interest.

His diagnosis is one economists will recognise even if they wouldn’t state it in quite such earthy terms: an under-resourced planning system has been captured by a legal and consultancy industry that thrives on complexity, since further slowing and complicating disputes is how its practitioners get paid — planning law, he notes, is now one of the more lucrative corners of the legal profession. The result, in Blain’s view, is a system that nominally serves communities but structurally rewards obstruction, delay, and the best-funded party in the room.

The book’s most technically satisfying passage concerns the road that will carry the quarry’s lorries: the B3397, Hamble Lane, which Blain describes as the busiest single-lane B-road in Britain, already prone to standstill when shifts change or schools finish. The quarry company’s own submission claimed extra lorries running from 7am to 7pm, past two schools, an early-years centre and a medical centre, would have negligible impact on congestion — resting on traffic counts showing vehicle numbers apparently falling over time.

This is where the book earns its keep as a case study. Residents demonstrated the “fall” was a statistical error masquerading as reassurance: as congestion worsened and journey times lengthened, cars spent longer occupying the same stretch of tarmac, so fewer vehicles physically passed any fixed counting point per hour. A slower road produces a lower vehicle count even though more cars, not fewer, are stuck on it. The council’s own real-time data, scraped from Google Maps by residents, showed the developer’s claimed journey time was simply untrue — yet the flawed figures were accepted into the planning record largely unchallenged.

It’s a small episode, but arguably the book’s most rigorous piece of economic reasoning: a demonstration of how a measurement system, uncritically applied, can produce precisely the opposite of the truth it purports to measure, and how a planning process without the will to interrogate its own inputs will simply wave that error through. Economists who worry about the integrity of official statistics will find an uncomfortably familiar villain here: not malice, but a monitoring system built to produce a reassuring number rather than an accurate one.

The book’s other set piece, a digression on HS2’s infamous “bat tunnel,” makes a similar point at grander scale — a rare bat species shielded from a railway that barely runs, illustrating a planning culture that has lost any sense of proportionality between cost and outcome. It’s entertaining, but also a serious point about process, once untethered from cost-benefit thinking, becoming an end in itself.

More interesting to an economist is Blain’s aside on incentives rather than villains. Gravel itself is barely profitable — it fetches perhaps £30 a tonne against £150 a tonne for landfill — which reframes the dispute: this was never really about aggregate extraction, but the far more lucrative business of burying waste in a hole in the ground, incentives hiding in plain sight behind a scheme’s ostensible purpose. He extends the logic to housebuilders sitting on land banks with unused planning permission, arguing that scarcity, not genuine supply constraint, sustains prices — a point with obvious relevance to Britain’s housing debate, whatever one makes of his proposed remedy of letting local authorities reclaim unbuilt land.

Readers looking for dispassionate policy analysis should be warned: this is not that book. Blain writes as an advocate and a resident, and the prose carries the emotional heat of someone genuinely angry. The planning inspector, the developer, and “Broken Britain” generally are painted with a broad brush; economists may want more of the developer’s own case, and harder data on the flooding and pollution claims.

What the book delivers well is a readable, often funny, case study in regulatory capture and diffused accountability — how a system with sound stated objectives can produce outcomes that serve none of them, because no single actor is required to weigh the whole. For SPE members interested in the political economy of regulation and planning, it’s a useful worked example, even wearing its indignation on its sleeve.

As advocacy journalism, The Battle for Hamble succeeds handsomely: vivid, indignant, and genuinely illuminating about the perverse incentives and quiet statistical failures inside Britain’s planning machinery. As economic analysis, it’s closer to a well-argued op-ed — a starting gun for debate about how Britain plans, builds and regulates, rather than its final word.