Planning and Infrastructure Bill

2nd reading
Wednesday 25th June 2025 Lords Chamber

Second Reading

15:51

Moved by

[Lord Khan of Burnley]

That the Bill be now read a second time.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (Lord Khan of Burnley) (Lab)]

My Lords, I would first like to extend my thanks to the many noble Lords with whom my noble friend Lady Taylor and I have already spoken about the Bill. I know that there is consensus in this House that the country could and should be better served: better served by more decent housing, with a better, faster process for agreeing what infrastructure is needed to support the communities we build; better, greener infrastructure to help the country meet its climate targets; a better deal for nature, which we know the public deeply cares about. Britain deserves better than the status quo, and it is for that reason that we have brought forward this Bill.

We have already delivered significant changes to our planning system in a revised, pro-growth National Planning Policy Framework. The Office for Budget Responsibility has forecast that these changes will increase our real GDP level by 0.2% by 2029-30—the equivalent of £6.8 billion in today’s prices. We are creating a system that is not only fit to address our present challenges but agile enough to respond to our future needs.

For too long, the approach was a mismatched tapestry of ill-fitting, short-termist reforms that tinkered around the edges rather than resolving our problems. In the process, layers of bureaucracy and gold-plating have been created rather than genuine improvements. This House should not mistake the Government’s ambitions or the speed at which the Bill has been taken forward for a lack of careful consideration. The situation is stark, and these issues merit prioritising.

The time it takes to secure planning permission for major infrastructure projects has almost doubled in the last decade to more than four years. Home building has also fallen from already insufficient levels. There are simply not enough homes. The number of new homes built is estimated to drop to around 200,000 this year, which would be the lowest year for net additional dwellings in England since 2015-16. The Planning and Infrastructure Bill will help turn this around, sending us on our way to building 1.5 million safe and decent homes in England and reaching planning decisions on 150 major economic infrastructure projects in this Parliament.

The Bill will further support the Government’s clean power 2030 target, enabling essential clean energy projects to be built as quickly as possible. As a key component of our Plan for Change, this ambitious package of reforms will unblock the planning system to secure the infrastructure this country needs. Upgrading the country’s critical infrastructure is essential to boosting economic growth and improving the quality of life that Britain has to offer. That is why the Bill introduces a range of reforms to the consenting process for nationally significant infrastructure projects to create a faster and more certain system. These changes have been informed by feedback from developers, planning and technical experts, ENGOs and local authorities.

Reforms brought forward by the Bill include ensuring that national policy statements, which are the cornerstone of the nationally significant infrastructure project regime, are kept up to date. New powers will allow for projects to be directed out of the NSIP system where they can be better served by another consenting route. We are replacing overly prescriptive statutory consultation requirements, which encourage risk aversion and gold-plating, with guidance that will encourage the development of high-quality applications through meaningful engagement.

The Government still expect that development proposals are fully scoped before submission to the Planning Inspectorate. These measures will tackle the huge volume of inaccessible paperwork that slows the process without adding value to communities. This could reduce consenting times by up to 12 months and pave the way for new roads, railways and wind farms to bolster the country’s connectivity and energy security.

Building on recommendations proposed by the noble Lord, Lord Banner, KC, the paper permission stage for judicial reviews of national policy statements and development consent orders has been removed, as has the right of appeal when cases are deemed totally without merit. Taken together, these changes will address the biggest barriers to delivery. They are targeted specifically at fixing elements of the system that slow down applications, decisions and, ultimately, development.

On top of these overall changes to the NSIP regime, the Bill will also deliver a faster and more certain consenting process for transport infrastructure projects. Boosting transport connectivity will support economic growth across the country, tackle congestion and keep Britain moving. Measures brought forward in the Bill will streamline the Highways Act and the Transport and Works Act process to ensure that it is proportionate, is fit for purpose and supports the effective and timely delivery of transport projects.

Additionally, the Bill will introduce a number of changes to speed up the delivery of our energy infrastructure. It supports vital reforms to the electricity network’s grid connection process. The current first come, first served connections queue prevents viable projects from being able to connect to the grid ahead of slower-moving ones. The Bill will ensure that projects that align with the Government’s Clean Power 2030 Action Plan are prioritised. This move to a first ready, first connected approach will avoid delays in connecting viable and needed projects to the power grid. These reforms enable strategically important energy projects needed for clean power to be prioritised for grid connection.

Reforms to the consenting process for electricity infrastructure in Scotland will also make the system more efficient and look to reduce overall consenting timescales. These have been developed jointly with the Scottish Government.

The Bill enables the launch of a discount scheme for certain communities that live nearby new or significantly upgraded electricity transmission infrastructure. The introduction of a cap and floor scheme for long-duration energy storage will support investment in this area and help to decarbonise the electricity system. A cheaper and more efficient energy system is a key driver of growth.

I turn to Part 2. The Bill will make further changes to streamline decision-making in the planning system to ensure that the system operates as effectively and efficiently as possible. A national scheme of delegation will be introduced to set out which types of applications should be determined by officers and which by planning committees. The Government have published a technical consultation in which we propose splitting planning applications into two tiers, providing certainty about what decisions will be delegated to expert officers and at the same time ensuring that councillors can continue to focus on the most significant proposals for housing and commercial developments. This change will not undermine the important role that planning committees play in providing local democratic oversight of planning decisions. Instead, it will ensure that planning committees play their proper role in scrutinising development to the best standard possible and without delay. In fact, 96% of planning decisions are already made by officers. Introducing a national scheme of delegation will simply create greater consistency of decision-making, ensuring that planning committees have the time to deal with the most significant or contentious applications.

Some in the other place have argued that this measure represents an attack on local democracy, framing the Bill as an attempt to diminish community voices. I disagree. This reform will improve the effectiveness of local democratic oversight. There will be no more grandstanding debates about the merits of a fence or extension; instead, the committee’s focus will be on those development proposals that matter most to local communities.

Our changes, combined with further reforms in the Bill to allow the local determination of planning fees, will help to ensure that local planning authorities and wider organisations have the resources they need to deliver change for communities across the country.

We cannot meet this country’s needs without planning for growth on a larger than local scale. The Bill will enable the Government to introduce a system of strategic planning across England. Areas will be required to produce spatial development strategies, closely modelling the system which has been in place in London for over 20 years. This will help to address key spatial issues such as meeting housing needs, delivering strategic infrastructure, growing the economy and improving climate resilience and nature recovery by taking a subregional view of how growth needs can be sustainably met. It will also enable more efficient and timely production of local plans, which will provide the detail and site allocations to support the special strategy set out in the SDS.

On Part 3, I think we can all agree on the important role that sustained economic growth plays in ensuring the prosperity of our country. However, we are clear that nature cannot be an afterthought and must be placed at the heart of our reforms. The nature restoration fund will accelerate the building of homes and infrastructure, while unlocking the positive impact that development can have in driving the recovery of protected sites and species. This will move us from a system that simply offsets impacts to one that actively supports the recovery of protected sites and species. The more strategic approach to nature recovery brought forward by the Bill will be delivered through the creation of environmental delivery plans. EDPs, made by the Secretary of State and delivered by Natural England, will set out a package of conservation measures sufficient to address the environmental impacts of development and, crucially, secure an environmental uplift. Rather than being limited to addressing the impact of a single development, an EDP will pool resources and deliver conservation measures at scale to maximise the positive outcome for the environment. At the same time, developers will benefit from a streamlined process and simple user experience for development in England and up to 12 nautical miles into its territorial waters.

The Government have constructed the legislation to include a range of safeguards to ensure that the new system delivers on the ambition to go further for nature. An EDP can be put in place only where the Secretary of State is satisfied that the conservation measures are likely to outweigh the negative effects of development. This will ensure that our reforms will not reduce existing levels of environmental protection, with this new approach delivering more for nature, not less. It is for this reason that the Government are confident that the nature restoration fund is a progressive intervention, as supported in the Section 20 statement that accompanies the Bill. That is not to say that the Government are not listening to the views of stakeholders who have indicated areas where they may wish to strengthen the Bill. My noble friend Lady Taylor of Stevenage and I take the views of the Office for Environmental Protection seriously and continue to engage with it and environmental NGOs. We look forward to hearing and engaging with the views of noble Lords today and throughout the Bill’s passage.

Of course, the NRF is not the only measure in the Bill that will make a meaningful difference in our ongoing battle to support nature and address climate change. Measures in the Bill to prioritise network connections are a prime example—we cannot afford to delay the benefit the Bill will have on the environment as a whole.

The Bill will also strengthen development corporations to make it easier for central and local government to deliver large-scale new communities. It creates a clearer, more flexible and robust legislative framework for the operation of development corporations. These are important vehicles for delivering large-scale and complex regeneration and development projects. Ensuring that we have up-to-date and clear legislation on their remit, duties and powers will allow development corporations to unlock more housing across the country, co-ordinating that with infrastructure and transport for sustained economic growth.

The Government are keen for authorities to make greater use of their compulsory purchase powers to support the delivery of housing, growth and the regeneration of their areas. Measures introduced in the Bill will enable more effective land assembly, which will speed up and lower the cost of housing and infrastructure delivery. The Bill will ensure that the process for acquiring land with a hope value direction is more efficient. It will reduce the administrative cost of making a CPO and streamline the CPO process, including by allowing notices to be served electronically.

The legislation will also expand the power to remove hope value where land is acquired by a parish or town council when the relevant project facilitates the provision of affordable housing This will reinforce the principle that landowners should not receive excessive compensation where compulsory purchase powers are used to deliver schemes in the public interest. These changes have been brought forward to make the system more efficient and fairer. The Government are clear that there must always be a compelling case in the public interest for the use of a CPO.

It is in our national interest to make the planning system better, because sustained economic growth is the only route to improving the prosperity of our country and the living standards of working people. In making these changes, we can tackle some of the biggest issues facing the country today. I believe the measures in the Planning and Infrastructure Bill are sufficiently comprehensive, robust and, crucially, balanced to meet these challenges head-on. I know that the subjects to be debated today are matters dear to many across the House. I have no doubt that, in the weeks and months ahead, Members will approach this Bill with the rigour and scrutiny that embodies the very best that this House offers. I beg to move.

16:06

[Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)]

My Lords, I declare my interests as set out in the register as vice-president of the Local Government Association.

We on these Benches support many of the Bill’s principles and ambitions, several of which build on work that we led in government during a period of record housebuilding. While not perfect, the Levelling-up and Regeneration Act is a step forward, streamlining the planning system and focusing on local priorities. As a Minister, I recognised the urgent need for more homes, and I remain just as committed today to driving practical action to meet that need.

In 2019, the Conservative Party committed to delivering 1 million additional homes over the course of that Parliament. In 2024, before the general election, we delivered on that commitment. The Labour Party has now committed to delivering 1.5 million homes over this Parliament, and it is essential that it delivers on that manifesto commitment.

As the Bill progresses through this House, we will raise serious concerns: the removal of councillors’ voting rights on individual applications; sharply increased housing targets in rural areas, without sufficient protection for villages; the shift to strategic plans; and the questions over the deliverability of the 1.5 million homes target. That figure appears to be little more than the Deputy Prime Minister’s arbitrary aspiration. Announced in the other place without a road map, without detailed plans and, ultimately, without a credible delivery mechanism, the target lacks the very foundations required to make it achievable.

There are, quite rightly, widespread questions about the target’s deliverability, particularly in light of the February S&P Global UK Construction Purchasing Managers’ Index, which reports one of the sharpest monthly declines in housebuilding and construction on record. Furthermore, the joint report from Savills, the Home Builders Federation and the National Housing Federation estimated that the Secretary of State is likely to fall short of her target by as many as 500,000 homes.

Doubts about deliverability were only compounded by the recent spending review. The Chancellor’s announcement was heavily backloaded, with limited short-term impact; most of the uplift comes after 2030, with meaningful increases not projected until 2035-36. The headline figure, spread over a decade, goes beyond this Parliament and will have to withstand numerous fiscal events from a Government so often keen to change their mind.

There is, as yet, no formal multiyear budget commitment. It is a pledge, not a statutory allocation. As the Institute for Fiscal Studies put it, the £39 billion figure is meaningful only if future spending reviews confirm it. Even if the workable aspects of the Bill are able to deliver more homes, the Government must indicate how this funding will deliver their pledge in this Parliament.

The Bill also impacts our natural environment and rural communities. Later in this debate, my noble friend Lord Roborough will outline why, from these Benches, we view Part 3 of the Bill as a particular cause for concern. The proposed nature restoration levy may, to some sitting in an office in Whitehall, seem like a welcome simplification of the environmental conditions attached to the planning system. But in reality it appears to water down existing protections, and that is not a solution. The Official Opposition want to see the right homes in the right place, without weakening our position on nature restoration and appropriate environmental protections.

There are important questions that the Government must answer. What safeguards will ensure that the levy is proportionate to the environmental impact and does not simply become another tax or barrier to development? What is the expected timeline for implementing the environmental delivery plans, and have the Government factored in potential delays, including the possibility of judicial reviews? We look forward to the Minister’s reflections on these points. Our assessment is that it could take some years from Royal Assent before the environmental delivery plans begin to make a real-world impact. If the Government believe otherwise, we would welcome reassurances on this.

On outcomes, concerns persist. The Chartered Institute of Ecology and Environmental Management has warned that this system risks the immediate loss of natural capital, with any benefits only realised decades later. We hope the Government can provide greater confidence that this approach will deliver meaningful and timely results for the environment.

If the Government are now concerned with the issue of nutrient neutrality, perhaps I might draw their attention to the amendments we tabled during the passage of the Levelling-up and Regeneration Act. Regrettably, the Government—then in opposition—chose to vote them down, thereby defeating the proposition. I would, of course, be more than happy to assist the Ministers by returning these amendments to the attention of the House, in the hope that even at this stage the Government might now reconsider their position.

Additionally, this Bill touches on the crucial area of energy. My noble friend Lord Offord will speak with authority on this subject later in the debate. However, I will briefly set out why we see it as so vital. The UK continues to face some of the highest electricity costs in the world, an issue that poses a serious barrier to growth. We therefore welcome commitments to energy infrastructure and support any measures that aim to reduce energy costs. This must go hand in hand with proper community consultation, particularly regarding the installation of overhead cables and new pylons. Finally, we must ensure that we are developing a diverse and resilient energy mix, one that provides stability and equips us to meet the challenges of an increasingly uncertain world.

On planning, the Minister is correct that we are deeply concerned about the proposed national scheme of delegation, which would remove councillors’ ability to vote on individual planning applications. Is the Minister not concerned about the systematic removal of layer upon layer of democratic oversight? Democratic accountability matters, especially when it comes to housebuilding. Local consent, legitimacy and trust are essential to deliver not just more houses but the right houses.

When local communities and their elected representatives have a meaningful role in the planning process, housebuilding is seen as something done with people, not done to them. Strip that away and you risk generating opposition, misdirecting development and ultimately building fewer homes. We want the right homes in the right places, and the Government need to bring communities with them if they are to deliver that. When communities are engaged and can see the shape and benefit of new housing, whether through affordable homes, infrastructure improvements or environmental safeguards, public support increases and delivery becomes more achievable.

We are particularly concerned at the proposed model of strategic planning. It could be—and is being—used to shift urban housing need into our rural areas. This is especially troubling in light of the disproportionately high increases in housing targets assigned to those rural authorities. The Secretary of State has raised the national housing target by 50%. Residents might reasonably expect that their local targets have increased by a similar amount, but that is far from the case. According to the House of Commons Library, in major urban conurbations, housing targets have risen by an average of 17%. In predominantly rural areas, they have increased by 115%.

To illustrate, London’s target is down 12%, Newcastle down 15%, Birmingham down 38% and Coventry down 55%. Meanwhile, Wyre Forest and New Forest have seen their targets doubled. Westmorland’s target has increased by almost 500%. This is neither fair nor sustainable. It erodes local trust and places significant pressures on our rural services, infrastructure and landscapes.

Worse still, it undermines the very reason we need more homes in the first place. High housing costs in major towns and cities act as a major barrier to interregional mobility. For low-income houses, households and renters, housing affordability creates a form of price lock-in, preventing them accessing areas with greater employment opportunities. If we are serious about boosting growth and supporting opportunity, we need the right homes in the right places. We need homes where opportunities are, and we need local representation to be involved in the process of building those homes. We therefore urge the Government to rethink this approach and to restore a meaningful role for democratic decision-making in the planning system.

From these Benches, we warmly welcome the Government’s greater emphasis on the local plans. A plan-led system is the right approach, and we recognise the effort to ensure that communities have a stronger voice in shaping development. However, we see opportunities to build on this. In particular, we would like to explore more ambitious support for small builders and self-builders, an important part of a diverse and resilient housing sector. The current 10% site allocation for such developments is a positive step, but we support the Federation of Master Builders’ suggestion that this could be increased to 20%. We also welcome consideration of an expanded role for Homes England in supporting microbuilders, who often face particular barriers to entry.

I turn briefly to the issue of grey belt. While we appreciate the intention to make better use of underused land, concerns remain about how these changes may impact the wider countryside, particularly village identity. Although this is not directly part of the Bill, it clearly interacts with the Bill, and we hope Ministers will continue to reflect on the balance between flexibility and long-standing protection of rural communities. There is also a risk of unintended urban sprawl. This would place significant pressure on our local infrastructure and services. We should prioritise the proper use of our existing urban centres, bringing empty properties back into use and supporting densification where appropriate to make the most of the space we already have.

Our aim in engaging with the Bill is not to obstruct its objectives but to contribute constructively to its success. We will bring forward amendments that are designed to strengthen the Bill’s ability to deliver well-designed, affordable homes, particularly for those on lower incomes and first-time buyers, while ensuring that local voices, rural character and environmental safeguards remain respected.

16:19

[Earl Russell (LD)]

My Lords, we welcome the stated aim of getting Britain building and kick-starting our economic growth, delivering much-needed housing and critical infrastructure. We also recognise the urgent need to fundamentally reform and improve our planning systems. We must build more homes—more affordable homes—and infrastructure to meet the challenges of our time, from improving transport systems to addressing climate change.

The current systems are clearly not working. Getting to clean power alone by 2030 will require huge investment in renewable energy and the grid. Our electricity consumption is due to more than double by 2050, and we welcome the reforms to the grid connection system.

We are at the stage of the energy transition where we need to build a lot of stuff, and we need to be able to take our communities with us to get that done. Although the intention to improve the systems and processes is welcome, some of the solutions proposed are misguided and concerning. The Government have chosen neither bats nor crested newts, because the Government want growth. These plans are much more “done to” than “done with” when it comes to our local communities. The Government suggest that existing environmental protections are a significant barrier to development and that these plans will provide a win-win for both nature and the economy, and a more strategic approach.

Nature appears to have little voice and little value within these proposals. Our planning systems need to be aligned with and support our climate and nature goals. If enacted, the Bill will degrade our nature and biodiversity, and the real reforms and funding that our planning system desperately needs will be missed. My arguments are based on the Government’s own evidence; the impact assessment admits:

“There is very limited data on how environmental obligations affect development”.


Official analysis provides no data to support the argument that environmental legislation holds up building.

Removing these protections will not help. Delays are more often rooted in lengthy pre-planning application stages, poor processes, lack of data and of data sharing, outdated national policy statements and, in some cases, yet to be delivered policies such as land use frameworks and various spatial plans. In addition, our local authorities are permanently understaffed, underfunded and unable to cope. We can add to this list skills shortages, supply chain issues and market confidence.

As we have heard, more than 1.5 million homes in England have planning permission; 95% of local planning applications are approved. All too often, developers do not build, and the systems simply fail to ensure delivery. The Bill misses an important opportunity to better hold large housebuilders to account and continues a developer-led approach.

The environmental delivery plans and the nature restoration levy proposals are an alarming step backwards for nature protection. The Bill proposes that developers can pay into a nature restoration fund instead of fulfilling existing legal obligations to protect wildlife and habitats. This bypasses the fundamental mitigation hierarchy: the principle that impacts should first be avoided, then mitigated and compensated for only as a last resort. There is no requirement for developers to even attempt to avoid harm before resorting to paying the off-set fee. This is a profound weakening of our environmental law.

I do not much like the idea that nature can be transplanted in this way for a fee. It treats nature as akin to a problem as simple as house removals. Nature cannot simply be moved around to suit developers’ needs. This model is entirely unsuitable for irreplaceable habitats. All sites with nature protections should be removed from these provisions. Many of these habitats are simply impossible to recreate and move elsewhere.

The abundance of 753 terrestrial and freshwater species has, on average, fallen by 19% across the UK since 1970. How do we expect to meet our biodiversity targets with these proposals? Proposals to give these unique ecosystems stronger protections were rejected in the other place and government amendments never arrived. The Government even rejected a cross-party amendment to allow swift bricks in new homes. What hope is there for nature if adding a £36 swift brick is so easily rejected? We must work with nature, bring it into our developments and promote access. Doing so provides rewards for our quality of life and improves our health. We must restore and work with nature to help mitigate the impact of climate change.

Instead, the Bill’s overall improvement test states that the conservation measures must only be

“likely to be sufficient to outweigh”

negative impacts. This introduces uncertainty, unpredictability and subjectivity, falling far short of the rigorous scientific certainty required by our existing environmental laws. We believe this must be strengthened and that the benefits must significantly outweigh any harm. The Office for Environmental Protection has also expressed significant concerns about the Bill as drafted, saying that it reduces the level of environmental protection. It describes the provisions as a “regression”, particularly for habitats and species.

Concerns also persist regarding adequate resourcing and capacity for Natural England to administer the substantial new responsibilities. These will be in a complex system that the Government are putting in place. We are calling for independent oversight of the NRF to ensure that funds are spent effectively and transparently.

To conclude, we must properly resource our planning authorities. Some 25% of all planners have been lost in the past seven years. The Government will allow local authorities to set their own fees but these must be ring-fenced to ensure that the money and skills are available to ensure a sufficient local planning system. We must strengthen our local democratic accountability and public trust. The Bill’s approach risks alienating communities and diminishing the crucial role of our elected councils. I worry this could have a negative impact as we roll out all the stuff we need to build to get to net zero. We must ensure meaningful engagement and good communications, and that communities have a voice in and benefit from the energy transition itself.

We will work with the Government to improve the Bill, but they may well be surprised by the level of cross-party consensus that has already established itself on all sides of your Lordships’ House on these matters.

16:27

[Lord Best (CB)]

My Lords, I declare my interest as a vice-president of the Town and Country Planning Association and of the Local Government Association, an honorary member of the Royal Town Planning Institute, and an honorary fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects.

My interest is in the Bill’s vital mission to get the homes and infrastructure built that this country needs so badly. We have a very real housing crisis, with increasing numbers of families placed in temporary accommodation at huge public expense, simply because there are not enough homes to go around. This objective will require proper resourcing of planning departments, and Part 2 of the Bill recognises this necessity.

A key question hanging over the ambition to build 1.5 million more and better homes is: who will the nation entrust to get this job done? For many years, the answer for most housebuilding has been, “We will let the volume housebuilders acquire the sites, come up with the plans, design and build the homes, and make their profits while we try to require them to allocate a modest proportion of their output for affordable housing”.

This reliance on the large housebuilders has not produced the quantity or quality of homes we need. It has seen development of expanses of greenfield land in preference to small sites and brownfield schemes that can regenerate whole neighbourhoods. It has put SME builders out of business—down from building 40% of new homes to just 10% since 2000. It has not created apprenticeships and a trained workforce, and there has been little innovation or use of modern methods of construction. It has led to so-called “fleecehold” sales to home buyers and to uniform, soulless design, and there has been little attempt to provide the green spaces and community facilities that are the making of any place. The housebuilders have worked at a pace that suits themselves—a build-out rate that ensures no reduction in house prices.

The housebuilders can reply that they are profit-making businesses with shareholders to satisfy and they cannot be expected to work for public benefit—for the common good. But surely, now is the time for a model that is driven by what is best for the place in question. This leads us to the really positive Part 4 of the Bill, which promotes new development corporations. This is the model that will be used for the eagerly awaited new generation of new towns, but which can operate everywhere else: arms-length to local authorities, but publicly accountable; and sometimes created by mayoral and other combined county authorities. Development corporations acquire sites ahead of planning consent and capture the increase in land value, if necessary using the CPO powers much improved by Part 5. Development corporations commission the necessary master plans and parcel out sites to a range of providers—to housebuilders, large and small, but also to housing associations for social housing; to providers of homes for later living; for student accommodation; for self-build and custom housebuilding; and for all the vital social infrastructure.

The Planning and Infrastructure Bill enables the use of this development corporation model for any major development, introducing an alternative to the failed business model of the oligopoly of volume housebuilders. Here is the breakthrough the Bill could achieve.

So, in commending Part 4, I ask the Minister whether the necessary backup—guidance, governance, finance—is being prepared by the Ministry for Housing, Communities and Local Government for the creation of many new development corporations for urban extensions, major regeneration projects and desirable new developments that will contrast with the arrangements that have let us down for the last 30 years or more.

16:32

[The Lord Bishop of Manchester]

My Lords, it is always a great privilege to follow the noble Lord, Lord Best, whose wisdom on housing is quite unparalleled. I draw attention to my own interests in social housing, as set out in the register, and to the fact that a number of provisions in the Bill might impact on the interests of the Church Commissioners for England, who pay my stipend and own the house I live in.

I welcome the Bill. We desperately need a rapid expansion in the building of social homes, ideally at social rents. Enactment of the measures here included can be part of the architecture—please excuse the pun—we need if we are going to underpin the ambition for a mixed economy for housing, one which will live up to the Archbishops’ Commission on Housing’s values of homes that are safe and sustainable.

Along with the noble Lord, Lord Best, and others, I welcome efforts to tackle the long-standing issue of hope value. The rapid, inflation-busting rise in the value of land with planning permission, compounded now over several decades, convinces me that while the position we have inherited may have been suitable half a century ago, it is now frankly untenable and immoral. However, we need to tackle this carefully; I and my colleagues will listen closely to debate on this matter in your Lordships’ House.

In Greater Manchester, attempting to achieve a spatial plan across 10 local authorities has proved taxing—that is a euphemism for impossible. I hope that, through the Bill, we will be able to break some of those log-jams. In practice, these are often due less to party-political differences than to councillors needing to attend to very localised lobby groups. Combined authorities and mayoralties have now more than proved their worth, especially when we need to take a strategic view, so I hope we can give them the powers they need. Indeed, I suspect that many local councillors, who understand the need for housing and infrastructure, may be deeply relieved not always to be blamed for agreeing to major new developments in their wards.

Turning to other aspects of the Bill, several of my noble and right reverend friends will be following with interest the rural provisions. For example, we believe that the Bill provides an important opportunity to protect chalk streams, which are both globally rare and ecologically very significant.

My noble and right reverend friend the Bishop of Hereford has drawn to my attention how multi-generational farming families struggle under current legislation to build agricultural tied accommodation so that the next generation can remain on the farm. We need to keep family farms running, not least so that very elderly farmers can retire—I know far too many who are continuing when they really should not—and we do not lose the skills and commitment to farming that have often been passed down many generations. I know he will be looking to table an amendment in Committee and, no doubt, supporting other amendments.

The notion of offsetting the impact of development on a particular site by other environmental measures elsewhere is already established in other legislation, so extending it has my support. But the case made by the Wildlife and Countryside Link—that measures to offset environmental harm should be delivered as close as possible to the site of the impact—needs to be taken seriously. Wherever possible, there should be a direct link between new infrastructure and the development of new ecosystems. That way, the public see the benefits in their own communities. I accept that that will not always be possible, and it must not become a means of blocking or delaying every major development, but offsetting at a considerable distance should be rare and exceptional.

Finally, I have long championed the needs of the Gypsy, Roma and Traveller communities. They have been part of the backbone of rural Britain for many generations, but they are increasingly pushed to the margins. I urge that we take the opportunity of this Bill to ensure that Gypsy and Traveller accommodation figures are included and explicitly referenced in the requirements of spatial development strategies. Moreover, the definition of social housing could also helpfully be amended to include local authority Gypsy and Traveller sites, along with broadening the definition of a “dwelling” in Section 1 of the Housing Act 2004 to include all those essential parts of the home on a Gypsy/Traveller site.

It may not be obvious, given the lack of any of my right reverend friends in their places, but there is considerable interest in this Bill on our Benches. This just also happens to be one of the busiest weeks of our year. Several hundred new priests and deacons will be ordained in our cathedrals across England this coming weekend. Lucie, my assistant, has worked wonders with the diary just to get me here.

I look forward to continuing to engage with the Bill at its later stages, but in the meantime, I am glad to welcome it.

16:37

[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)]

My Lords, I very much welcome the Bill, which I see as an essential foundation to building new homes and critical infra- structure. We simply cannot afford the current planning and regulatory system, which seems almost designed to stop growth and make it so expensive and damaging to our economy and basic living standards.

My main interest in the Bill is in Part 1, which will help speed up the building of new energy infrastructure, which I see as vital to achieving clean power by 2030. The noble Baroness, Lady Scott, said that she supports much of the Bill, including the measures on energy. I noticed that she made no mention of clean power and net zero. Of course, the party opposite is in full retreat on this, despite the fact that it was Mrs Thatcher who said at the UN in November 1989:

“It is mankind and his activities which are changing the environment of our planet in damaging and dangerous ways”.


It was the noble Baroness, Lady May, moreover, who, as Prime Minister, legislated for net zero by 2050. But the party opposite is now in full retreat. It has turned its back on climate change and net zero and developed an unfathomable passion for fossil fuels, despite the volatile fossil fuel market being one of the major causes of our high energy prices.

Clean power by 2030 requires a huge upgrading of the country’s major energy infrastructure; on that, I think we are agreed. The Commons Environmental Audit Committee concluded in 2024 that many planned renewable energy projects were hampered by persistent problems accessing the electricity grid, including slow connections, limited capacity of local planning authorities and inappropriate planning regulations. Currently, companies are waiting up to 15 years to be connected to the grid. This is leaving very promising developments absolutely gridlocked.

The advice to government from NESO—the National Energy System Operator—was to increase new transition network infrastructure by 2030 at over twice the pace it was being delivered in the previous decade. That is why the Bill’s provisions are so welcome, in particular: the removal of the burdensome statutory requirement to consult as part of the pre-application stage for nationally significant infrastructure project applications; the grid’s connection queue reforms to move from “first come, first served” to a “first ready and needed, first connected” approach; the new funding mechanism for statutory consultees, which will, I hope, address the lack of capacity and resources; and the proposed bill discount scheme for people living closest to new electricity transmission infrastructure.

Part 3 is also relevant to infrastructure growth. I say to the noble Earl, Lord Russell: I fully accept that it would be perverse if net zero were achieved at the expense of our nature, farmland and general environment, but, as it currently stands, the Bill gives a huge amount of responsibility to Natural England and the other statutory bodies, which have shown no interest in considering the benefits of delivering development, have seen a hollowing out of scientific expertise over the years of austerity, and have no experience in delivering complex infrastructure strategies.

I can see our environmental development delivery plans—to deliver strategic compensation in relation to the habitats regime—working for a given area where you might have multiple housing developers, but I am worried about the extent to which they will work for major infrastructure developments. As Catherine Howard, the head of planning at Herbert Smith Freehills Kramer, wrote, there is a risk that developers would

“need to twin-track the EDP process with going through the traditional Habitats assessment”

regime because an EDP was not in place in time for the consent application. This is going to be hopeless for developers. I believe that the Secretary of State needs to have a call-in power in the event of this being stuck in this way.

With that important caveat, I welcome the Bill; I see it as a great foundation for growth. However, I hope that the Government will be willing to listen to some of the issues for major developers around infrastructure in relation to Part 3.

16:42

[Lord Young of Cookham (Con)]

My Lords, may I say how much the whole House will miss the contributions of the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, from the Dispatch Box? We welcomed the clarity of his contributions, and the Back Benches will be reinforced by his presence now that he is free to say what he actually thinks.

Here we go with another planning Bill. I start with a quote:

“Conflict is not uncommon between those in both the public and private sectors who wish to change the use of land … The planning system provides the framework for resolving these inevitable conflicts. The Bill brings the system up to date, and enhances its credibility”.—[Official Report, Commons, 12/3/1991; col. 816.]


That was me, as Planning Minister in the other place, introducing the then Planning and Compensation Bill in 1991. My imprint on the planning system did not last long. We then had the Planning and Compulsory Purchase Act 2004; the Planning Act 2008; the Localism Act 2011; the Housing and Planning Act 2016; the Levelling-up and Regeneration Act 2023, which was another planning Bill—and now this. The 1947 planning Act lasted until the Town and Country Planning Act 1990. Since then, we have kept on digging up the foundations without, apparently, making the structure any more durable, so I wish the Ministers well.

In the time available, I want to make just one point: the success of the Bill will depend on the efficiency of local government departments in responding to the challenge in the Bill. On 5 February, the Government told all councils in two-tier areas and small neighbouring unitaries to produce, by March, plans to go unitary. Professionals in planning departments are probably more affected than anyone else because all the plans will have to change. They will, understandably, be worried about their own future and the turbulence of reorganisation as they apply for jobs in the new structures or accept redundancy.

The Bill’s success depends on up-to-date plans to deliver certainty and avoid appeals. The Government state:

“Succinct and up-to-date plans should provide a positive vision for the future of each area; a framework for meeting housing needs and addressing other economic, social and environmental priorities”.


However, as of March 2024, only a third of local authorities had adopted a plan in the last five years and 291 had plans which were more than five years old. As they attempt to address the backlog—which will still be necessary until the Bill becomes an Act—they will also have to start all over again producing a plan for the new unitary authority. The Government have stated:

“Where reorganisation occurs, new unitary authorities are expected to promptly prepare a local plan covering the whole of their area”.


This all came on top of the December 2024 devolution White Paper. In another reorganisation, all of England is to be part of one of three new categories of local authority: foundation strategic authorities, mayoral strategic authorities and established mayoral strategic authorities. Under the Bill, the planners in these new strategic authorities must produce spatial development strategies, providing strategic policies for the use of land in their area. At the moment there are only three of these. In a masterly understatement, the Government said:

“We are aware that areas undergoing local government reorganisation and devolution will experience a transition period where responsibility for spatial development strategy might transfer between authorities”.


At the same time, the Government want to reduce all the current delays in processing planning applications so that we can get on with the infrastructure and with building the 1.5 million homes that we need.

If planning departments were fully staffed with the necessary skills, they might rise to this challenge, but they are not. The Local Government Association workforce survey found that 62% of councils have difficulties recruiting planning officers and 45% have difficulties retaining planning officers, many being tempted by higher salaries elsewhere. Two-thirds of councils rely on agency staff to address capacity issues. The RTPI says:

“We continue to have concerns about the chronic under-resourcing of our planning system and therefore … a long-term resourcing and capacity strategy should be published alongside the Bill”,


but it has not been. The new town development corporations will also require planners. The Government have recognised the problem, but the steps that they have taken to address it fall way short of what is needed and risk undermining the purpose of the Bill.

I remember a discussion, when I was a Treasury Minister, with a senior economist in the Treasury. When I suggested a new policy that had been tried in New Zealand, he said, “It may work in practice, but it doesn’t work in theory”. The risk with the Bill is exactly the opposite: it may work in theory, but it will not work in practice—unless planning departments are resourced.

16:47

[Baroness Pidgeon (LD)]

My Lords, while planning and infrastructure may not get everyone in this House excited, they are fundamental to everything that we do in this country, and we need to get this right—for our communities and to start delivering across the country. Chapter 3 of Part 1 of the Bill, regarding transport infrastructure, has not had the focus that it deserves.

We recognise the urgent need to modernise and expand our networks, from rail upgrades to new bus corridors and active travel routes. Major projects must be delivered efficiently. However, we must not move to a position where we bulldoze through projects with no consideration for local communities and their needs or environmental concerns. It is getting that balance right.

If we travel to the continent, we experience the fantastic high-speed rail networks that have grown at pace. In 1981, France became the first nation in Europe to implement a high-speed rail link, from Paris to Lyon, which was 450 kilometres long. Since then, the network has grown, with over 2,800 kilometres. Spain started constructing its high-speed rail network in 1992. Thirty years later, it has roughly 4,000 kilometres of high-speed rail. Then we look at the UK. High Speed 1 opened in 2007, from London to the Channel Tunnel, a mere 108 kilometres. High Speed 2 we discussed last week.

Although I welcome and understand the Government’s ambition to streamline infrastructure delivery, we must ensure that the Bill does not sacrifice local accountability, local engagement, local heritage or environmental integrity in the name of speed or, indeed, progress. We can learn from our European neighbours about how best to deliver such projects at pace but bringing communities with us.

I welcome some of the progress in the Bill on EV charging. It is a huge issue as we clean up our transport network, and for too long there have been barriers. Clause 47 relates to public charge points. It is crucial that the legislation effectively addresses this issue and is future-proofed to support the continued growth of electric vehicle adoption.

My colleague, Helen Maguire MP, championed amendments to the Bill in the other House that would have enabled cross-pavement charging solutions, such as covered cable gullies, by extending the permitted development rights for on-street charging set-ups. The amendments would have broadened and clarified permitted development rights to facilitate the installation of EV charging infrastructure. Such changes are essential if we are to support the 40% of households without off-street parking and ensure that the benefits of EV adoption are shared fairly. The current bureaucratic process, which includes a street works licence and planning permission, feels too much. I hope the Minister will look favourably at similar amendments when they are tabled in this House. We also need to look at how we can establish charging infrastructure for HGVs and other supply vehicles, which will be vital for net zero. Too often companies find it difficult to secure the necessary permission, let alone the grid access, for such important infrastructure.

We must think creatively about how we power this transition. One of the most underutilised opportunities lies in our existing transport infrastructure. Across the country, vast expanses of roof space exposed to sunlight sit idle. Installing solar panels on car parks, bus garages and railway stations could generate clean energy, reduce grid pressure and power local EV chargers directly. France has already mandated solar panels on large car parks. We are playing catch-up with the recent government announcement. I hope the Government will consider provisions in the Bill to require solar installations on all suitable transport infrastructure. It is a simple, visible step towards a greener future. We have some good examples of it here in the capital, such as the stations at Blackfriars and Denmark Hill.

Let us use the Bill not just to build faster but to build better, smarter and fairer, to achieve a transport network that is clean, connected and accessible for all.

16:52

[Lord Lansley (Con)]

My Lords, I draw attention to my registered interest as chair of the Cambridgeshire Development Forum and the Oxfordshire Development Forum. I emphasise that my views on these issues are entirely my own.

A number of us are taking forward many of the issues that we discussed during the passage of the Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill, including my noble friend Lord Young of Cookham. His point about the resourcing of planning authorities is really important. Something that the Government could do straight away, outside of the Bill, is enable the retention of level 7 apprenticeships for new planning officers, because the lack of those will make things difficult for local planning authorities.

In the time available, I will focus on one thing. As we discuss many issues in the Bill, I hope we can understand more about what the Government propose to use from the Levelling-up and Regeneration Act, how they are going to use it, and what they propose not to use. For example, the national development management policies are potentially extremely important in enabling local authorities to produce plans more quickly and efficiently. I hope that those local authorities going into the new plan-making process have early access to NDMPs, so that they are able to limit the extent to which they have to undertake unnecessary consultation.

This links to the debate we will have about a national scheme of delegation. On the face of it, the Government’s technical proposal, in so far as it substantially deviated from the original consultation with three options, went in the wrong direction. The national scheme of delegation should be, first, that planning officers should make decisions where applications are in line with an existing up-to-date local plan. That should be very straightforward. Secondly, they should make the decisions where the decision is, in effect, directly mandated by the national development management policies. We need to look at some of these additional planning issues before we get to the debates in Committee and on Report on the content of the Bill.

I hope that the provisions in the levelling-up Act in relation to neighbourhood plans and neighbourhood policy statements might be brought into force. In the absence of that, I hope that the Bill will use that. If the Government want more homes built in the places where people want them to be built, neighbourhood planning has shown itself to be an effective mechanism.

There are provisions relating to locally led urban development areas and locally led urban development corporations in the Levelling-up and Regeneration Act, and my noble friend on the Front Bench referred to them. The noble Lord, Lord Best, advocated very forcibly the use of development corporations, but did not say which kind. I think we need to know from the Government whether they will make locally led urban development areas and development corporations available for this purpose, whether they plan to use government-controlled development corporations, or whether they plan, in line with the provisions of the devolution White Paper, to focus on mayoral development corporations. It is not just whether we have development corporations and what powers they have; it is what kind of development corporations. This will make a big difference when we hear from the New Towns Taskforce, which I hope we will do before the Summer Recess.

The final thing I want to say is that we all agree. I share many of the objectives of this Bill and look forward to debating it, with a view to strengthening the achievement of those objectives. We want to be able to deliver effectively on development plans, but we need up-to-date local plans to make that happen. At the moment, 70 local authorities are going to go under the old NPPF rather than the new one, and that will lose us the potential and requirement for something like 15,000 homes being built a year.

It is important that, with all these changes, we know how the Government are going to give us more pace in putting all the planning reforms in place, alongside this Bill.

16:57

[Lord Cameron of Dillington (CB)]

My Lords, first, I declare my involvement in a family farming and land management business. Secondly, I record my thanks to the Bill team for their courtesy in coming together to answer my series of very naive questions.

I believe this Bill is essential to get our country moving again and I support what it is trying to achieve. Coming from the south-west, my favourite eternally delayed project is the road vital for bringing our tourists in and taking our manufactured goods out—namely, the A303 and its dualling. The first time I saw a planning application for the Stonehenge bypass, which is the key to unlocking it all, was in 1985—40 years ago. It still has not been built and hour-long traffic jams still happen there. That is not good.

However, the issue that desperately needs dealing with is housing. We have a major housing crisis in rural England, far worse than in the towns. We lack affordable homes, not executive houses—note the use of “homes” and “houses”. As I have said in this House many times, council houses or their equivalent would be good—affordable homes to rent in proper interactive communities, built to standards we can all be proud of. I hope this Bill will enable that to happen. Building standards need to be checked, perhaps by the development corporations that the noble Lord, Lord Best, and I are both very keen on. We also need to amend the right to buy, which I hope is just around the corner.

I am all in favour of councils charging their own ring-fenced planning fees, providing that gives speed and certainty to applications. I am in favour of delegated planning decisions, training for planning committees, limiting the use of judicial reviews, encouraging faster access to electricity supplies and so on. The Government’s biggest problem is going to be the availability of skills. Where are they going to find the hundreds of new planners needed, the thousands of new builders, plumbers and electricians, and, above all, the hundreds of new skilled ecologists that Natural England and others will need to make this Bill work successfully?

As I understand it, EDPs are only about protected sites and protected species, and developers’ current obligations to promote BNG—biodiversity net gain—will continue to run in parallel. There will be huge competition for the small supply of ecologists between developers, local authorities and Natural England. I am not sure there is the capacity out there.

Part 3 of the Bill is its biggest weakness. I hope that the promised Pennycook amendments to satisfy the OEP will be announced soon. The biggest shortfall is the lack of a mitigation hierarchy. The Bill also needs to provide for subsequent management of the land involved in an EDP. It is all very well having achieved overall improvement by 10 years, but what is to prevent that overall improvement disappearing on the land in question in future years?

In Part 4, I am pleased to see that heat networks are included in the list of necessary infrastructure—something I have promoted in this House for some time, particularly where geothermal heat is involved. I am not keen on Natural England having compulsory purchase powers. It is better and cheaper if it contracts with landowners to get the land management it wants, but I suppose, if you are trying to assemble land or a land management programme, it is probably best if, as President Roosevelt said, you talk softly but carry a big stick. I hope that the powers will not be used too often.

There is an issue with compulsory purchase generally that needs fixing—namely, the way that an acquiring authority, or more often a private sector company acting in their name, when implementing a CPO seem to think they can ride roughshod over the normal rules governing the conveyance of property. With CPO powers in their armoury, they seem to turn into badly behaved bully boys. There are stories of people whose land and businesses have been confiscated and two years later they are still waiting for payment. That is outrageous. I will propose the introduction of an enforceable code of practice to ensure that the confiscation of property by the state, which can be devastating for an individual or a business, is accomplished in as fair and civilised a manner as possible.

17:02

[Lord Patten (Con)]

My Lords, first, I declare my long-standing interest in Persimmon plc, a middle-market mass housebuilder. This position has given me a ringside seat to observe the vicissitudes that have beset house building and planning over decades, with their cycles of ups and downs which no one has ever managed to defeat. Secondly, whatever the Bill before us sets out to do, in no way can it suddenly abolish the cycles in favour of a smooth, ever-upward movement of growth just by virtue of the men and women in Whitehall knowing best. I do not believe that is possible. This unfortunate Bill cannot by some fiat just fix those cyclical ups and downs—which rather depend on the safety of the economy, levels of taxation and availability of capital and of skilled labour—simply by grabbing more power from the centre. Indeed, the record sadly shows that no Conservative or Labour Government since 1945 have ever met their stated aspirations or hopes or pledges to build this or that particular number of homes in any one year or in any one decade.

It is amusing, but sad, to see that 300,000 per annum still is the hot-favourite target. The Prime Minister and his Ministers have since 2024 said much about their target intent. I would like to ask the Minister for a bit more clarity. He has an enviable reputation for being straightforward, saying it as it is and absolutely giving it between the eyes. I hope that he is not going to let me down—I seek not to damage him in any way by what I say in his important role. I want to ask him, therefore, what number of homes he expects to see built per year until August 2029, when his lot will come to the end of their present term. Is the number by then really still to be 1.5 million? I look forward to his answer. If his colleague who will be winding up tonight cannot give me that answer, I will be very happy to have—as drafted by the noble Lord—an answer in writing placed in the Library of the House so we can all see exactly what it is. That is because four years is a decent enough length of time over which to succeed or perhaps to be called out and be shown to have been pledging the unattainable. I do not think the massive shift of planning power away from local communities and councils will be any guarantee of success.

Thirdly, although HMG can recycle or manufacture new pledges—I think we have seen a bit of this in the last year—unfortunately we cannot manufacture new supplies of land. I have said in your Lordships’ House before that it is a scarce resource. All new housing cannot be built on reused brown, grey or green-tinged land, or built in areas once occupied by military bases—they are probably going to be reopened as military bases quite shortly. Much green or green-tinged land, alas, will need to be built on to provide new homes for young people. I accept that sometimes this will be necessary, and it is the only way that young people will get their homes. I doubt it will be easily accepted if it is from distant London SW1 and all to be decided centrally. Local involvement will always be needed to generate acceptability, for planners do not create communities; only people create communities. To make this happen, houses must look good. It is very possible to build well and build beautifully and to a human scale, as the late Sir Roger Scruton said—that very rare bird, a university moral philosopher and urban thinker. We should heed the advice that he gave.

17:07

[Lord Ravensdale (CB)]

My Lords, I declare my interest as a chief engineer working for AtkinsRéalis, a vice-chair of Peers for the Planet and co-chair of Legislators for Nuclear.

As an engineer, of course, I very keen to see Britain get building. This Bill is the single most important piece of legislation in the Government’s agenda to unlock growth and deliver for the many strategic targets the Minister outlined, including housing, clean power 2030 and defence. It is vital, therefore, that Parliament gets this right. I welcome the direction of travel in the Bill and that the Government are coming up with a number of very positive, radical ideas for the planning system.

However, the biggest problem for the Bill being able to deliver against its objectives is that Part 3, which has been presented as a solution to speed buildings and infrastructure through the system, may be a solution for housing, but, as the noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Kings Heath, set out, there are broadly held concerns that it will not deliver for infrastructure. That is because, by the time a developer comes along and identifies a habitat’s problem, there is unlikely to be time for Natural England to put in place an EDP to the satisfaction of all stakeholders. That means there will be a twin-track approach, which could have the unfortunate side-effect of adding to the bureaucratic burden within the planning system for large infrastructure. I would be grateful if, in her summing up, the Minister could expand on how she sees EDPs delivering for large infrastructure.

At the core of many of the issues that have added billions in cost and years in delay to our large infrastructure is the habitat regulations. They are, of course, very necessary, but there have been increasing issues with how they are interpreted. As mentioned previously, Catherine Howard, partner at HSF Kramer, has been doing some sterling work with ecologists and others on straightforward, common-sense clarifications to the habitat regulations that would bring more scientific rigor to the whole process. This has been set out in her Project Nutcracker series of articles, which I hope officials have seen.

For example, the habitat regulations are worded to require the proving of a negative: in other words, proof is required that a proposed project will not have an effect on a particular habitat. This is not the way science works; instead, we come up with theories and design experiments to try to falsify them. But proving that something does not exist is not falsifiable. That means that Natural England is currently not only overburdened but wastes precious time exploring hypothetical risks that are not adequately underpinned by scientific evidence. This is the fault of a system that asks it to prove that developments will have no impact, meaning that it must investigate and account for possibilities that there is no ecological evidence for.

The fundamental change that needs to be made is the introduction of a positive duty not to grant consent where there is scientific evidence of an adverse effect. This small amendment would have an immediate effect, freeing up scarce resource at Natural England to deliver on those goals, while streamlining the planning process for all the projects going through the system.

So there is a potential common-sense reform here that many ecologists are supportive of. It would bolster the measures in the Bill to speed up delivery of infra- structure projects in this Parliament, including the much-needed projects at the centre of the Government’s spending review and infrastructure strategy, as well as delivering more effectively for nature.

I am grateful to the Minister for her engagement in this Session on embodied carbon emissions. When she sums up, could she outline what plans the Government have to introduce common guidance, or perhaps to make a Ministerial Statement clarifying the approach local authorities should take?

In conclusion, there is a significant risk here. If Part 3 does not deliver for infrastructure, all the Government’s great aspirations for infrastructure build and development will not be realised. I look forward to further engagement with the Government on our pragmatic solutions to mitigate this risk, help get Britain building in the near term and deliver for nature.

17:12

[Lord Lilley (Con)]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Ravensdale. I hope he will not mind me saying that, through the expertise he has brought to this debate, he has illustrated how the hereditary system brings a comparatively youthful expertise of a non-partisan nature into our midst—one which will never come in once the constitutional vandalism this Government are planning has removed such people from this House.

I wholeheartedly support the Bill’s overall objectives of speeding up and streamlining the delivery of new homes and critical infrastructure. The current delays and costs are intolerable. The Lower Thames Crossing has cost £1.2 billion just for the planning process, before a single sod has been cut—if that is what you do to sod. That is more than what it cost Norway to build the longest under-river tunnel in Europe. A 25-mile bypass cost £250 million just for the planning process, and virtually every housing project in my old constituency —and in most other parts of the country—faces objections locally.

In effect, we have created a “vetocracy” in this country. Objectors can impose such costs and delays on project developers that they can effectively veto those projects going ahead. We must find ways of reducing the power of that vetocracy, and I welcome steps in the Bill to do that. We have got to stop local vetoes preventing, delaying and raising the costs of building homes, transport and energy infrastructure.

The noble Baroness, Lady Pidgeon, lauded the French success in building large infrastructure projects. I recall my old and much-lamented friend Nigel, the late Lord Lawson, telling me how, when he was Energy Secretary, he had asked his French counterpart how they were able to build nuclear power stations across France with so little objection. The French Minister, without realising the double entendre, replied, “When you are draining the swamp, you do not consult ze frogs”. But we do have to consult ze Brits in this country.

One less draconian way of undermining democracy is to enable developers to buy off or compensate objectors. This is most relevant in the energy sector, which is my principal concern. We need to access lower-cost and most-reliable energy sources and enable energy to reach the users without imposing extra costs. So I welcome the measures in the Bill which will enable the Secretary of State to establish a scheme to compensate people living in properties near to new transmission network structures by crediting their energy bills. But I cannot see why it should be delimited to those living near transmission networks and certain major upgrades of existing projects—that is what the Bill says at present. Why not extend the scheme so that compensation may be offered to those living near, say, proposed onshore windmills, which are the cheapest form of renewable energy? Better still, why not give companies proposing to drill for shale gas or oil onshore the right to offer compensation? I have heard of one company that would be prepared to offer £1,000 per household to those living within, say, a mile of a proposed well if a majority votes to allow such drilling to take place. It would subsequently offer a reduction in their gas bills, if the well proves successful, for the life of that well. I shall put down amendments to that effect.

Another aspect of the Bill that relates to the energy sector is the section enabling the Government to introduce a cap and floor scheme to finance long-duration energy schemes. The Explanatory Notes make it clear that that is expected to relate to new reservoirs—I mention the Dinorwig existing reservoir—but there are very few potential sites. The notes also refer to your Lordships’ House’s Select Committee report Long-Duration Energy Storage: Get on With It, which was mostly about the development of hydrogen as a form of storage. I again alert the House and the Government to the dangers of pressing ahead and investing in immature technologies prematurely. That technology has not been developed and is hugely costly at the moment, and we should not empower the Government to go ahead with it before it has proved its worth.

I add that, if we are going to build 1.5 million homes—I hope we will, and I will help the Government in their measures to make that easier to get planning permission for—we have to recognise that, at present, 40% of those will be taken up, in effect, by the rate of immigration foreseen by the Office for National Statistics over the next five years. We have to remember that it is about not just supply but demand—but no one will ever mention that.

17:17

[Baroness Liddell of Coatdyke (Lab)]

My Lords, I am the chair of Annington, a housing company that specialises in affordable homes, but I will not talk about that because, for many years now, I have been the honorary president of the Carbon Capture and Storage Association, which also includes utilisation. Frankly, I never thought the day would come when a Government would put CCUS at the heart of such a significant piece of legislation, so I want to say thank you.

The Bill has the potential to turn our net-zero ambitions into real-world jobs, investment and long-term economic renewal. The Climate Change Committee has acknowledged that there is no credible path to net zero without carbon capture and storage. The confirmation of funding for HyNet and the East Coast Cluster build-out, alongside the support for Acorn and Viking to reach final investment decisions in this Parliament, has put a spring in my step—noble Lords can probably tell from my accent which one gives me the biggest spring in my step. The recent financial close for net-zero Teesside and Liverpool Bay CCS further highlights the momentum, but risk still remains: inconsistent planning frameworks that are crying out for updating could threaten delay or even derail progress, right at the time when we need to accelerate.

For those of us, like me, brought up in the heartlands of coal, iron and steel, and shipbuilding, this is not just a climate solution. The opportunity analysis by the CCSA points to 50,000 skilled jobs and almost £90 billion in economic value by 2050. That should not be sneezed at. Add to that the potential for large-scale CO₂ storage and industrial decarbonisation.

Traditional industries, such as coal, iron and steel, and shipbuilding, can reform into clean energy industries. That means a lot to the kind of communities that I used to represent in the other place. The same skill sets are required for carbon capture and storage, but the planning must reflect the national role of CCUS infrastructure, even if it is only for short distances.

I know that there is a possibility of some pretty minor amendments that can have a great impact on the future of carbon capture, utilisation and storage. Reforming current guidelines, such as those in the Pipe-Lines Act 1962, can streamline the consenting process for CO₂ pipelines, and that kind of modernisation will allow us to keep with partners such as Norway, which is already planning cross-border CO₂ transport. Norway has been very much in the lead with a lot of this technology, and it is worth looking at.

This is all about boosting investor confidence. It will take investment from outside government to make this work, and work in the long term. In Committee, we will need those amendments to designate CO₂ spur pipelines and carbon capture equipment as nationally significant infrastructure projects under the Planning Act 2008, and to remove the requirement for special parliamentary procedures in the Pipe-Lines Act 1962 for pipeline compulsory purchase orders. That will help unlock the £9.4 billion already committed by the Government to CCUS delivery, and enable clusters such as Scotland, Teesside, the north-west and Humberside to move forward.

We have the potential to be a global leader in the development and export of carbon management technologies. Let us seize the moment—let us go for it, because there are great reserves of energy out there that can help us.

17:22

[Baroness Coffey (Con)]

My Lords, it takes a lot to shock me, but this Bill did, and still does. It will take a lot of amendments to get it right. I was particularly distraught at Part 3. I am conscious that in the previous Parliament, as my noble friend Lady Scott of Bybrook mentioned, some of the amendments to LURB that were rejected by this House were much smaller in scale than in Part 3, which can only be considered a complete and utter assault on our natural environment.

In thinking about aspects to be addressed, there are plenty of briefings that I am sure we will all share. However, we need to go through the Bill very carefully and properly understand it, instead of listening to mantras designed to push the Bill forward. There is no doubt that we want more homes built. However, as the noble Lord, Lord Best, mentioned, it is finances that are stopping a lot of houses being built.

There are 700,000 empty homes in this country—not second homes or holiday homes but empty homes. A million planning consents are still available for homes to be built, over 250,000 of which are in London. What is stopping them? It is about financing and continuing to make the most money. I am not criticising that, but simply trashing lots of the countryside and trashing nature will not necessarily deliver the infra- structure and the homes that people in this country need.

I say this, because I looked at the human rights memorandum carefully and there is a lot in it that talks about compulsory purchase “in the public interest”. I shall declare one interest: I still live in Suffolk, and I still live pretty close to some proposed energy infrastructure. I am not a nimby; I was actually very active in supporting Sizewell C, as long as it dealt with aspects of environmental regulation, which it did satisfactorily. But I am not clear how the Bill will address one of the two projects there that come to mind.

People are concerned that it has taken so long to get a variety of projects going. I understand why, but one of the key issues for Sizewell C was that, all of a sudden, due to a High Court ruling, the local water company said that it could not guarantee that it could supply the water. That was one of the things that massively derailed the construction of Sizewell C at that point, even when it started to come up with creative solutions. For example, we have a water shortage in East Anglia, and a lot of farmers and food security would be affected by the fact that they would not be able to get the water that they were used to—and they are pretty good with their water in East Anglia; they have high productivity. So it was suggested that a reservoir should be built, because Sizewell C needed it and farmers could use it as well, but Ofgem said no. I hope that we get to a situation whereby the Bill starts to allow those sorts of creative solutions instead of some of the challenges that it will bring, as we struggle to reach the targets already set in primary legislation.

Part 2 is an affront to democracy, and I shall give another local example. There is no doubt that building housing on any greenfield—not necessarily green belt, but greenfield—often tends to be controversial locally, but I give credit to the councils that try to get this balance right. What worries me about removing decisions from local councillors and giving it to planning officers is that we now have even more housing targets going into the countryside. There are situations where, for example, plans set a density for a 2,000-house development, and then officers recommend outline planning where the density is only one-third of what it should have been in the plan. It does not take too much of a brain to work out that, to meet the rest of the housing, they will have to use three times the amount of land.

There are many clauses that I shall examine very carefully—not only Clause 89, with its extensive Henry VIII powers, Schedule 5 on compulsory purchase, or Clause 91. By the way, we can all be happy: that provision does not apply to Crown land. Why not? It should be the first considered for compulsory purchase for any nature development.

It is also wrong that Natural England gets so many powers. This is not about Natural England itself, but it should be in the hands of the Secretary of State who should devise these. If they choose to delegate to Natural England then that is a different matter, but the Secretary of State and Ministers are accountable to Parliament while Natural England is not directly accountable. That is what we need to fix.

There are a variety of issues to do with water, but I hope that the Government will be open to a variety of permitted development rights, particularly with ponds and helping our farmers, and where they are about sustainable drainage. However, we should bear in mind that a brand new reservoir has not been built in this country in a long time—and I do not really understand why Thames Water is dragging its feet over in Abingdon. Let us take Abberton, over in Essex: 10 years ago, its capacity went up by 60%. So stuff is happening in this country, and we should not just try to use every bit of nature as an excuse for why certain things are not happening. The A14 was built ahead of time and below budget.

I am very sorry, I shall press the case for a lot more social housing, but not at the expense of trashing what we hold precious in this country.

17:28

[Baroness Bakewell of Hardington Mandeville (LD)]

My Lords, the number of speakers in this debate reflects just how seriously this Chamber is taking the issue of housebuilding and infrastructure. To start with, I will refer to Chapter 2 of Part 2 of the Bill on spatial development strategies. For those of us who have been involved in local government for a while, this is reminiscent of the RDA era. New Part 1A of the Planning and Compulsory Purchase Act 2004, introduced in Chapter 2 of the Bill, lists what a strategic planning authority means, but there is no mention of the national parks. That seems extraordinary, as they are vital to ensuring that strategic planning in their areas is done with empathy and sensitivity to individual environments.

The contribution that access to the countryside makes to health and well-being is well documented; this is a vital role for the national parks. They assist in the provision of affordable homes and have many permissions for housing granted. Currently, in the South Downs National Park, there are over 2,000 homes with permitted permission, of which 500 are affordable homes, but all are unbuilt.

In addition, national park authorities are not mentioned as being part of strategic planning boards. Given their role in mineral extraction and waste disposal, they should surely be present round the table and fully involved. Can the Minister say whether this omission is an oversight or deliberate; and, if so, why?

On the role of the community land trust organisations, there are currently 290 CLTs in England which own 2,100 assets, including 1,953 affordable homes. Many CLTs provide housing in AONBs and national parks, where smaller-scale affordable housing development is essential. Almost half the rural affordable housing projects in the pipeline in Devon involve CLTs. This was a result of the community housing federation’s work and shows the potential and appetite among communities to increase housing supply, if they are confident that it will result in homes that meet local needs. It is not helpful that the Government have recently ended funding for neighbourhood planning support. The Government have also not reinstated any grant funding for community-led housing. The Minister, the noble Baroness, Lady Taylor, has been very positive in writing about CLH but the Government have actually made it harder for communities to play this role.

The pipeline of new projects in the south-west has almost completely dried up, which is very disappointing indeed. Projects that were led by communities are set to be replaced by imposed government diktat. Is this really what the Minister wants?

I turn now to the lack of stopping places and permanent sites for Gypsies and Travellers, which the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Manchester raised. Every local authority should provide transit and permanent sites, alongside other traditional stopping places, thus dramatically reducing the number forced to stop on what the law now classes as illegal encampments. Since the statutory duty to provide sites was repealed in 1994, barely any local authority sites have been built. Private provision has increased and, while this is welcome, it is not accessible for many. In planning for homes, it is crucial to acknowledge and include provision for all our communities. Local authority-managed sites remain vital for a culturally pertinent way of living.

Long-standing planning failures have created a severe shortage of safe and suitable sites. Children need to be considered, and their access to education and health services is almost non-existent if they are continually moved on. Treating them as an underclass reinforces their marginalisation from the rest of society.

Lastly, my first Bill, which has already been referred to, was the Housing and Planning Bill 2016—there were lots of warm words about delivery. I urge the Government not to follow the example of the previous Administration. Housing is not an also-ran. It is key to economic and personal well-being. The Housing Minister must be totally committed to delivering the government goals and stay in post for at least the length of the parliamentary Session; churn will not deliver. Being the Housing Minister should not be a stepping stone to another role. It is an essential part of delivery and needs consistency, not a yearly change of personnel.

17:34

[Lord Goldsmith of Richmond Park (Con)]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Bakewell. The Bill is trying to do what is needed to boost housebuilding. I do not think there is anyone who disputes the simple fact that the gap between demand and supply continues to widen. We know, as many noble Lords have said, that this is at least in part the consequence of a planning system that is unbelievably complex and cumbersome, and often just flies against common sense, and we have heard lots of examples today.

I will focus on one aspect of the Bill. I start by saying that I appreciated the Minister’s opening remarks in relation to nature. I know from my own experience of dealing with the Minister that he believes very much what he said, but I have concerns about the Bill.

The Bill, like others before it on this issue, seems to pitch nature as a kind of blocker to development. In addition to there not being any new measures that I can see to ensure that new developments are built in a more nature-friendly way, some valuable protections are being removed, even if by default.

Clause 67, for example, says that nature improvement needs to be

“funded … by developers in a way that does not make development economically unviable”.

But in a country such as ours, which is so nature-denuded, and where our biodiversity continues to plummet, surely some development in some genuinely sensitive and important areas should be economically unviable. In the proposed equation that we are seeing here, it is hard to see how nature can ever win that contest.

In addition, it is not clear what the Bill means for the future biodiversity net gain obligations. I remind noble Lords that this is a new market, created more or less by consensus between the two Houses, that has generated myriad businesses and schemes, exactly as intended. Students, businesses—anyone who has moved into this new space—will undoubtedly be feeling unsettled about their own future, so I hope we will have clarity from the Minister on that point.

There are lots of ways in which the Bill can be strengthened. I hope, for example, that we will see significant, stronger protections for irreplaceable habitats such as chalk streams, ancient woodlands, peatlands and so on as an insurance against the risks that have been highlighted in the Bill. We have 85% of the world’s chalk streams but only 11 out of 220 are currently protected. Given the huge cost of flooding to communities, it just makes no sense that the National Planning Policy Framework still permits development on some functional flood plains. We have an opportunity here to change that, as well as pursuing opportunities to simplify regulations and give nature a boost at the same time.

There will be plenty of opportunities to outline those examples in due course, but I want to focus on one particularly important measure, which is among the easiest, most cost-effective—and effective—steps that we can take. It is one that I previously championed in this House, with tremendous support from the then Opposition, now Government. At the time of tabling my amendment, the noble Baroness, Lady Taylor, said —I love these words:

“We were delighted to see Amendment 221A … relating to the provision of swift bricks … We believe that specifically including swift bricks as a measure in the Bill, to be incorporated in planning law, is justified because of the unique nature of these precious birds’ nesting habitats … There is definitely a clear and present threat to these species. We hope the Government will accept this relatively a small step, which could make a world of difference to protecting our swift population, and that it will not be necessary for the noble Lord, Lord Goldsmith, to divide the House—but I hope he knows he has our full support in this amendment”.—[Official Report, 6/9/23; cols. 540-541.]


So noble Lords can imagine my delight when that amendment was resuscitated in previous debates in the other House. It reappeared as Barry Gardiner’s new Clause 73, which would require the installation of swift bricks in any development higher than five metres.

Noble Lords will know, because we have debated this already, that the breeding population of swifts collapsed by a staggering 60% between 1995 and 2020. We have known since 2002 that this rapid decline in swifts—and, it has to be said, other cavity nesting birds—is primarily the consequence of a lack of cavity nesting sites. The way we build new homes and renovate older homes today just does not accommodate nature in any way.

This month, we heard a welcome—in my view—announcement from the Government: confirmation that the national insulation budget of £13.2 billion will be spent in full, mostly on wall insulations. That is good news, but there is no mitigation or protective legislation for cavity nesting habitats. The birds do not stand a chance.

We know swift boxes work; there is a reported 96% occupancy in boxes on the Duchy estates; there is unanimous support from ornithologists and zero real opposition from the developers. The parliamentary petition that was started by the author and campaigner Hannah Bourne-Taylor was, at the time that it was launched, the fastest to reach 100,000 signatures. So, there is popular support for this, and it is so easy to do. It is cheap and requires zero maintenance and expertise.

I strongly encourage the Government to look again at some of the great things that were said by the then Opposition when I was trying to get my amendment through—I failed, as noble Lords will know—and ensure that, when the times come, it will not be necessary to divide the House.

17:39

[Lord Mawson (CB)]

My Lords, it is very difficult to talk about anything of substance in five minutes on a subject so central to this Government. But having talked with colleagues in the industry, I would like to make the following brief points. I declare my interests.

First, my colleagues are reassured by the sense of purpose and drive that the Government are demonstrating in this policy area. We need to help the Bill get on to the statute book soon, so that we can get building.

Secondly, the Bill needs to think more about building communities and place-making, not just about building more soulless housing estates. The Government are rightly committed to addressing a range of different problems: housing, health, crime, education and net zero. The lesson from the history of failed housing estates built in the 1960s and 1970s by the public sector, and the worrying signs from too much of what is being built today, is that if we build homes in the wrong way, we will not only fail to help solve these problems but make them worse.

We need to build places and strong, humane cultures and communities, not just homes. If noble Lords are in any doubt what this means for local residents, they should take five minutes and listen to Billy Connolly’s description on YouTube of what happened to him and his family when they were moved out of their home and community in the Gorbals in Glasgow and placed in a soulless housing estate on the edge of town. No one can describe the experience more clearly than Billy.

My colleagues and I are working on addressing precisely these issues in projects across the country with some of our major developers, and we are happy to share with the Minister and her colleagues our 360-degree approach to place-making, which is focused on buildings and culture—maybe she can let me know if there is interest.

We are all very concerned about what happens to bats and newts, but how concerned are we about the young mother I was with a few months ago on a multimillion-pound new housing estate in east London whose two year-old was already picking up needles in the play area? We all need to think very carefully together about how we do not repeat those mistakes in this next phase of development.

Thirdly, it is good news that planning officers will be given greater responsibility to determine smaller applications, reserved matter submissions and schemes on allocated sites through a new proposed national scheme of delegation. This should lead to greater consistency of approach across local planning authorities, plus certainty and timeliness of decisions. The mandatory training of planning committee members should, in theory, also lead to greater consistency and certainty for applications that do not fit into the above national scheme of delegation.

Having sat on a planning committee for many years, I know how flawed these present processes are, and I have watched too many local councillors play political games with these local processes. I think His Majesty’s Opposition need to think more clearly about the connections between democracy and delivery. There needs to be more clarity in their thinking about this matter.

Fourthly, the nature restoration fund, hopefully, will remove the restriction on 160,000 homes stalled by nutrient neutrality restrictions by allowing developers to pay into a nature restoration fund that delivers habitat improvements at a regional scale, rather than requiring site-specific ecological mitigation for every scheme. This should speed up the delivery of sites. There are, however, concerns about Natural England’s ability to deliver a robust scheme on a timely basis.

Fifthly, the proposal in the Bill to speed up the delivery of nationally significant infrastructure projects is also much welcomed and should provide greater clarity and certainty over the delivery of these projects.

Having said all this positive news, I think there remain some challenges for business colleagues in the industry. The introduction of new cross-boundary regional strategic planning could be positive, driving a more joined-up approach towards housing, economic and infrastructure growth across LPAs. However, there are significant concerns about the potential delays to new local plans and housing schemes because of this structural change. LPAs, which remain critically underresourced are undergoing significant change through forthcoming devolution and the abolition of the two-tier authority system, which, when tied in with the need to deliver these regional strategies soon, mean there may be an awful lot of resource tied up in delivering restructuring and not delivering local plans and housing schemes, which are needed in the short term.

I finish with a reality check: the current length of timeframes for securing planning permission will likely not shrink by a significant amount. Bidding on a site now does not realistically generate volume for the large housing businesses until 2028, given the timescales associated with securing planning permission, selling consented land, securing reserve matters, signing Section 106 agreements, site preparation and the build and sale of homes. By and large, the Bill is seen by many in the housing industry as very positive, with several of the changes proposed leading to quicker, more consistent and more certain outcomes. However, this has to be set against the wider context and systematic issues present, which may limit the positive impact these reforms will have.

17:45

[Baroness Young of Old Scone (Lab)]

My Lords, I declare my environmental interests in the register.

I think we all recognise the need for changes in the planning system to deliver really important infrastructure and housing, but we need to recall that the planning system is there to do more than “Dig, baby, dig”. It is a system whereby a balance is struck between economic, social and environmental outcomes for the good of citizens and communities.

The narrative in this country on this has become too polarised over recent months: you are either a builder or a blocker. It is either development or the environment. We are smarter than that; we can deliver both. Part 3 will need considerable change if we are going to do that. That view is shared by the Office for Environmental Protection, which regards this part of the Bill as regressing from our environmental standards.

The provisions in Part 3 on environmental delivery plans and the nature restoration fund are fine to deal with the delays in the planning system caused by environmental issues best solved on a wider-than-site basis—on a catchment basis. There are issues such as nutrient neutrality, which has already been mentioned, recreational pressures and other water quality and quantity issues. But the proposed system is not right for resolving many protected species issues or for dealing with irreplaceable habitats. For the latter, the clue is on the tin: these habitats cannot be replaced, and indeed both the revised NPPF and the biodiversity net gain guidelines make provision for their protection. I ask the Minister to tell the House how irreplaceable habitats will be protected under Part 3.

Part 3 also removes the snappily named mitigation hierarchy, which encourages developers and planners, as a first step, to think hard about avoiding protected sites—first do no harm. If the Government are going to meet their statutory nature conservation targets, they must both protect what is already there by way of important nature and create more strategic habitat.

The delivery of Part 3 relies on Natural England, which is already creaking for a lack of resources and staff. I ask my noble friend the Minister what assessment has been made of the capacity of Natural England. How many environment delivery plans do the Government expect Natural England to prepare, and how long will that take?

There are other issues in Part 3, which, in the interests of time, I will pass over. I could go on, but I would begin to sound like the polarised narrative I said we should avoid. I do not believe that is where I stand, because we are smarter and there is a win-win solution. Many of the elements of that system are already in place or are being put in place by the Government: the land use framework approach, regional spatial strategies and revised local plans linked with local nature recovery strategies, all of which can enable developers to steer their applications to places where they can be sure of an easy run through the planning system.

The ecological surveys and environmental impact assessments will have been done in advance at strategy and plan level, and not be a delay factor at planning application stage. There are other simple changes that will streamline the system, and I look forward to working with the Minister on alternative proposals. In the meantime, can the Minister advise us when we will see the government amendments, signalled by Minister Pennycook in the other place, to address these concerns?

One last point is that several of the larger developers, both in infrastructure and in housing, are increasingly anxious about Part 3. Sweeping away important nature protections is not a good look for a housebuilder or an infrastructure developer that has pledged to deliver a national or international environmental accreditation. They are concerned that this will be done in their name. There are also concerns that they will incur costs and complications from having one system inside EDP areas and another outside, as the noble Lord, Lord Ravensdale, highlighted. Are the Government listening to those concerns from developers? I look forward to the Minister’s responses.

17:50

[Baroness Thornhill (LD)]

My Lords, this Bill is something like that popular old spaghetti Western, “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly”.

Let us begin with the good. Chief among these aspects is the strong recognition that the status quo is no longer working. Infrastructure delivery has been sluggish, housing needs remain unmet, and many local authorities are still grappling with outdated planning frameworks and, as has been said, many do not have an up-to-date local plan.

The icing on the cake for me is the welcome return of strategic planning, and with it, empowered development corporations. These aspects were missing previously, and both are welcome and overdue. The emphasis on streamlining nationally significant infrastructure is in principle sensible if we want to tackle the climate crisis, deliver on net zero and provide energy security. We simply cannot have vital infrastructure mired in red tape for years on end.

Similarly, the focus on digitisation and data-led planning is very much a step in the right direction. If digital tools mean that more people can engage meaningfully with the process, that is a win for both democracy and delivery.

I also acknowledge the proposed reforms to compulsory purchase powers. If handled fairly and transparently, that could enable more strategic regeneration in brownfield development, which has to be preferable to the continued encroachment on our green belt.

But then we come to the bad. The Bill talks a good game about speeding up delivery but, first, we must not conflate delivery with planning permissions. As has been said, there are hundreds of thousands of units already with permission that are simply not being built. Let us have some courage and address the broken land market and the incentives that currently reward land banking. That is not about red tape but about political will.

Throughout the Bill, as has been mentioned by many noble Lords, there is a concern about capacity to deliver. Our local authorities are expected to implement much of the Bill and, as we have heard, they are already overstretched, underfunded and struggling to recruit and retain skilled planning officers. I know the Minister will tell us of the Government’s plans and funding to remedy this long-standing problem, but the gap between these plans and their achieving fruit—that is, people in post, doing the job—is one of many years. How will the Government fill that gap? There certainly is not time here to comment on the capacity within the construction industry, which is also demonstrably lacking, but the Minister may well have an update for us on that.

The Bill treads worryingly into overcentralisation. I understand the driver for that after decades of failure, but we must not fall into the trap of sidelining local voices in the name of speeding up the process. From experience, I know that the best planning outcomes emerge when communities, councillors and developers collaborate within a coherent framework, which I hope the spatial development strategies will provide. The Bill needs to be clear about the value of the public’s voice and the appropriate place for it to be heard.

It is clear, even from our debate, that Part 3 has attracted the most concern: measures which replace robust environmental safeguards with a financial levy. There are concerns that changes to the environmental assessment may risk weakening vital safeguards. We need to be certain that the new processes will uphold our biodiversity, our heritage and climate commitments. We must insist that any levy achieves significant improvement, not mere compensation.

On the ugly, as we have observed in other Bills, and increasingly so, there is a tendency to present undeveloped legislation that lacks detailed policy and grants Ministers broad delegated powers to fill in the gaps later. Most notable in this Bill is the proposed national scheme of delegation. That is a significant shift, with substantial powers given to the Secretary of State and where we are yet again asked to give the Government a blank cheque on matters of national significance and some controversy.

Disappointingly absent are provisions to strengthen community engagement, empower neighbourhood planning and bolster community land trusts—measures that empower citizens to shape their places rather than merely react to what developers propose. Indeed, I urge the Government to consider that a vision for high-quality design is a core component of the spatial development strategies, created with communities rather than handed down to them. We will support the good, amend the bad, and call out the ugly.

17:55

[Baroness Willis of Summertown (CB)]

My Lords, I declare my interest as noted in the register as chair of Peers for the Planet.

When looking at this Bill, the one thing I think we can all agree on is that our planning system needs to be reformed, and in that sense, I welcome the Bill. But if we are to ensure a healthy and resilient future for people and the planet, we also need to ensure that our planning system, at the same time as delivering 1.5 million houses and major infrastructure, also delivers towards our environmental and climate targets.

We need a climate and nature duty which will run through the planning system and ensure consistency in decision-making by treating nature and climate targets as material considerations and giving them proper planning weight. Yet what we have in our current system is already too piecemeal, and now this Bill brings in yet another set of reforms which, if we are not really careful, will result in conflicting legislation and strategies all pulling against one another.

I know that other Lords have commented on this, but in this respect, it is Part 3 which is of most concern. If it is left as it is, it will lead to regression in the legal certainty for nature, a removal of the mitigation hierarchy, and conservation measures that can be delayed by a decade after the damage has been done. Associated with this, I have three specific concerns that will be very helpful to hear the Minister’s opinion on.

The first, as highlighted by the noble Baroness, Lady Young, is that the Bill fails to include any mention of protection of irreplaceable habitats such as protected blanket peatlands, ancient woodlands, chalk streams and species-rich grasslands. Currently, these habitats are given strict protection under the habitats directive and the Wildlife and Countryside Act, as well as protection under the mitigation hierarchy. In the Bill, the EDP proposal turns this process on its head. It would allow developers to pay a levy and skip straight to compensation. But how can you compensate or restore elsewhere when habitats can take hundreds, if not thousands, of years to restore? For example, let us take the SSI blanket peat bog on Walshaw Moor in Yorkshire. It has taken 6,000 years to grow to where it is now. At its current growth rate, if we destroy it, it will take 240 human generations later to see the peatland restored. This is clearly ridiculous, and allowing harm to those irreplaceable habitats in exchange for future compensation would be a grave misstep.

Secondly, the Bill views nature as important to protect only for its inherent value, yet we now have huge amounts of evidence, including from the UK Government, that the ecosystem services provided by nature are incredibly important for their role in climate mitigation, flood risk protection, pollination, clean water, clean air and good-quality soils. It is also now widely acknowledged, including by the Treasury, that if these natural capital assets are allowed to degrade any further or be destroyed, there could be a significant financial impact. For example, the Green Finance Institute in its 2025 report on nature-related financial risk—I recommend that your Lordships read it if you do not know this data—estimated that further deterioration of our natural capital assets could lead to an estimated 6% to 12% loss of GDP by 2030. So how will this Bill protect important natural capital assets?

Thirdly, and finally, there is no mention in the Bill of the need to preserve green spaces and nature in cities. This is a major omission, in my view, given the abundance of data and population-level evidence, including papers published, most recently in the Lancet and the British Medical Journal, demonstrating that green space in cities is critically important for the health and well-being of us humans. Provision of accessible green space within 15-minutes walking distance has been agreed in international legislation, so where is it in this Bill? Alongside any new housing development, there should be provision for green space within 15-minutes walking distance.

I firmly believe that it is possible to achieve nature-positive and climate-positive urban development, but we need to be clear about how it should be prioritised within the system and ensure that decision-making is more balanced and consistent.

18:00

[Baroness Moyo (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, the cost of energy has been hinted at this afternoon. However, it is one of the most important infrastructure issues that we must address. As disclosed in the register of interests, I serve on the board of directors of a global energy company, Chevron.

Today, the United Kingdom has the most expensive industrial energy electricity costs among developed nations, with British industry paying four times as much as in the United States, according to the IEA. Meanwhile, British households are paying on average 40 cents per kilowatt hour, compared to 18 cents in the United States and just 8 cents in China, according to Statista. This situation could get worse as AI data centres raise demand, constrain electricity grids and put further pressure on energy costs. It seems to me that an ideal planning and infrastructure Bill should invest in fresh capital and critical infrastructure, including transport and housing. This is much in the vein of the Government’s 10-year, £725 billion funding commitment. But Britain must also invest in bringing down its punitive energy costs.

Reducing the cost of energy is the ultimate non-inflationary economic stimulus that this country urgently needs, especially given that this month, the OECD cut the forecast for the UK’s growth from 1.4% to 1.3% for this year, and down to just 1% for 2026. Reducing the cost of energy increases both the profit margin for businesses and disposable income for households, both net goods for the economy. Moreover, lower energy costs ease the financial pressure on public goods such as the National Health Service and local authorities. I welcome the Government’s plans to reduce electricity costs by 20% to 25% from 2027 for electricity-intensive manufacturers. However, this still leaves higher energy costs for the rest of the private sector, the public sector and households.

It is my contention that an effective infrastructure policy should reflect at least three points as it pertains to reducing energy costs. First, for the foreseeable future, the United Kingdom should maximise all sources of energy, including both renewables and conventional energy, in order to bring down energy costs and secure a stronger economic future. This stance would ensure that Britain could regain a key global competitive advantage: energy production. I am pleased to see that, as a small step, the Government are looking to allow new applications in licensed oil and gas fields in the North Sea this autumn.

Secondly, AI, and agentic AI in particular, offers real, tangible promise to bring down the cost of elements of energy production such as exploration, drilling and transmission. Therefore, AI adoption should be the centrepiece of energy policy and infrastructure planning for the 21st century.

Thirdly, there is an opportunity for dematerialisation. Simply put, this is the ability to get more power out of the same unit of energy. For example, in vehicle manufacturing, this would mean using lighter materials in car bodies to reduce fuel consumption and emissions. Currently, businesses and academia are leading innovation in dematerialisation, but it is vital that Governments support science and research in this area. By taking these three steps, we achieve the two goals of lowering energy costs, which catalyses economic growth, and reducing emissions, a key piece of our energy transition ambitions.

Many aspects of the path to energy transition are rooted in assumptions from three or four years ago, yet so much has changed since 2022—our energy security, our economic outlook, and our understanding of what technology can do to reduce energy costs. Britain’s natural resource wealth and the emerging era of technology thankfully allow us to pursue both economic growth and an effective energy transition. I support the direction of this Bill, but there remains considerable scope for the Government to reduce energy costs both through the Bill and through broader policy.

18:05

[Lord Naseby (Con)]

My Lords, it is a privilege to follow the noble Baroness, who raises such an important dimension affecting this Bill. As I listened earlier this afternoon to the Minister, I was pleased at the way he delivered the Bill before us. I think he will have sensed a wish across the House for us to move forward and to help the Government succeed in the objectives they have set. I know that that sense is shared by his noble friend who will be winding up, whom I have talked to about new towns.

I would like to cover just three aspects. First, there is my own experience. I had the privilege to be elected leader and chairman of housing for the London Borough of Islington in 1968, the only Conservative leader of the London Borough of Islington so far. I am the son of an architect, and when we took power, we did a complete review with the borough architect, a man called Mr Alf Head. We looked at a place called The Crumbles, which was run by the GLC—an early Victorian building where the residents had to have the toilets on alternate floors. I said to Mr Head, “Do we really have to continue with buildings of this sort? “No”, he says, “Sir, if you’ve got some vision”—you as councillors— “I have been working on low-level intensive housing.” I invite the Minister to go to Essex Road some time and see the results of his vision and our ability as local councillors to get it built. That was an exciting exercise.

Secondly—and I think this is still relevant today—my wife and I bought a small terraced house in Gerrard Road that had a “sort of” bathroom and, maybe, a kitchen. But there was a process for young couples with a baby, which we had, to get a grant, which we had to match. We did that, and that restored that property for, to the best of my knowledge, a long, long time. That time has come again. I have visited one or two properties which are in a terrible state, and young couples have the energy and desire to bring such properties up to modernity. I actually wrote a pamphlet called The Disaster of Direct Labour, but I do not think the present Government are proposing direct labour in local government—I hope not. Anyway, those are my experiences.

I want to say a few words about new housing, which is vital, of course. One of the biggest problems today is building, or potentially building, on the flood plain. That will get worse, because we know from all the evidence that the level of rainfall is going up by approximately 10% a year, and that the intensity of the rainfall is greater now than 10 years ago. Against that background, frankly, we should not allow any building on the flood plain. That is an important element.

Conversely, I think that we should work with the major housebuilders. I am not one who is critical of the work of the major housebuilders. They have to have planning permission covering at least three years if they are to run a viable business. Although it is quite right to say to new housebuilders, “You’ve got to put on roofing material that will help get solar energy”, I do not think that you can tell them to put heat pumps in every property. That is not feasible. In my early stages with Reckitt & Colman, I worked in Hull, which had row after row of terraced housing. Those properties cannot have heat pumps.

It is against that background that I would like to see us look again at gas being used as a vehicle, with hydrogen, to provide energy for heating and cooking, particularly in areas of major terraced housing. I have done some work with the gas industry and on what goes with it. Basically, it is safe and it works. I should like to see it go forward.

I come, finally, to new towns. I represented Northampton South for 23 years. As a new town, it was not initially welcomed by the local council. I thought a lot about it and said, “No, we need to welcome it. We need more housing in this area. We need proper housing and a mix of housing”. We were getting it from the Commission for New Towns, but in the new towns of the future we must make sure that there are sufficient facilities for sport, libraries, education and all those things. The inquiry recently proposed that the Government should do 12 new towns; in my judgment, at a cost of more than £3 billion each, three or four is more than enough. There are opportunities there, and speaking purely for myself, I would certainly be delighted to work with them on any project they may have and to take it forward.

18:11

[Lord Berkeley (Lab)]

My Lords, I want to say a few words about something that has not been talked about very much. Let me turn this damn phone off first—this happened in my Select Committee yesterday and it was not very good.

I want to talk about planning, because planning comes up a great deal in this Bill—quite rightly, and it is a great Bill. There is a lot about the different ways of obtaining planning, such as through the Transport and Works Act or through the Planning Inspectorate. What I cannot find is anything about planning when it comes to railways or canals. Historically, planning permission for them has been obtained through a hybrid Bill. I have been involved in a number of hybrid Bill projects: the Channel Tunnel was the first one; then there was HS1; and, more recently, HS2. I also chaired a Select Committee on a river project in east London—no, in the north-east somewhere.

There is one common thing that worries me; with greater pressure on people’s time, I have a serious worry. Who you would call a judge in any court, or an inspector in planning, becomes a group of a dozen or half a dozen Members of Parliament or Members of your Lordships’ House. They are expected to act as a judge with full transparency and full fairness; to listen to all the evidence, both from the promoter and from the people who are petitioning; and then to make a decision.

This all sounds very easy until you look at things and ask, “First of all, how is the Select Committee selected?” It is not like a Select Committee that we have here. It is a special Select Committee to act as judge and jury, so to speak, for the particular project—usually one promoted by the Government. I have to say, when you start looking at who is selected, a lot of the time the selection is based on: “Have you behaved in the House? Have you voted with your party, or have you not been there?” If you are speaking against the party too often, you are going on that committee. I could give several examples, which I will not do now, but it has got to a stage where you can look at the committee and say, “Well, I’ve got to open my correspondence in the morning meeting. Maybe I’ll be asleep after lunch, but nobody will notice”. That happens quite often.

The poor petitioners, who are not helped by the very expensive lawyers whom the promoter is employing, often have to speak on their own. They are told throughout the process, “It’s all very difficult. You’re probably not going to win, but I suppose you could try”. They then have to accept, more or less, the decision of this so-called court, which is under a lot of pressure from Ministers and everyone else to come out in favour of the promoter. I would like to ask my noble friend the Minister—I do not necessarily need an answer tonight, but I think that this deserves a petition when we get to Committee stage—do we need to use the hybrid Bill process for railways and canals anymore? The planning process that we have through the Planning Inspectorate and the Transport and Works Act seems to work very well and people have confidence in it. Certainly on the basis of HS1, I could go on to compensation and things like that, but I will not do so; I shall just say that people are very upset about it. They think that they have been treated badly, and then they do not get paid their compensation—whether or not that is related, I do not know.

We ought to have a debate about this because I suspect the reason for not having a change is because Parliament sees itself as supreme. We are very good at being supreme here, and they are very good at being even more supreme down at the other end of the Corridor. However, I think that, for something like this, which is basically a court, we should give it to the professionals. So I shall try to come up with a petition, which may at least enable some debate to take place; I may be told why that will not work, but let us hope that it will.

18:17

[Baroness Grender (LD)]

My Lords, the Government’s ambition to build more homes and infrastructure for our country is welcome. It is indeed time to get Britain building again. However, there is a danger in this Bill of council blaming and nature blaming, which ignores recent history.

According to the CPRE, a staggering 1.2 million homes given planning permission since 2015 have not been built. This highlights that the problem is not always the blockers in communities but is often the developers, who are banking land and failing to build. Although we strongly support the aspiration of 1.5 million new homes in this Bill, regrettably, it does not include any explicit target for the building of 150,000 social homes per year—a vital commitment in our own manifesto. How can we truly tackle the housing emergency and get families out of the insecurity of temporary accommodation without addressing the dire lack of genuinely affordable homes that are tied to local incomes?

We are deeply concerned that this Bill continues with the overcentralised, developer-led approach that has demonstrably failed to deliver. It undermines the independence of local government and deprives communities of their stake in development. Local councils, as the backbone of our planning system, are not the blockers: they approve the vast majority—86%—of applications that come their way. Sweeping powers for the Secretary of State, such as on determining which planning functions are delegated and on reducing the objection period for transport projects, will shut communities out of decisions that have a profound impact on their lives. We must ensure that local councils, not Whitehall, decide which applications go to committee, maintaining the democratic right for communities to be heard and represented.

On Part 3 of the Bill, although the concepts of environmental development plans and a nature restoration levy are noted, their success is highly dependent on substantial up-front funding. We have very serious concerns, for Committee stage, about Natural England’s capacity and resources to monitor and enforce this fund effectively.

This is a missed opportunity for mandating nature-friendly development in all new housing, including minimum biodiversity measures such as swift boxes, bat boxes and green roofs, including solar. It also fails to adequately strengthen protection for irreplaceable habitats such as our precious chalk streams. We will seek to amend to improve farming business viability through better use of environmental land management. We owe it to future generations to ensure that our planning system is sustainable, genuinely affordable and democratically accountable, enabling our communities to thrive and to enjoy nature, not diminish it.

18:20

[Lord Gascoigne (Con)]

My Lords, I declare that I am on the boards of Peers for the Planet and the Conservative Environment Network. I also chair the Built Environment Select Committee—although the members who are here will be pleased to hear that I speak today purely as a Back-Bencher. I thank the Minister who will be responding, the noble Baroness, Lady Taylor, for the time that she has given me, not just on this Bill but on the wider issues of housing and planning. It is both generous and genuinely appreciated.

This Bill is the most exciting legislation in this Session, as someone else has said, not because it is perfect—far from it—but because it opens a vital and long-overdue national debate. It is about not just housing but life, communities, connectivity; places to raise families, work, grieve and make friends. It is a chance to nationally plan land use more strategically, aligning homes with infrastructure, jobs and nature. I wish to raise three things.

The first, as has been discussed already, is planning committees. A poll found that 53% of people do not trust councils to act in their best interests and that 59% want more information on, or a greater say in, local decisions. I acknowledge that, as the Minister has said, a consultation is under way. But if the Government plan to remove a democratic element from planning, whatever the threshold, they must ensure that people still know who makes decisions, on what basis, and how they can make their voices heard. Democracy works only if people are involved. If you remove that local input or accountability, you damage that democratic link entirely.

I would like us to explore how we can front-load the planning process, using better data, earlier engagement and stronger design codes that secure local support from the outset. If you combine that with the brownfield passports that the Government are looking at, you reduce the need for repeat committee debate, you save time and you provide long-term clarity. All of this is already possible in current legislation.

The second area is Natural England. If it is to take on a stronger regulatory role, we must ensure that it is transparent and accountable. Who scrutinises its daily decisions? Who steps in when something goes wrong? Does it have the right skills and resources? Should it be the sole delivery body?

The third area is Part 3. When I looked at it the other day, it reminded me of when I put questions into AI when I am bored and out pops something which is very clever but sometimes lacks human intuition. This section of the Bill may have started with nutrient neutrality in mind. Perhaps it should have stayed there, as has been said. If it is put alongside the broader noise on biodiversity net gain and nature-friendly farming, I cannot help but feel a growing apprehension. This section risks undermining protections and creating new problems when first we should be fixing what is not working.

The fund must be for nature, not “administrative expenses”, as in in the Bill. As it stands, it risks becoming a bureaucratic cash cow, with too few guarantees of results. There is nothing about mitigation hierarchy, no requirement to embed green infrastructure and no assurance that the funds stay local. Maintaining and improving nature is not addressed. You pay the levy and the problem is offshored. Added to this, EDPs last only 10 years. What happens then? Some habitats and species cannot just be cut and pasted elsewhere.

I hope that the Bill sparks a deeper national conversation about the kinds of places we want to build and the kind of country we want to be. Growth does not have to make things worse. On the contrary, it is essential, but people must see and feel the benefits. We need to better deliver the infrastructure and services that people expect and fix this crazy situation of billions sat there in Section 106 waiting to be spent. Scrutiny and criticism of the Bill must not be mistaken for nimbyism. You can care deeply and passionately about nature but still want more homes and businesses. That is not cakeism. It is smart planning.

Recently I went to Aylesbury, where Barratt and the RSPB have partnered on 2,500 homes. Since then, the number of sparrows has risen by 4,000%, goldfinches by 200% and bumblebees by 50%. This is despite not just Brexit but the presence of roads, homes, shops and schools, and all because nature was put in at the outset. They are not alone; others are doing it. Nature is not a blocker to growth but a part of growth. It creates jobs, as my noble friend on the Front Bench knows all too well. It revives places and helps to make healthier and happier communities.

I welcome the Government’s aims, but the rhetoric must change. We must stop framing housing and nature as adversaries, where one must lose for the other to win. I have spoken to campaigners and young people who care about the environment yet want more homes. Many developers building at scale are putting nature in because it works. It is this energy that I want us all to channel, not to kill the Bill but to improve it, not to throw the baby out with the bathwater but to push for a more measured, more national and more ambitious plan that delivers for both people and nature.

18:26

[Viscount Hanworth (Lab)]

My Lords, the Planning and Infrastructure Bill marks a turning point. An intention has been declared by the Government to pursue a major reconstruction of the UK economy. This intention is conveyed by the Bill.

Many years ago, a Labour Government were faced with a similar task of post-war reconstruction. An austere and purposive Government, under the unassuming leadership of Clement Attlee, faced a task of which the difficulties were widely acknowledged. The Government were supported by an able Civil Service. Its skills had been honed by the wartime exigencies. The Ministry of Supply, which had overseen the procurement of wartime matériel, was replete with technicians and staff who had managed a complex supply chain. The ministry oversaw some leading post-war technological projects, including those of the newly established nuclear industry. It also oversaw the nationalisation of the iron and steel industry.

Equal competence was demonstrated by the Ministry of Transport, which oversaw the nationalisation of the rail network, albeit that little credit was given on this account. Thereafter, the Civil Service was rapidly de-skilled. Its traditional amateurism was reasserted by means of its selection board. By the mid-1960s, critics were complaining of the lack of scientific, commercial and manufacturing skills in the Civil Service.

Current circumstances are very different from those of the early post-war years. The Department for Energy Security and Net Zero, which is charged with overseeing our energy policy, has a dearth of technical expertise. One might expect the department to be dominated by scientists and engineers, but there are few of these. Those in charge of the nuclear policy are graduates with degrees in archaeology, history and the social sciences. Although they can be credited with supporting a nuclear renaissance, there is little understanding of the technological imperatives.

In pursuit of net-zero emissions, it will be necessary for small nuclear plants to become close-up and personal to industrial applications and to clusters of population. Reactors are required that embody fourth-generation nuclear technologies that possess inherent safety. Instead, we are developing pressurised water reactors, both on a massive scale and as small modular reactors. Both pose stringent safety requirements, which must keep them at a distance from the consumers of heat and electricity. We have allowed projects that have been pursuing fourth-generation nuclear technologies in the UK to close or to expatriate themselves to more welcoming countries. A ministry staffed by technical enthusiasts would never have allowed this to happen.

The dearth of commercial experience in the Civil Service is as striking as its technological limitations. This deficiency has been gruesomely illustrated by the experience of the HS2 rail project. It seems that successive Governments who were willing to support the project were content to issue vague outline plans and to rely on the contractors to determine the detailed specifications. Governments were inclined to make changes to the plans without regard to the costs of the resulting disorganisation. The HS2 project has been affected by a planning system that is beset by local objections and demands for judicial review. This has severely impeded its progress. The Planning and Infrastructure Bill proposes to reform a sclerotic system.

There is a tendency to envy nations that have a more forceful regime that can override local objections. If we are not prepared to act likewise, then we must resolve to adequately compensate the affected parties. However, in pursuing the construction of new towns, if that is what we intend, we must make provision for the compulsory purchase of land in a way that will allow its enhanced value to accrue largely to the public authorities or to the development corporations. Otherwise, it will accrue to lucky but undeserving landowners.

I will make one final comparison between the past and present. After the war, the nation was fully aware of the parlous state of the economy and the physical environment. Nowadays, the electorate are less aware of the hazards we face. Our leaders should have alerted them to the realities sooner. The consequence is that we will be blamed for each emerging problem. We will be blamed for the failures in the provision of healthcare and social care, for the bankruptcies of local authorities, universities and institutions of higher education, and for much else besides.

We have been willing to listen to the nostrums of pollsters, spin doctors and political strategists, who were responsible for convincing our leadership that it was dangerous, at an election time, to admit that taxes needed to be raised to finance the reconstruction. That was surely a misreading of popular opinion that made no allowance for the possibilities of political persuasion. The consequence is that we have lost time before embarking on the project, and we have lost some credibility.

18:31

[Lord Offord of Garvel (Con)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to speak to Part 1 of the Bill and specifically to Chapter 2, which relates to electricity infrastructure. The Bill introduces many critical reforms to our planning and grid connection systems, and, if implemented effectively, could help restore a degree of realism and responsiveness to our infrastructure development.

I welcome the shift from a first come, first served model to a first ready, first connected model for grid connections. To quote my noble friend Lord Young of Cookham, this should “in theory” allow viable shovel-ready projects to proceed without unnecessary delays. However, if we are to prioritise projects, we must be strategic. Not all megawatts are equal. A kilowatt hour from a nuclear plant delivered consistently is not the same as one from a wind turbine that might not be turning tomorrow. Immediately dispatchable, energy-dense sources such as nuclear and gas must be prioritised for grid access. Those technologies provide essential baseload power and enhanced grid stability. Crucially, they offer inertia—that is, resistance to frequency fluctuations—which is something that renewables such as wind and solar cannot provide. Frequency fluctuations can cause blackouts, as we saw first-hand only too recently in Spain.

We must be cautious about fast-tracking a growing queue of small-scale, intermittent renewable projects that offer low-capacity factors and often require costly network upgrades. My argument is not against renewables but against imbalance. Yes, a truly resilient grid must be cleaner, but also smarter, stronger and more stable. We should connect the right projects in the right order, in the national interest, not just to tick boxes for arbitrary 2030 targets.

Broadly, we will support efforts to streamline the planning process for nationally significant infrastructure projects. They are critical for our energy security and economic competitiveness. Although I welcome the Bill’s legal framework for a cap and floor scheme to support long-duration energy storage, I also share my noble friend Lord Lilley’s caution about pre-empting new technologies before they are fully proven. That said, it is vital that we enable the deployment of technologies that balance supply and demand, reinforce resilience and help us move towards a cleaner energy system.

However, I must express concerns about the underlying motivation driving those projects, namely the Government’s so-called clean power by 2030 target. Although I have done so in this House many times before, I hope noble Lords will indulge me once again: it is important to lay bare the reality of the associated cost of this target. Aurora Energy Research has priced the cost of grid upgrades at £116 billion over the next 10 years. That amounts to an additional £400 per annum per household. That is before factoring in the OBR’s estimate of £96 billion more in green levies and subsidies over the next five years—an additional £600 per annum per household.

Let us be clear: the 2030 target is not just unrealistic, it is ideological. It is being pursued not with a careful eye on affordability, nor with a clear plan for technology neutrality or energy resilience, but rather to satisfy a political agenda, not a national one.

We must prioritise a balanced energy mix that combines innovation with reliability, clean energy with cost effectiveness, and growth with environmental stewardship. Ideology must not override practicality. The Government owe the British people a secure, affordable and sustainable energy future, delivered fairly and in a realistic timeframe.

I trust that the Minister has heard these concerns. I look forward to engaging further in later stages of the Bill and I hope for constructive dialogue in Committee.

18:30

[Lord Shipley (LD)]

My Lords, I remind the House that I am a vice-president of the Local Government Association. I understand the ambition of the Bill to speed up infrastructure delivery. Planning frameworks are complex and can be slow. But I remind Ministers that when the Audit Commission existed, it audited planning performance, publicised poorly performing councils and required improvements from them. I accept the need to enforce shorter timescales on decision-making.

It is wrong to suggest that the planning system is responsible for not building enough homes. As we have heard, there are well over a million homes with planning permission that are not built and councils approve nine out of 10 planning applications for housing. It is not the planning system that causes low house completions but the lack of money—now partially addressed in the spending review, although not entirely—together with the lack of construction workers and materials, added to land banking by major builders that sit on planning permissions while land values rise.

The Government still want to build 1.5 million homes by 2029. That means they must build 374,000 a year from 2027. If that were to be done, at what quality might it be done? I ask that because the Bill could be the means of future-proofing our housing stock, given our ageing population and that we have more people who live with a disability. Many new homes lack quality, and some very poor housing is being produced through permitted development conversions where profits are the driving force. We need to build more healthy homes that last.

My noble friend Lord Russell and others have talked about Part 3. I agree with his conclusions, and I wish that Ministers would stop talking about this being about newts—not in this Chamber, but more generally. It is actually about 5,251 rare and protected habitats that must not lose their current legal safeguards.

Planning reform will help to deliver infrastructure, but many large infrastructure projects in this country have suffered from bad project management and huge cost overruns. It is not just about planning. The Bill includes several positive measures, such as making it easier for councils to purchase vacant land for housebuilding, localising planning fees, and increasing planning capacity. Those measures should be supported, but the national scheme of delegation will centralise decision-making when there is no evidence that decision-making will be improved. The democratic role of councillors in decision-making, which has been central to the English planning system, is at risk. Any reforms must safeguard local oversight and transparency, otherwise there is a risk that the public will not be supportive.

Planning reform will succeed only if there are qualified planning staff to do the work. To build capacity, the number of level 7 chartered town planner apprenticeships must be increased—this at a time when spending on planning has been reducing. According to the excellent brief from the Royal Town Planning Institute, we have a shortage of over 2,000 planners in local authorities and not enough chief planning officers, because that role has been downgraded over the years.

The real reason why planning has been in difficulty is that there have not been enough staff to do the work necessary, and too few chief planning officers with the necessary clout to drive progress and outcomes. Chief planning officers should be statutory, as I have said during the passage of previous planning Bills. The RTPI is right to urge the inclusion of a clause defining the purpose of planning, alongside an audit of the whole planning system and how it interlocks. Its proposed national spatial framework would be a positive improvement.

At this stage of our debate on the Bill, we have to put competency and accountability at the heart of decision-making, but Clause 51 gives too much power to Whitehall. If, under Clause 50, you train councillors to be better, why do you need to take the power away from them and give it to Whitehall? Whitehall does not need to be involved in the size of planning committees or the powers of officers and councillors. Finally, as the RTPI has said, planning is not a blocker; it is an under-resourced enabler, and this Bill could put that problem right.

18:40

[Lord Crisp (CB)]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, and to pick up a couple of the points he made so eloquently. I am going to talk about two things: the relationship between health and planning, and between health and housing.

Second Reading is about underlying principles, and I want to start with: what is planning for? It is too often cast, and is cast at the moment, as an obstacle. I understand why, and we have heard already about the frustrations with major infrastructure projects—how does one explain to a foreigner why we cannot manage those projects in this country?—and with the costs and delays involved, and about the need to speed up decision-making more generally. It has not always been like that, and it need not be like that.

Planning can be a positive force for transformation, for creating places and communities that support health and well-being, prosperity and the environment. These three have been linked, for example, in Ebenezer Howard’s original concept of garden cities, and today we must all recognise those links between health, prosperity and the environment. For example, the creation of healthy environments and a healthy, stable workforce is vital to a thriving economy, and the opposite is damaging to growth, as we have already seen from the chronic levels of sickness around the country at the moment. My noble friend Lady Willis of Summertown pointed out how the natural environment enhances our health and is vital in cities as well as in the countryside.

There is almost nothing in all the various aspects of planning today that addresses health, and where there is it relates almost exclusively to healthcare facilities. There is some increasing emphasis on prevention, but nothing yet on creating health, by which I mean creating the conditions for people to be healthy and helping them to be so, which is a pretty good starting point, it seems to me, for planning for community and places. We need to recreate the link that people have understood in the past.

Turning to housing, many noble Lords will know that Nye Bevan and other previous Health Ministers were also Housing Ministers. Perhaps it is not surprising, though I am not about to make an amendment suggesting a change in the responsibilities of government at the moment. But there is no need, I suspect, to tell noble Lords about the links between health and homes. Mould, damp, cold, heat, unsafe construction, fires, falls, accessibility, extraordinary mental stress from the worries about repairs and risks, and other mental health aspects are an important part of this. But there is also a positive side: if we get our housing right, it provides great stability, a great foundation for life. It allows children to do their homework, if the rooms are big enough. It allows us all to live through life’s changes without having necessarily to move.

We need new homes which promote health and well-being and provide a foundation for a healthy and productive life, rather than, as so many do, damage health and add to the feelings of insecurity and helplessness that are sadly so prevalent today. The TCPA has published a booklet entitled A Home to Die For?, which has pictures of some of the worst homes being created today, particularly through permitted development rights. I see nothing in this Bill that will address those issues.

Some noble Lords will recall that I introduced the Healthy Homes Bill in the last Parliament and attempted to get a set of healthy homes standards in the levelling-up Bill, with excellent support from His Majesty’s then Opposition, and the Liberal Democrats and many others. Indeed, we won a vote on it in this House and lost the ping-pong by only one vote. I hope there may still be some warm feelings towards these ideas on the now government side, and that we may still make some progress on them. I will of course be looking for support elsewhere.

I know the Minister will point me towards policies—and there are some very positive policies, although even there, without enough reference to health and well-being—but they are too easily ignored or overruled in the name, ultimately, of viability. People start the planning with all good intentions, but in the end, we lose those vital aspects. The evidence is all around us, as shown in the booklet I referred to. My noble friend Lord Best described very well the mechanics of this. But he also pointed to the very positive role that development corporations could have in the future, and we have many good examples of that, including the Olympic legacy. I hope this is something we will explore.

In conclusion, I want to quote from my great friend Professor Omaswa, who used to run the Ugandan Health Service:

“Health is made at home, hospitals are for repairs”.


Planning can do a great deal to create health, support the new localised NHS agenda that I believe we will be having, and help create sustained growth—and I mean sustained growth, not just a short dash of growth—by providing the support people need to lead fulfilling and economically productive lives.

18:46

[The Earl of Caithness (Con)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, and I am very glad that he mentioned healthy homes. It is just one of the many issues missing from the Bill.

I like this Bill. I like the ideas and principles behind it, and I thank the Minister for the way he introduced it, but I take issue with him on one point in particular. When he was talking about the current problems the planning system faces, he did not mention the lack of planning officers, which was raised by a number of noble Lords. My noble friend Lord Young of Cookham mentioned it, and the lack of skilled workers was mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Cameron of Dillington. Is the Minister concerned about the lack of planning officers? There has been a huge decline in the last 10 years, and these are going to be key people in the transformation the Government wish to see happen. I think I was not the only noble Lord to be very struck by the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Best, and I hope the Government pay attention to it and take action on it. It is far too easy for the Government to say they listen, but it is time they acted on the listening.

My Lords, I welcome Clause 32 and the ring-fencing of planning fees. Of course we all need some new development, but we also need nature with the new development. I was very saddened by the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Mawson, who went to nutrient neutrality as an excuse for not building new houses. That is a housebuilder’s old chestnut and a nonsense. I give the example of the Hampshire Avon, where so much has been done on nutrient neutrality. There is enough land now for 10 years of housebuilding, and that is a very precious area.

The noble Baroness, Lady Grender, was absolutely right about the missed opportunity of this Bill to make all development more nature friendly. There is a huge opportunity here for the Government to turn the dial to a really beneficial position: healthy homes and good, natural development that new housing can take advantage of. We get better design and a better quality of house as a result.

Let me turn to my main concern, which is Part 3 of the Bill. The more I have learned about the Bill and the more people I have talked to, the more I have decided that Part 3 has been made up on the hoof. It is a good idea but it has been totally overshadowed and destroyed by the Civil Service.

The Government, not surprisingly, are taking a very statist approach to nature and are giving more powers to Natural England. I would advise against that. Natural England has a poor record on protecting nature. It lacks effectiveness and efficiency. A lot of people have said that. I have been waiting—I am still waiting—for over two months for a reply from the chief executive of Natural England. In recent evidence reviews, it has ignored up-to-date scientific evidence which is contrary to its own thoughts.

The funding of Natural England is a concern, but there is even more of a concern when it comes to EDPs and the nature restoration levy. As Tony Juniper, the chair of Natural England, has told us, that is an unpredictable pipeline of money. How will Natural England do a job when it has an unpredictable supply of money?

I hope the Minister will confirm that the private sector is still going to be involved. The private sector has done a huge amount that can help in the development of nature; in particular, with chalk streams. I am glad the right reverend Prelate is back in his place. He mentioned chalk streams and I will support him all the way on that. My final plea to the Minister is: please can we clarify all these overlapping policies—spatial policies, biodiversity net gain requirements, new grey-belt plans, environment outcome regulations, the 25-year farming road map, the environmental improvement plan, and local nature recovery strategies—and how we are going to link those in with EDPs?

18:52

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Earl, Lord Caithness. I have a sense of déjà vu, thinking back to when the noble Earl and I were working to get a focus on soil health in the Environment Bill, now Act, when the noble Earl was acting to push his own Government in the right direction.

I declare my position as a vice-president of the Local Government Association. I am the first member of the Green group in your Lordships’ House to speak, so I note that in the other place the Green MPs voted against the Bill at Third Reading. That was not because they did not think there were good elements in it, but there is so much damage being done to nature—and hence, as many noble Lords have said, to human health and well-being and to the state of the nation—that they could not support the progress of the Bill. I thought it was important to set out the position that we start from.

In the Minister’s introductory speech, we heard a couple of the central misconceptions that underpin the reasons why the Government’s approach more generally in the Bill will simply not work. It will be counterproductive. The noble Lord spoke with some glee about new roads. Well, we know that new roads simply create new traffic. You cannot build your way out of a traffic jam; all you do is create more traffic jams. The noble Lord spoke about the safe and decent homes the Bill is supposed to deliver. As the noble Lord, Lord Crisp, just said—and many others have said—what our large handful of mass housebuilders are building is anything but that. If people have not seen it, I point them to the article in the New Statesman this month about some of the absolutely awful and incredibly expensive homes that have been built in the Prime Minister’s own constituency that the owners are not able to get sorted out.

To pick up the points made by the noble Baroness, Lady Willis of Summertown, and many others, the health of nature is the health of human beings—we human animals living on this fragile planet in this terribly nature-depleted country. Speaking up for nature is speaking up for humans. As the noble Lord, Lord Crisp, just said, if we are going to have a healthy economy, we need healthy humans. We are speaking up for the economy, ultimately.

The Bill is disastrous for nature. I go to the briefing of the Wildlife and Countryside Link, but there are many briefings pointing out how the Bill undermines vital legal protections for nature. It is environmentally regressive and reduces the level of environmental protection provided by existing law.

I could take the rest of my time going through a very long list of the issues I want to address, but that would be a little dull. I will focus on a couple of points that help illustrate my general point that nature and human well-being are tied together.

We need to take a One Health approach to the Bill. I point to a briefing from the Sustainable Nitrogen Alliance, which says that the proposed environmental delivery plans will be insufficient to tackle nitrogen overloading. We need an integrated approach to nitrogen pollution that addresses, in addition to development, the impacts of intensive agriculture and wastewater and the risk of pollution swapping.

Coming back to my point about health, I go to UNEP, which notes that ammonia emissions, as well as contributing to climate change, are an important driver of fine particulate matter pollution, which reduces air quality and has increasing adverse effects on human health. I spent last weekend, in my leisure time, on a two-day course: the Field Studies Council’s introduction to lichens. I can highly recommend that to noble Lords. Any noble Lords who stand still too long in the Dining Room may find themselves bailed up by me to talk about that more. It was striking how much the tutor kept saying, “Well, you won’t find this or that wonderful species here. Everything is covered in nitrogen”. That is what our country is like. It is a human health issue as well as an issue for lichens.

In the other place, Sarah Champion MP talked about the right to grow. That is really crucial for human health; allotments and similar spaces are great for nature as well. I will mention the issue of landfill—historic and current—and the human health impacts of that; and Zane’s law is something noble Lords will be hearing more from me on. But I want to mention something that might be able to be cleaned up now before we get to that point. The Badger Trust points out that in Schedule 6, there are amendments that significantly undermine protections for badgers without improving the situation in any way for housebuilders. I hope we might be able to clean that up before Committee, so we will not have to dig through that detail.

18:57

[Lord Rooker (Lab)]

My Lords, this is a Bill I strongly support, I want it to work, but I think it will be a waste of time. That sounds harsh, but it need not be. As I said in the King’s Speech debate last year, on 18 July, I have been involved in planning reform before as a Minister, more than once. My radical suggestion of a 30-month period of no regulation other than building control has clearly not been taken up—far too bold. But unless Ministers can remove the walls around departmental silos, the Bill will be waste of time.

New Labour was not perfect. But I was involved under new Labour, more than once, in clear major work across departments, outside the silos. It can be made to happen. Currently it is not happening. I have been at meetings with developers, industrial builders, and energy providers in the last months. The issue was getting action across departments: no give and take, examples of “all or nothing” from departments, and in some cases it has been nothing; jobs lost and companies lost—no one seems in overall control. No. 10 is the issue. We have a good Government, but they are a clumsy Government.

The Bill will not work if at the top it is awkward, all thumbs, butter-fingered, lumbering and stiff. Believe it or not, I think the Prime Minister should take a leaf out of the Arnold Weinstock management playbook, when he took GEC from a tiny company of £100 million to a manufacturing company of £11 billion, selling power plants to China and locomotives to the USA. He did not allow silos to exist in the subsidiaries. He cut out the chaff. He did not get sidetracked by consultants or third parties. It can work.

I support the Bill. I have read the briefs from at least 10 organisations: the National Trust, the Royal Town Planning Institute, Association of British Insurers, the Town and Country Planning Association, the National Association of Local Councils, the LGA, the County Councils Network, CPRE, the CLA and the NFU. All claim to support the Bill, “but”—there is always a “but”. Some of them contain good people I am happy to work with—tomorrow morning will be a good example—but, collectively, as third parties, aided by the two regulators, Natural England and the Environment Agency, they are the reason so little progress has been made over the years. That sums it up. Collectively, they have been the problem. They sidetrack the clumsy Government we have.

The Government need to embrace boldness as their friend, not their enemy. Once No. 10 is clearly in charge with a plan to stop and get rid of the silos, Ministers should be made to work across departments and just get on with it.

19:00

[Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts (Con)]

My Lords, as they say, follow that. It is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Rooker. He is always trenchant and always given with verve and determination. I will pick up on the issue he raised of departmental silos in a minute.

I want to make two points, one strategic and the other tactical. I will deal with the strategic one first. This is an ambitious plan for 1.5 million homes while meeting clean power targets and, at the same time, making sure we have an adequate degree of nature recovery, as mentioned by my noble friend Lord Goldsmith. However, it does not deal with the point made by my noble friend Lord Lilley: that, over the next 10 years, we will have an additional 6.6 million people in this country. That is a huge number; it is about two cities the size of Manchester. Manchester covers an area roughly the size of Berkshire. Together, all these issues will have some substantial consequences. For my part, I am concerned that some of them may be unintended. In the short time I have available, I want to draw the House’s attention to one: the growing danger and risk to our food and water security.

When this Bill comes into effect, a lot of agricultural land will be taken out of food production. Partially, obviously, that will be because we are going to have to build houses and the ancillary facilities that go with them. Also, less obviously but still very important, there will be massive amounts of agricultural land lost to solar farms—not just to solar farms but to the production of maize for feeding biodigesters to generate electricity. It is all part of the push for green energy targets.

It is obvious that you cannot eat solar panels. When the Minister comes to wind up—perhaps I could ask the noble Lord on the Front Bench to pass this on to her—could she tell the House how many acres of agricultural land are expected to be taken out of production as a result of this Bill? How will the Government square this with the conclusion of their own national security review, published today, which concludes, as headlined in the Times, that the risk of war on home soil is now the greatest in years?

People tend to forget that we grow just over half our food, about 55%, and we must go on to the world market to buy the balance. It is a question not just of buying the food but of shipping it here. The Russian invasion of Ukraine and the impact of four or five pinch points, such as the Strait of Hormuz, show how vulnerable we are to world events. As an island—an already relatively crowded island—we are particularly vulnerable to these shifts. In the early 1940s, this country was within a few months of starvation until the Royal Navy was able to crack the U-boat threats to our convoys. Today, the threats are much shorter. As mentioned in the national security review, supply chains now run very thin. It is estimated that there are three days of supply for this country in the food chain at any one time. As someone put it, rather overdramatically, we are nine meals away from anarchy. The situation regarding water, as mentioned by my noble friend Lady Coffey, is no better.

If the prime task of the Government is to protect citizens and keep them safe, that must include providing adequate supplies of food and water, but that does not come into this debate because—this was the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Rooker—it falls into another silo. It is important that, somehow, those silos interconnect, communicate and make sure that the implications of one are read into the conclusions and policies of the other.

In my last 30 seconds, I turn to my tactical point. I want to interrogate the Minister about footpaths— I declare an interest as a member of the Ramblers. The UK’s network of footpaths plays an important role in giving people a chance to exercise and to improve their physical and mental well-being, but there are 40,000 miles of footpath which are currently unrecorded and which, under the drop-dead date of the Countryside and Rights of Way Act 2000, will disappear on 31 December this year—gone for ever.

The previous Conservative Government gave an extension. Instead of 31 December this year, they would disappear on 31 December 2030. However, the incoming Labour Government bravely said that we should remove all the drop-dead dates and they should be left to be sorted out over time, but—in the hallowed phrase—when parliamentary time permits. Now, we have parliamentary time, so I hope the Minister will welcome some amendments to give effect to this very important commitment that this Government have given us.

19:06

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, I thought I would be the only person to mention recreation and sport in this Bill, but the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson, has stepped timidly on to the territory with footpaths.

The removal of consultees is something I have found rather worrying, and Sport England disappearing as a consultee is something I find very worrying. We are going to do away with the system and remove the roadblock by making sure that we do not have a body that defends playing fields. Now, I would say this, wouldn’t I? I cover sport; I play sport. If I have to declare an interest about my career as a rugby union player, it is a financially very strongly negative one. It is positive for physiotherapists and manufacturers of rugby boots, but the rest of it is distinctly negative.

Playing fields allow that sport to happen. The little club I started with is now known as Lakenham Union but was originally Lakenham Hewett. For the first 10 to 15 years of its career, it played its home games totally on school playing fields. It has gone on to be something bigger and has developed. But we do not have that statutory defence any more. The Bill before me says that the ultimate plan is—I give up; dyslexia comes into it, and I probably should have declared that in Questions earlier—to look at this. However, the Bill is removing the people who look at playing fields; you do not have that defence in place any more.

The noble Lord, Lord Rooker, spoke about government being a little bit cleverer. Did we not hear yesterday the Minister determinedly saying, “Yes, we need more sport; we need a better choice for school education; we need people to get out there to try the whole thing”? You cannot do that if you do not have playing fields. You just cannot. It is a benefit for health, communities and everything else. I hope that at the end of this process—how much I bother the Committee and Report stage depends on how soon I get the answer; you can save some parliamentary time by giving me a nice answer —we get some consideration and something solid to defend community assets.

One of the briefings I had referred to things being superfluous and no longer needed. But if you have a bit of green open space to play sport on, how can that possibly not be needed? It is ultimately reusable many times over. The way you do that is by making sure you do not have any changing rooms, but it takes a bit of investment. There is enough local government experience in this room to know that I am telling the truth. If we are not going to look after these things to make sure that the communities we are building around have some assets to make them communities, we are ultimately going to fail.

A reference was made to Billy Connolly’s description of being moved out of Glasgow. I have heard it; it is very funny, and it makes a political point. You move somebody out of somewhere and say, “You’re out of a slum now—but you’re living in a desert”. School playing fields, parks and so on are key components that allow these things to happen. I say to the Government: please make sure they are protected, and protected properly, and if you are going to get rid of them, make sure you put something much better in their place. It is these little details that turn successes into failures, and I hope the Government are listening.

19:10

[Lord Banner (Con)]

My Lords, I declare three interests: first, as a practising planning silk with a range of clients affected by planning and infrastructure law in different ways; secondly, as chair of the advisory committee of SAV, a developer, and director of Crossman Special Projects, a land promotion company; thirdly, Clause 12 of the Bill proposes to give legal effect to the recommendations of my independent review of legal challenges to nationally significant infrastructure projects that require primary legislation.

There is much to be welcomed in the Bill, particularly in Parts 1 and 2, and on the whole it is a step in the right direction. However, there are some missed opportunities. I hope the Government will listen to constructive proposals to improve it, and thereby further help its purpose of making the planning regime more efficient to deliver the housing and growth this country desperately needs.

I endorse the streamlining of the NSIP regime, in particular, unsurprisingly, Clause 12’s streamlining of the procedure for judicial review of NSIPs to cut down on delays caused by legal challenges. That is the only recommendation of my independent review that requires primary legislation to implement. The other recommendations require changes to the civil procedure rules, which are governed by the Civil Procedure Rule Committee. I would welcome clarification from the Minister of the anticipated timescale for implementing those other changes. My recommendations were put forward as one overall package, and it would be helpful to know when the rest of that package will be delivered. I would also welcome clarification of whether the changes to the CPR will be made in relation only to infrastructure judicial reviews or to judicial and statutory reviews in planning generally. My report looked only at infrastructure, but I do see merit—as do many others—in rolling out the reforms to cover planning reviews generally.

The reintroduction of strategic planning is a positive step. Previous experiments with extreme localism failed to appreciate that, at least in the world of planning, reliance on carrots alone without any stick is and always will be ineffective. Strategic direction is essential to make a dent in the massive nationwide shortfall in both market and affordable housing. I do not share the view of some on this side of the House that rural areas should be exempt from their fair share of delivering growth. In fact, my experience of planning inquiries promoting and indeed opposing housing in rural areas is that, when done well, it can provide a necessary and welcome boost to the local economy—the pubs, post offices, schools and so on. Without that boost, they wither away and die.

In the limited time I have, I turn to the improvements to the Bill that I would most like to see. First, an express general principle of proportionality in planning would give decision-makers, applicants, consultants and the courts reassurance that less can be more. It would also put an end to the days of environmental statements being delivered in lorries and DCO-examining inspectors asking over 2,000 written questions about a single project, both of which are real examples of the current default to prolixity that only clogs up the system and causes delay and additional cost.

The second improvement concerns the basic conditions for neighbourhood plans. Currently, neighbourhood plans do not have to conform with national policy: they must have regard to it, but, having done that, they do not need to conform with it. This presents a significant loophole in the drive for greater strategic direction. Well-resourced parish councils in the areas of greatest unaffordability can, contrary to national policy, unilaterally pull up the ladder by, for example, deeming there to be no grey belt in their area or restricting development in their area to less than is required by national policy. Mark my words, this is what will happen if the basic conditions stay as they are. A single-sentence amendment to the basic conditions would put paid to this by requiring neighbourhood plans to conform to the framework, thus putting them in their proper place within the hierarchy of plan-making.

The third improvement concerns providing a legislative solution to the difficulties presented by the Hillside judgment on the relationship between overlapping planning permissions on the same site, where later permissions are sought to modify a large multi-phase development. This is a technical point, and I cannot possibly do it justice in a short speech. I know the Minister is aware of this issue, because we have discussed it. It is a huge issue for multi-phase projects; it adds massively to their risk profile, their finance costs and their attractiveness to inward investment.

I echo the comments of noble Lord, Lord Lansley: there are a number of tools in the Levelling-up and Regeneration Act that have not yet been exercised. LURA inserted new Section 73B into the Town and Country Planning Act 1990, which went a modest way to addressing this issue by allowing for limited material amendments to planning permissions. Section 73B does not go far enough, but even that has not been commenced. I do not understand why, or why the Bill before the House could not go further and deal completely with the Hillside problems. It would make a real difference.

Fourthly, we have heard a lot about local authority resources but not very much about the Planning Inspectorate. The Planning Inspectorate is the keeper of the keys in relation to DCOs, local plans, spatial development strategies—when they come forward—and planning appeals. It is currently massively under-resourced. The inspectors are not paid enough, which is an issue in attracting the widest possible pool of people to that role. I have raised the issue of charging for planning appeals to raise money for PINS before, and I understand the block to it. There is a power to charge for appeals, but the block is that there is no ring-fencing, so if appeal fees were charged, they would go into the blob. The Bill includes ring-fencing for local authority fees, so why not put ring-fencing for the Planning Inspectorate in the Bill?

Lastly, I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, that the RTPI’s ask of statutory chief planning officers and a statutory purpose of planning would help buttress the national scheme of delegation by ensuring that officers are not unduly lent on. I support the scheme of delegation, provided that it is done properly. I appreciate that the consultation is live, but I suggest that we should see the detail before the Bill goes through. I urge the Government to consider these proposals with an open mind in Committee.

19:16

[Baroness Whitaker (Lab)]

My Lords, it is very interesting to follow the noble Lord, Lord Banner, but I shall take a different perspective.

The Bill’s commitment to practical measures, to get the houses we need built and long-neglected infrastructure developed, is going to change millions of lives for the better. I am also reassured by its pathways to clean and reliable energy in the context of nature restoration, and to bringing down the cost of living.

I declare an interest as an honorary fellow of the RIBA. It is, of course, essential that the reforms create well-designed places where healthy, prosperous and enjoyable lives can flourish, and which cover all of our diverse population, of all ages and abilities. My noble friend the Minister will not be surprised that I am in particular concerned about our long-established Gypsy and Traveller communities, who for so long have been left out of our concepts of homes, as the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Manchester and the noble Baroness, Lady Bakewell of Hardington Mandeville, who is not in her place, said so powerfully earlier.

I declare that I am co-chair of the All-Party Group for Gypsies, Travellers and Roma, and president of Friends, Families and Travellers and of the Advisory Council for the Education of Romany and other Travellers. Despite their centuries of contribution to our cultural fabric, our policies and legislation have consistently failed to protect the nomadic way of life of these communities, which is defined in law and has been central to their identities, even when many have been forced into bricks and mortar, to the detriment of their well-being and often their mental health.

I am proud that our Government have begun to make the planning system fairer to Gypsies and Travellers in their revision of planning policy last December. I know my noble friend will understand that there is still quite a way to go, not least in the training of local authority planners. The Planning and Infrastructure Bill provides this opportunity.

We must clarify the definition of “social housing”. The founding definition in the Housing and Regeneration Act 2008 has, by omission, made a loophole for ignoring the accommodation needs of Gypsies and Travellers, and that has been the pattern. The 6,441 caravans recorded in the July 2024 caravan count, on 267 socially rented sites owned by local authorities and registered providers, are clearly low-cost rental accommodation, as defined under Sections 68 and 69 of the Housing and Regeneration Act, yet they are not explicitly recognised as social housing. The duty on the strategic planning authorities’ spatial development strategy—most interesting provisions—and the obligations on landlords need to have a basis for including them.

The Gypsy and Traveller accommodation needs assessments system—GTANA—is also not working. There is now no duty to conduct GTANAs and guidance on how they must be conducted was withdrawn in 2016, causing distressing disparities across the country. In fact, there has been a dramatic decline in the provision of local authority sites since the repeal of the statutory duty to provide them in 1994, resulting in neighbourhood friction over unauthorised sites, with no local authority rubbish collection or mains drainage, constant eviction and starkly inferior living standards.

I hope my noble friend has a copy of the Kicking the Can Down the Road report by Dr Simon Ruston and Friends, Families and Travellers, which reveals that, among the 100 local authorities that informed the research, 119 of the 149 socially provided Gypsy and Travellers sites were built before 1994, with only 30 more developed in the three decades since, across all local authorities in England. That is paralysis. Planning legislation must address that chronic damaging shortage of lawful stopping places and end legislative ambiguity to ensure that Gypsy and Traveller communities are no longer left in the margins of our planning system.

19:21

[Baroness Freeman of Steventon (CB)]

My Lords, the fact that we are facing increasing demands on our infrastructure and living in one of the most nature-depleted countries in the world shows that we need to plan our new and retrofitted homes carefully. They need to be as light touch on the environment and national infrastructure as possible and, wherever feasible, they need to have a positive impact to meet our aspirations and our legal targets. This is, I am sure, the aim of all of us, but the Bill needs amendment to achieve it.

Every building that we construct or renovate should be designed to use and waste as little energy as possible and to generate as much of its own as possible. It should be designed to provide habitats for wildlife, such as through cavity nest boxes, which in effect cost nothing, and it should be designed to minimise harm to wildlife. The British Trust for Ornithology estimates that, in the UK, around 30 million birds a year die by flying into windows—yet bird-safe designs and glass cost little more and are legislated for in other jurisdictions. I shall be pressing for bird safety in planning and design, as this is such a simple measure.

At the next level up, every new housing development should be planned under the same principles. How can we help ensure that community-level energy, water or sewerage systems are designed and built to make communities more resilient and put less pressure on the national infrastructure? How can we integrate these developments properly with existing houses and communities, helping preserve their character and independence, and with their natural environment? Places where people live and thrive need to be places where other species live and thrive too. The proposed spatial development strategies and environmental development plans need to be hard-wired to the long-awaited land use framework and to local nature recovery strategies, and they also really need to reflect communities’ priorities.

The UK is committed to legal biodiversity restoration targets, and we need to legislate that all planning and development, including that by development corporations, is done with a view to biodiversity enhancement. With that in mind, I hope the Government will agree to tightening up aspects of Part 3 to ensure that it is in line with their aims. As other noble Lords have mentioned —and I think everyone will agree—there are some habitats and landscapes where no amount of money will compensate for their loss, and they cannot be moved to some other location. Ministers have previously said that they think that irreplaceable places implicitly fall outside the scope of the proposed environmental development plans, in which case I urge the Government to make it explicit in the Bill.

Then there are some habitats that have been so degraded already that they can be considered suitable for development, but here we must see this as a double opportunity to provide homes for people and, in doing so, to enhance the biodiversity opportunities on that land. It could be a triple win. Enhancement can go beyond designing buildings to provide natural habitats and bird safety; it can extend to giving people access to green spaces and increasing flood resilience and local water storage—nature-based solutions that benefit people and biodiversity and relieve our national infrastructure all at the same time, on that very piece of land. Amendments to the Bill are necessary but could achieve that.

Finally, land that is currently a green space but not designated irreplaceable will be damaged by development, despite all the considerations of green planning, which need to be legislated for as the first approach. This is where the Government, through the Bill, rightly see that environmental development plans can help by taking a more strategic and holistic approach to the whole area and bringing another piece of land into the equation—a piece of degraded and endangered land that can be protected and have its biodiversity enhanced to make up for the loss on the developed land.

Again, at the moment the wording needs to be amended to ensure a win-win. It is not currently stated in the Bill that the biodiversity benefits on this land need to overcompensate for the losses by the 10% or more required under the current biodiversity net gain system. If we sited that greened-up land as close as possible to the sacrificed development land, we would help wildlife displaced from one area to colonise another, and it would act as a green space for the people who move into that development. That is a win-win and can fit perfectly with existing local nature recovery strategies, but they need to be added into the Bill.

Alongside these big, broad principles, the Bill needs amending to ensure that environmental development is in place and under way before building development starts; to ensure that biodiversity benefits are carefully and scientifically measured and monitored, with further enhancements to the plan being made, if necessary, if the hoped-for outcomes are not at first forthcoming; and to ensure that the greened-up land, once allocated, is given a high and permanent level of protection so that it cannot just be built on itself in a few years’ time, negating its purpose.

I very much hope that the Government will consider putting forward their own amendments to deal with each of these. I look forward to working with other noble Lords on them.

19:27

[The Earl of Effingham (Con)]

My Lords, I will focus my remarks on Part 1, Chapter 3 of the Bill, which addresses transport infrastructure—a vital sector for our country’s connectivity, economy and environmental ambitions. I welcome His Majesty’s Government’s overarching goal to modernise and streamline the planning framework for transport. It is clear that the existing system struggles to keep pace with the scale and urgency of the infrastructure demands that we face, from improving regional connectivity to meeting the needs of a growing and modern economy.

Among the key reforms proposed are amendments to the Highways Act 1980, which will grant local highway authorities powers to charge fees for administrative processes, such as stopping up, diverting highways or permitting structures on or over public roads. Although this approach is pragmatic in theory and may help authorities recover costs and enhance service delivery, I share the concern of many noble Lords that greater clarity is needed about how these fees will be set and regulated. Will there be robust national guidance to ensure consistency across local authorities? Crucially, how will the Government protect smaller developers, community organisations and voluntary groups from disproportionate financial burdens that could impede vital local projects?

The Bill seeks to simplify procedures under the Transport and Works Act 1992 for authorising transport schemes. Streamlining is undoubtedly required to cut delays and bureaucracy, but it is essential that this does not come at the expense of thorough scrutiny. It is crucial that affected communities will retain meaningful rights to consultation and that environmental and social impacts will continue to be rigorously assessed and mitigated.

I welcome the provisions empowering local authorities to mandate electric vehicle charging infrastructure in new developments, but we should be cognisant that a uniform approach may exacerbate existing regional disparities. Rural and less commercially viable areas face significant challenges, from limited grid capacity to a lack of private sector incentives. What measures will the Government put in place to ensure an equitable rollout of EV infrastructure across all parts of the United Kingdom to guarantee that those rural communities are not left behind?

Throughout the Bill, we see the Government’s continuing preference for centralisation in planning decisions. Although efficiency and timelines are obviously important, we must guard against the drift towards sidelining locally elected representatives and communities in favour of top-down control. Genuine local engagement and accountability are the cornerstones of planning that respect community needs and environmental stewardship. The Deputy Prime Minister’s remarks in the other place emphasised streamlining, but that must not come at the expense of constructive input at the local level.

Finally, I raise concerns about the introduction of fees related to harbour orders. Coastal and port communities are economic lifelines for many regions, and smaller ports in particular operate on tight margins. Although recovering administrative costs is reasonable, the Government must ensure that these fees do not deter necessary investment or stifle growth in these vital areas.

The Bill presents a valuable opportunity to lay the foundation for a more efficient, responsive and future-facing transport infrastructure system capable of supporting economic growth. But, as always, the details will determine the success of these reforms.

19:31

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)]

My Lords, I declare an interest as a vice-president of the Local Government Association. It is a pleasure to follow the noble Earl, Lord Effingham—I almost agreed with some of the things he said. It was quite charming.

For a passionate Green like me, who spent the first 18 years of her life living in a council house, this planning Bill does nothing to make me happy. It trashes the environment, squashes newts and builds houses for the well-off. I want the Government to focus on social housing, and I want a country where people can live in those secure, warm and cheap to rent properties, paddle on clean beaches and swim in clean rivers, and explore water meadows and ancient woodland. Instead, the Government are determined to put a smile on the face of the big developers who funded the Conservatives for decades and are probably lining up to pay for Labour’s next election campaign.

The “trash for cash” approach outlined in Part 3 will be a disaster for nature and for human health, and has to be thrown out. Developers must not be allowed to pay money to destroy natural wealth to boost their private profits. Green councillors up and down the country argue that we want the right house in the right place at the right price, but the Government are giving us the wrong type of house in any old place that the developers want at whatever price the developers feel they can charge to boost their private profits.

I find Part 3 absolutely shocking. The Chancellor has declared that developers will not have to worry about bats, newts and frogs anymore. That is a straightforward betrayal of all the promises made about the target of protecting 30% of land and sea for nature by 2030. Those improvements to habitats and biodiversity simply will not happen under this Government if they pass these measures. I do not understand why they object to good ideas and reject good amendments. Swift bricks, for example, are a brilliantly simple idea, adding only a few pennies on to any new build, so why do the Government object? Why do they not stop objecting to any amendment that is not theirs, make it theirs and just do it?

The Prime Minister has declared war on the blockers and zealots. Who are these people? There are tree-huggers like me, but I am one voice in my local planning system. I do not live in Devon, Shropshire, Northumberland or Norfolk, or the thousands of local areas around the country which are full of these apparent zealots who the Prime Minister does not like. They truth is that they are just ordinary local people who stand up and object when a local woodland is threatened or a river is polluted by an intensive chicken farm. Those ordinary local people use the existing planning system to fight big developers. They try to compete with the builders, who have expensive lawyers and political access.

The Government promise us affordable housing, but that is a very misleading term. I remember the very long debates we had for 16 years in the London Assembly about what it meant—how affordable was “affordable” for a house. When the Government talk about millions for affordable housing, it is mostly a subsidy for developers to build the same houses but sell them at a reduced rate. It gives a lucky few the chance to get on the housing ladder, but it is often at the expense of the taxpayer.

We need to enable councils to build social housing again. Safe, secure, well-insulated housing would solve a lot of social and economic problems. For example, we would have schools where the parents could afford to feed pupils because their energy bills were low. The NHS would have fewer patients sick from malnutrition or from freezing in badly insulated flats, and the jobs market would have well-educated, healthy people to employ.

This is the bit where I try to be nice, so listen carefully: if the Government want Greens and the majority of noble Lords to support the Bill, they should give us guarantees that the current projections for irreplaceable habitats will not be up for negotiation, and that the environmental development plans will include an implementation schedule, enforced by Natural England—if we have to have it as a player—that is subject to judicial review. They should give us a Bill that makes social housing a priority, and give us affordable rents. They should give us a Bill that reduces pollution by removing the automatic right of developers to connect new housing with the sewerage system. Now that really would be worth voting for.

19:36

[Lord Bailey of Paddington (Con)]

My Lords, I refer to my register of interests: I am the chairman of Faraday Ventures, which was set up to provide social and key worker housing. Therefore, I am understandably keen to support any measures that will encourage the construction of a large quantity of high-quality housing, particularly if a large proportion is made up of social housing.

I welcome the spirit in which the Bill has been launched as it seeks to build on the progress made by the previous Government in delivering 2.5 million homes since 2010. However, there are some serious concerns, which I shall highlight. I question whether it is possible for the present Government to build 1.5 million homes by the end of this Parliament, as they have promised.

The Bill is designed to streamline planning and infrastructure delivery for homes, but in doing so it takes away powers from local councillors by reducing the strength of the planning committees through the national scheme of delegation to be introduced by Clause 51. This specifies at a national level which planning decisions would be decided on by officers and which by planning committees.

As the shadow Secretary of State responsible for housing said in the other place, if the Bill passes in its present form, residents will feel disappointed and disenfranchised when they raise concerns to their elected councillors about proposed developments. I believe that this will break the social contract if local people feel helpless around development; it will lead to less acceptance of new housing. Does the Minister agree? London Councils shares this concern, stating that councillors must retain the ability to scrutinise and influence certain developments, especially where there is significant local concern.

The role of councillors is further diminished through Clause 93, which would amend existing legislation to increase the flexibility and use of development corporations. To be clear, development corporations are, or can be, a very good thing, particularly in the provision of new towns. I believe that they will be necessary to deliver new towns, but here in London we have seen the best and the worst of development corporations. One delivered the Olympics, which was largely considered to be a good thing, and to this day housing is still coming forward. But in the West End, many local people feel that the Mayor of London is using the mayoral development corporation to ride roughshod over their plans, under a Labour-led council, to deliver the pedestrianisation of Oxford Street. If we have to vote on corporations, we need to know what type of corporation and what flexibility they will be given above beyond the ones we already recognise.

London Councils is also right to note that the planning system is not the main barrier to delivering new homes and infrastructure here in London, where there is a healthy pipeline of nearly 300,000 homes that have been approved by council planning departments. That is enough to meet future housing targets more than three times over, but those schemes are not coming forward for development, due to viability issues. Viability in a place like London with high land values is a real problem.

Some of the measures in the Bill will help planning reform, and I sincerely wish the Government all the success in the world with delivering their 1.5 million homes—and I personally, through my role here and on the GLA, will do my level best to help. This planning Bill could be a boon to that, or it could be a missed opportunity; it is about the detail, particularly around things such as the levels of social housing that we can expect to get and what we are going to do about development corporations, which will be vital.

19:40

[Lord Inglewood (CB)]

My Lords, I declare my interests in the register—in particular, that I am a farmer and landowner in Cumbria, president of Historic Buildings and Places, and until last autumn was for six years chairman of the Cumbria Local Enterprise Partnership. I have also been involved in rural, environmental and heritage organisations and matters for much of my life.

Forty years ago, to my own surprise—both then and in retrospect now—I chaired the Lake District planning board’s development control committee. At that time, I began to wonder whether local authority membership of itself was the right basis for the quasi-judicial function of determining planning applications, and I came to the conclusion that boards analogous to JPs might be better; hence, I welcome the idea of mandatory education for planning committees. Of course, local knowledge and views matter, but they are not the only consideration in determining applications, and planning officers on their own in the real world cannot always deflect the tsunami of local populism that sometimes accompanies controversial applications.

Part of the point of the planning system is to get it right without resorting to appeals. That is somewhat analogous to the belief that I have that perhaps the most important thing that I learned from reading for the Bar was to avoid litigation if you possibly can. Given the overriding requirements behind the Bill and the points made in this debate, there is a very good case for accountable development corporations and special regimes for national infrastructure. However, as the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, has said, the devil lies in the detail, and they must be transparent and accountable. In such cases, deliberations on all planning matters must be taken into account. Listed buildings remain listed, even if specific listed building consents may not be required. Changing the planning process should not affect the planning and evidential significance of heritage, nature or environmental considerations. Those matters are, in their own way, very important to our national economy and the character of the country in which we live, and are at the heart of contemporary ideas about “Place” and its generally recognised importance to the wider economy.

It is important that land use policy and its implementation is not hijacked by the public sector to promote its aspirations at the expense of the small man and local concerns and other considerations not directly measurable in economic terms. There is a temptation, which sometimes cannot be resisted, for the public sector to see the process of authorisation as a kind of bulldozer to get its own way and take forward its own agenda. I am sure that we can all think of instances where that may be happening.

While charging for planning applications may seem a bit out of kilter, in that the basis of land law and the planning system is the presumption that one can do what one wants with one’s own land, unless there is a good reason not to, which is defined inter alia by planning policies, in reality this purist approach hardly seems realistic in the world in which we live. But these charges should not be greater pro rata if the authority concerned is ineffective. Indeed, I had wondered whether perhaps, if you won a planning appeal, you should get the money back.

We have heard this evening very considerable scepticism expressed about the mechanisms of Part 3 of the Bill. I simply say that I echo them. Speaking from the perspective of a Cumbria farmer and landowner, I can say that the current arrangements are all over the place. As someone wanting to take forward these things, it is simply impossible to know what on earth you have to do. The parallel public and private regimes taken as a whole make no real sense, and much of the money talked about in this context does not seem to exist. Unless matters are sharpened up, much of this will be shown to be whatever is the proper collective word for paper tigers.

Planning is crucial. We need it in this country, because it is a form of estate management for the nation as a whole, based on the country’s disparate needs being balanced out between them. In that way, you avoid physical anarchy. Like all estate management, its implementation on the ground depends on money, which is why the implementation of much of what we are talking about this evening depends more or less entirely on the Government’s economic policy.

Clearly, the country is in a mess; if good policies prevail, that will be for the good, but the impact of some current policies will, I believe, inhibit growth, and they will have a damaging impact on what we are discussing. The state of the economy is crucial. How planning policies work out depends on landowners, developers and those running and carrying out the planning function working together. Levelling up was a response to a failure in this regard, in the north of England. There is still much more to be done. I say, “Good luck to them”, but I sense that they may need it.

19:46

[Viscount Trenchard (Con)]

My Lords, I declare my interest as a trustee of the Fonthill Estate in Wiltshire, and I thank the Minister for introducing this Bill today.

Everybody recognises that we have to get more new houses built, although the failure of all Governments in recent years to control both legal and illegal migration has clearly exacerbated the shortage. However, in my view, the Bill goes too far in removing councillors’ powers to vote on local planning applications. Does the Minister really think that central government knows better than local councils when it comes to decisions on which proposed developments will improve their communities and which will be harmful and ought to be refused? This will be damaging to local democracy and will discourage talented people from seeking election as councillors, because they will be allowed to do less than they are at present.

Can the Minister tell the House how the proposed scheme of delegation is going to work, and how the Government are going to demarcate those decisions which are to be taken by civil servants from those which will be left to local planning committees? Surely, such important details as these should be in the Bill. On the other hand, there are areas where the Government could provide much more encouragement to house- builders, by removing legacy EU habitat regulations, which offer a ridiculous amount of protection to bats, for example, and other EU legacy red tape, which both the last Government and this one have been too slow to abolish.

Noble Lords may remember that, during the passage of the Levelling-Up and Regeneration Bill, some of us worked hard across the House to obtain a consensus for providing a separate and recognised status and level of protection for Britain’s wonderful chalk streams. My noble friend Lord Benyon at that time introduced a government amendment that achieved that, and it is deeply disappointing that, in Committee in another place, Labour MPs voted against Amendment 148 to this Bill, which would have mirrored the levelling-up Act by providing equivalent and necessary protection for chalk streams in this Bill. Would the Minister commit to introducing a government amendment to replicate the protection afforded to chalk streams in that Act?

I also question why the Government are prioritising building in rural areas rather than urban ones, nearer most of the jobs, where new houses are most needed. I would also ask the Minister to explain why the Government have decided to remove hope value from the value that they place on land being compulsorily purchased from farmers and landowners. It seems particularly unfair to farmers, who have already suffered enough from cuts to agricultural subsidies and changes to NICs, especially when the purpose of compulsory purchase in such cases is obviously to develop the land for housing or energy infrastructure.

Currently, local authorities can purchase land compulsorily and then pass it to parish councils for some purposes, including building affordable homes. The Bill, as drafted, stops hope value applying to this power if it is used to deliver affordable homes. The removal of hope value would also apply to the loss payments, which are additional payments based on the property’s value, designed to cover the cost and emotional burden of having to move out of and replace the property. In general, I accept that measures in the Bill are in line with the Labour Party’s pledges for planning reform, but they miss the opportunity for an enhanced recognition of rural areas within national planning policy, particularly regarding the rural economy and rural housing.

As the CLA has pointed out, the National Planning Policy Framework does not acknowledge the differences between the sustainability credentials of a rural area versus an urban area. This negatively impacts decision-making for proposals in rural areas. The Bill introduces new environmental delivery plans—EDPs. They will set out how damage to protected species, or features of protected sites which are likely to be negatively affected by development, may be mitigated. I worry about the extensive powers being extended to Natural England, including whether it is appropriately skilled or resourced to handle this extra responsibility. What does the Minister think about this? In particular, does she really think it is proportionate to provide Natural England with compulsory purchase powers to deliver the EDPs?

Lastly, I look forward to hearing the Minister’s winding-up speech and, in particular, I hope she will answer my noble friend Lord Hodgson’s question about the number of acres being taken out of agricultural production for solar energy schemes.

19:51

[Lord Teverson (LD)]

My Lords, I am pleased to start with my interests because they are to do with energy, specifically battery storage—I will talk about long-term storage in a minute, but I will leave that for now. I am also chair and director of a number of smaller land developers, and chair of the Cornwall & Isles of Scilly Local Nature Partnership. So I stand on both sides of the conflicts that the Bill looks at. In wearing those two hats, I have never had a conflict of interest. There has never been a situation in all the developments that we have been involved in—medium-sized, often mixed, not always with a lot of housing and admittedly not infrastructure—where nature has got in the way of development. It is primarily about planning resources at local authorities.

I welcome many parts of the Bill, particularly everything that will enable us to achieve net zero; it is really important that we manage that in terms of energy infrastructure. I also welcome this Government’s housing objectives. However, as many people have said, my noble friend Lord Shipley in particular, the problem is not primarily planning. My eyes were opened on housing some time ago when I looked at the time series of housing starts since the Second World War. There is a complete break around the beginning of the 1980s. Up to that point, the number of private starts was pretty equal to the number of public starts: roughly about 150,000 each through that period. When the Thatcher Government came in and, in effect, banned local authority housing, that fell off to more or less zero—social housing now is some 40,000 units—but the private sector just carried on along at the same level. Whatever the stimulus was, the volume stayed the same. Behind that, there is a message about the difficulty of stimulating private housing finishes, and it is not necessarily down to the planning system.

I welcome the measures in the Bill on long-term storage, which I am not involved in commercially, and the cap and floor mechanism—let us get on with that because it is important for grid stability. I welcome the EV changes, but let us enhance them further, exactly as my noble friend Lady Pidgeon said. I also welcome the financial compensation being by grid lines, or trying to get people involved in that energy transition.

No one has mentioned Clause 28, which concerns the Forestry Commission. It is allowed to indulge in renewable energy itself, which sounds great, but it does not mention biomass in relation to energy production. I would be concerned if the pass that allows the commission to work in that area enables it to use its own logs commercially, to make up for any government funding reductions—they would be cannibalising their own crops. I am interested in what the Minister says on that.

I am particularly concerned about the environmental delivery plans. This is not something that we are imagining; sure, we are in nature depletion and the restrictions that we have had on nature have not been good enough so far, but to me, this makes them worse. The OEP’s letter to the Secretary of State makes it very clear this is a regression. What worries me is not only the fact that the Bill is a regression but if the Government do not take notice of the OEP, in terms of their reputation and core function in Parliament, it is a real problem. It is important, as Minister Pennycook has said, that we find a way that the OEP and the matters that it has brought up are solved in the Bill as it goes through. That is crucial; otherwise, we have an important government agency that loses respect.

Lastly, local nature recovery strategies are mentioned twice in the Bill, once very positively in relation to spatial development strategies. However, when it comes to EDPs, they have very weak enforcement in how they are taken into account, and that must be changed. It has to be compulsory that local nature recovery strategies are fully taken into account in relation to any environmental development plan.

19:57

[Baroness Hodgson of Abinger (Con)]

My Lords, I declare my interests as a director of a family company that holds a little farmland and has occasionally done small-scale development. I am also the recipient of three party wall notices in the past three years.

We all recognise the need for more homes. While the Bill aims to speed up the process for building houses, like other noble Lords, I am concerned about the damage that it may do. The Bill flouts Labour’s manifesto promises to uphold local communities’ ability to shape housebuilding in their area and its pledge to preserve environmental protection, as well as being an attack on human rights. There are other ways to do this.

As other noble Lords have said, there are some half a million land-bank plots currently being held by the big house developers, with eight of the major companies holding land of a value in excess of £198 billion. The Government state that they want to build 1.5 million homes, so will they please refuse to give the big companies more planning permission until they develop what they already have?

The Government’s steps to weaken the green belt are very concerning; surely we must use brownfield sites first. The CPRE briefing said that existing brownfield sites can deliver 1.2 million houses, but allowances need to be given for cleaning up these sites over building on the green belt.

Once our lovely countryside has been concreted over, we will never get it back. Green spaces are so important for good mental health. We are the custodians of a beautiful country, and we must preserve it. Demolishing buildings leads to further climate insult, so can we give tax breaks for repurposing buildings for housing and stop councils allowing so many buildings to be torn down?

As we have already heard, this is not just about quantity but quality. I welcome the good intentions to build better, smarter and in a more environmentally friendly way, but I worry that the Bill will, in reality, help build the slums of the future. I agree with the discussions in the other place that sought to ensure we preserve the setting and special character of historical villages, rather than losing them in an unchecked sprawl. We need smaller developments with local designs using local fabrics that are in keeping with their areas. This would help boost local business by allowing small developments with local builders.

One of the advantages of living in a democracy is that we have property rights, and we must resist at all costs authoritarian tendencies to wish to remove them. In the Bill are provisions to make compulsory purchase easier and for local authorities to be able to seize land more cheaply where it is “required” for new development. Compulsory purchase—seizing someone’s property—is against human rights and should be used in only the most extreme circumstances. Also, in building and developing, no one should be allowed to interfere with existing housing or to undermine the foundations of a private property without the owner’s permission. People need to be reassured that their home is safe in line with the ECHR.

Government needs to be joined up, so I turn to wider issues around infrastructure. In the current climate of growing uncertainty, we see our defence policy pivoting to deterrence against possible war. Although defence is the first priority of a Government, surely our second, as an island nation, should be food security. I know my husband, the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson, has already made this point, but plastering our countryside—and, more importantly, our productive agricultural land—with plastic solar panels is a terrible mistake. As he said, the national security strategy tells us that we must actively prepare for war, and our land is needed for food production. We currently import more than 40% of our food; we need to be more self-sufficient and resilient. Instead, let us insist that all new houses should have electricity-generating panels and roll them out on commercial and industrial buildings. Will the Government commit to put solar panels on all their buildings?

I will share one example of land under threat from such a solar farm development: Lime Down, a massive project in beautiful Wiltshire countryside, mostly on good agricultural land. Lime Down threatens 2,200 acres with solar panels, 45 acres of batteries, three new electricity substations, approximately 1 million panels and a two-year construction period involving thousands of lorries thundering up tiny lanes. It takes in six villages and stretches eight by three miles, with compulsory purchase being threatened to access the site at East Pye. The proposed installation will be in place for 60 years.

I would be interested if the Minister could clarify if and why a non-UK firm can have the right to compulsorily purchase UK land. Projects such as this not only cause misery to those affected but erode our food security. In war, they will make easy targets in this era of cyber conflict and drones. We have seen what can happen with the recent electricity outage in Spain and Portugal.

To conclude, we need to use existing buildings, brownfield sites and existing planning permissions before we start eating into our beautiful countryside. Solar panels should be on roofs not agricultural land, and, most of all, as a democracy, we need to preserve our property rights.

20:03

[Lord Whitty (Lab)]

My Lords, I am glad to follow the noble Baroness. I agreed with the first third of her speech. The latter part, however, I disagreed with. Less than 1% of agricultural land will be taken over by solar farms and similar sites. We need compulsory purchase to deliver some of our energy system. I therefore disagree with the latter part of her speech, but I agree with her on local control of housing developments and of other aspects of planning.

I will scrap the bulk of my speech. I will say what I agree with in the Bill, but I first appeal to my noble friends on the Front Bench, and to their colleagues, not to repeat all this stuff about blockers and builders, and not to give credence to saloon bar chat about frogs and newts preventing useful development. It was not frogs and newts that made a complete mess of a national infrastructure project such as HS2; nor is it frogs and newts—or even spiders—that are preventing us achieving our housebuilding targets.

I approve of the provisions in the Bill on providing easier access for national infrastructure, on energy and grid connections, on EV chargers and on electricity storage. However, I am dubious about much of the rest of it. Let me say something in defence of planners. The planning system is often too slow, and it is underresourced. There are bits of the Bill that attempt to address the underresourcing with the recruitment of better planners and better training for them.

Much of the countryside has been protected by the planning system. Had we not had a planning system since Lord Silkin in the 1940s we would have had urban sprawl, new modern slums, and much less protection of our natural resources and natural features. The planning system has its inadequacies, which we now have to address, but that does not mean we ought to dismantle it or make it more susceptible to the pressures.

As the noble Lord, Lord Best, said, the failure to meet housebuilding targets under successive Governments has nothing to do with the planning system itself. Indeed, the planning system has approved well over 80% of plans for housing. When there is an appeal, less than 3% of them are upheld by the appeals system. It is not the planning system that is preventing housebuilding but, as the noble Lord, Lord Best, said, the oligopolistic nature of the large housebuilders and the way they have squeezed out the competition there used to be with family building firms, and the lack of purchasing power from national and local public bodies. That is what needs to be addressed if we are to stand any chance of meeting our targets on housebuilding; it should not be an attack on planners.

The Government have written the net-zero strategy into their recent national industrial strategy and energy strategy. It is not written in to this Bill, nor are the contributions to tackling, slowing down and off-setting climate change. The protection of the countryside and of biodiversity, and reversing the biodiversity loss we have so tragically experienced in this country over recent decades, contribute to our tackling climate change. That needs to be put more explicitly in the Bill, as do the effects of climate change and our need to adapt to it. For example, why is there not a provision on not building in areas that are susceptible to flood or any pre-empting of much of the improvement in the water supply that we need to make?

I am sorry this has been slightly rambling. It is different from what I intended to say, but most of what I intended to say has been said. The most important message I give to my noble friends is: stop regarding those in the planning system as blockers; they are enablers of a better life.

20:09

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, whose wisdom and company I enjoyed during my time on the environment committee. I am a supporter of the Bill, by and large. I am delighted to see that the policy is shifting towards “We want more bats” and away from “No bat must be inconvenienced”, but as the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, said, bats are not the problem when it comes to planning. As Members of an organisation that can spend enough money to build 50 houses on a pair of front doors that do not work, we should realise that.

I hope to use Committee to encourage the Government to take some of their ideas further. There is obvious scope for allowing trusted partners to work alongside the Government to achieve what they are hoping to do with environmental delivery plans. Many farmers’ groups are in a position to work on that sort of initiative. To rule them out, as the Bill does currently, is missing an opportunity.

What the Government are doing in throwing into doubt the whole structure of biodiversity net gain is a mistake. In biodiversity net gain, people are asked to commit for 30 years. It was a policy which evolved with support across the House, and now this Government, after merely 30 months of the policy, are throwing everything into doubt. Those people who had got themselves organised to be part of that system are wondering whether they made a huge mistake, and by the time the Government get around to sorting their ideas out, those people will have lost confidence. The Government really need to understand that having trusted partners in the private sector to deliver what they want is a plus, and they need to put themselves into a position where those partners can believe that the Government—and any Government that follow—will support them through the long-term commitments which this Government and the previous Government were expecting to be made.

I hope to persuade the Government to accelerate their work on biodiversity data. We have a very rich and capable set of players in this country, with the local environment record centres and a lot of amateur effort. But a lot of biodiversity data that is created through the planning system is not captured. A lot of planning applications go through without using the data we have. We need a better structure that is better thought through. I know the Government are working on those things internally. I hope to see that brought forward into this Bill, rather than left for some future occasion.

I really hope I will be able to persuade the Government to take an interest in those measures which would allow more use to be made of the settlements we already have. I had a Private Member’s Bill on permitted development rights, but we should also look at measures like land readjustment schemes, the London system of public transport accessibility zones, and the use of design codes to make it easy for developers to know what will be permitted, rather than leaving the whole question of design to be an uncertainty and a rather individual and personal decision at the end of things.

We should pick up on an aspect of the Government’s industrial strategy, where in various areas they are supporting the use of digital twins. There is a great deal that could be done in planning, which does not appear to be specifically part of the industrial strategy, to reduce costs, enable collaboration and enable imagination when it comes to what the layout of a new town should be and look like. The AI-assisted capability that is embedded in some of the British products that underlie this are tools that the Government should be seeking to support.

I will try to persuade them to make livestock markets and abattoirs critical national infrastructure. We need to sort things out: we are causing a great deal of cruelty to animals by not renewing our structure. Animals are having to travel very long distances to their deaths, and we can do better than that.

I will recommend a duty of candour for planning officers to go with Clause 50, so that they feel absolutely confident in telling members exactly what is, rather than feeling that they can in some way be criticised, and therefore giving them a duty to support their views.

I will urge the Government to redefine what a newspaper is. It was set out in 1881. Things have moved on, and if we are to have Clause 98 with duties to put notices in newspapers, it ought to recognise the modern world.

Echoing the national security strategy and our need to fight on home soil, I will draw the Government’s attention to the fact that we may not have termites here now but look at what is happening in France.

20:15

[Lord Carlile of Berriew (CB)]

My Lords, before this debate started, I was confident that we would hear repeatedly the word “architect”, but in fact we have hardly heard it at all in a debate about housing. I want to talk about design and the role of architects and in doing so, I say that the speech I agreed with most was that of my noble friend Lord Best.

I should confess that for a time I was the unpaid chair of Design for Homes, the organisation that runs the Housing Design Awards, and therefore was exposed to the work of architects in great measure. I want to argue that building well-designed homes is a key aspiration to be realised through the Bill. I would like to congratulate the Government on their ambition to build so many dwellings, including, as I understand it, so many much-needed social housing units to enable young families, above all, to be able to remain in their own communities. That applies nowhere more than in rural areas, including the sort of community I once represented in another place.

I have been troubled by some of the grudging comments from parts of the Conservative Party. I can just about recall, having done a bit of research, what the Conservatives achieved in 1953 when Harold Macmillan was the Minister for Housing. In 1953-54, the Conservative Government built 301,000 new homes in one year, and most of those were council houses—something they trashed following the 1979 election, and I very much regret that.

In speaking about architects and design, I urge the Government to do a number of what I regard as very important things. First, have proper space standards within homes. The Parker Morris standards, now out of use for many years, served their purpose. Look at some of the best council houses—for example, in the Minister’s and my hometown of Burnley, where many council houses on the Brunshaw estate were built to Parker Morris standards, and good houses they were.

Then I would invite the Government to ensure—this is going back to my noble friend Lord Best’s speech again—that architects are not sidelined. Often in big housing developments, the architects are asked to do a design and then they are forgotten about until something goes wrong, and then if there is litigation, they may be the ones who are sued. But, actually, the truth is that architects should be there throughout, because it is only with good design that the Government will be able to build neighbourhoods predicated on creating places that people of all ages will want to remain in permanently and not leave because they cannot afford to live there or because there are only old people or young people there or other social mismatches.

I agree with the Government that compulsory purchase orders have an important role to play. If this ambition of the Government’s is to be achieved, then land should be made available, not at ridiculous prices, but certainly at fair prices. In order to achieve what the Bill is designed for, it will, frankly, be necessary to use compulsory purchase orders.

I agree too with the proposal to use development corporations, and I urge the Government to look at the equivalent of development corporations in areas where there are not per se development corporations to ensure that standards are kept up.

I would encourage the speeding up of the planning process by providing template standards and accelerated processes. I agree totally with the noble Lord, Lord Young of Cookham, when he advised that there should be far more people trained to do the work in planning authorities so that it can be done thoroughly, quickly and decently.

Above all, I would encourage the Government to ensure that communities are involved in the design of their own neighbourhoods so that those neighbourhoods can stretch forward into the lives of the new generations who will be living there.

The Bill is about building to scale. Building to scale gives an immense opportunity to build good, because if you are spending a lot of money on a large scale, you can demand of those who do the work—the architects and developers—that they do it well. We should build with pride and give to the generations that follow us estates and areas to live in which will stand for them and their future generations for long to come.

20:20

[Baroness Miller of Chilthorne Domer (LD)]

My Lords, it is always a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Carlile of Berriew, and I agreed with every word he said.

Planning is part of the social contract. For the Government to deliver that social contract, the people for whom the planning is developed need to be part of it. If the Bill is to deliver the homes and communities that people are glad to live in, we must amend parts of it so that people are guaranteed a decent input at an early stage.

During this debate, we have heard of some of the things the public will be faced with: master plans, strategic development plans, local plans and neighbourhood plans. They have local authorities; they will have mayors and development corporations. It is jaw dropping. For a normal member of the public who is not immersed in the sort of world we have been immersed in this afternoon, they are going to really struggle to have their input, unless there is something in the Bill that makes it much easier for them. Certainly, diminishing the role of the elected councillor is a very regressive step. In fact, the Government should really be encouraging local authorities to have a bigger role.

To look back to some years ago, Planning for Real exercises really invigorated people in my local authority. The community could come out to wherever it was—the town hall, the village hall or the pub—and get truly involved. If we look at the tools that are available now—I am glad the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, mentioned digital twinning—we see that they have massively taken on the ability for people to get truly involved, because they will be able to overlay all those plans that I mentioned and the nature recovery areas so that people can see in real time what the developments being proposed will mean to them. The Bill needs to include some of that far more imaginatively, so that people are not disempowered by it, which is what I fear.

Of course, local government has not been perfect: only about one-third of local authorities have up-to-date adopted local plans. That is why it is crucial that the Bill takes forward public input much more positively. If none of those things happen, people will find it find it even harder to have a say in shaping their community’s future.

In my remaining time, I want to mention Part 3 of the Bill. Surely, we are clever enough to design legislation that allows for growing communities and for nature to be healthy. A number of noble Lords have mentioned mitigation hierarchies to avoid harm and mitigating unavoidable impacts. A very last resort is providing compensation measures, and the Bill goes straight to that last resort. We must insert a mitigation hierarchy clause.

Finally, from everything I have heard this afternoon—it will not be dying in a ditch; it will be dying in a chalk stream—we will fight to the last to have these irreplaceable habitats recognised in the Bill as such. The name is on the tin: if the Government cannot see that, that is exactly why this House should make a stand.

20:25

[Lord Jamieson (Con)]

My Lords, I declare my interest as a councillor in central Bedfordshire.

It is widely recognised that we need a simpler, more consistent and faster planning system that delivers higher-quality outcomes at lower costs. As others have raised, there has been a failure to deliver infrastructure, housing and commercial premises, particularly in London, Oxford and Cambridge, as well as a failure to deliver good environmental outcomes. The last Government made some good progress, with over 1 million new homes in five years and the Levelling-up and Regeneration Act—I ask whether this Government will seek to build on that rather than replace it.

Developers are equally frustrated, particularly with their inability to plan and invest for the long term due to the uncertainty of their most critical raw material: building land. We support many of the Government’s ambitions and there are some positive measures in the Bill, such as taking on board the recommendations of my noble friend Lord Banner on judicial review and reviewing the consultation process. However, it falls well short in many other areas, as many other noble Lords have pointed out earlier in this debate: the Bill takes a rather simplistic, overly centralised and blunt government-knows-best approach, rather than seeking to address the details, complexity and overlapping issues needed to improve the system, one that I believe the public would be more supportive of.

I have some questions. Strategic and local plans should be the fundamental base upon which to build development. However, the Government’s proposals are top-down. They are telling authorities what they need to achieve, with the threat of government intervention if they do not do it. Where are the tools to support authorities to achieve great outcomes for their areas and to make it easier to deliver these plans? If you give someone an impossible task, do not be surprised if they fail. Who determines the balance of achieving things such as environmental, infrastructure, affordable, commercial and housing numbers while seeking to meet the requirements of all those statutory bodies? How will these proposals make it easier to deliver a plan?

Local democratic accountability is crucial. Local residents should have a voice, as many have pointed out. There may be times when local councillors, under pressure from their electorate, are too willing to call something in, but there are far more times when it is important to have this option, particularly where developers seek to push the envelope. There are already measures in place to address this, and these need to be bolstered, not completely removed.

Environmental delivery plans are an interesting concept, but are the Government seriously giving this responsibility to an unaccountable quango that has no responsibility to deliver within a wider context, with tax-raising and CPO powers, and one that marks its own homework? Why not, for instance, through the strategic or local plans, work with a variety of providers? Why have the sensible proposals from the Levelling-up and Regeneration Act on CPO and development corporations not already been taken forward?

While there are some positives on delivering infrastructure, will these really move the dial? Will they stop the delays and costs that we have seen for critical infrastructure, such as the Lower Thames Crossing? Will they improve biodiversity? Will they create a better environment? Why does the Bill encourage more development on greenfield and green belts? Why have this Government not continued with a strong material presumption in favour of brownfield development? What is the Bill doing to make processes simpler and provide consistency; for instance, setting national policy frameworks and standardising templates and processes?

While I can agree with many of the aims of the Bill, and there are some positive measures, overall, it is a missed opportunity. It could have built on the Levelling-up and Regeneration Act. It could have supported councils and planning to move faster and be more consistent. It could have addressed many of the unintended consequences of the habitats directive and other nature and environmental legislation that is overlapping and in conflict. It could have done more to address the consequences of JRs. It could have turbocharged brownfield and urban generation. It could have addressed the roles of the many other public and quasi-public bodies needed to deliver. It could have a standardised process and paperwork, driving consistency. It could have set clearer priorities and ranking against which development is judged. As I said, it is a lost opportunity.

I hope the Government will engage positively on the Bill as it makes its way through the House of Lords, working with Peers across the House and the many good suggestions I have heard to address the issues in it and make it something that will deliver for our country and our communities.

20:30

[Baroness Levitt (Lab)]

My Lords, some may wonder why I, a criminal barrister, have chosen to speak in a debate on planning and infrastructure. The reason is that I have a lifelong interest in housing, which derives at least in part from my observation of hundreds of criminal cases, including those I saw during the time I spent as a judge presiding over jury trials. In so many of those cases, one of the problems of defendants is that they have never enjoyed the advantage of a decent home, which should be a place of personal safety and stability. Unfortunately, it is a depressing truth that the most comfortable and secure place in which some people spend a significant proportion of their lives is a custodial institution, and the shortage of decent homes for poorer families has contributed to this.

Against this background, I want to congratulate the Government on this Bill. It is the most ambitious programme for housing since 1953. As a member of your Lordships’ House, I wish to contribute in an effort to help the Government achieve their objectives by ensuring that what is built will be remembered for its good qualities. The best of the great Victorian architects and builders produced houses that we still want to live in nearly 200 years later. I know that the Government are fully conscious that they should be building new homes for many generations of our citizens. We should be ambitious that, in 200 years, people will talk of this project as one of the finest in housing development in our history.

I do not think it is controversial to say that good housing is about far more than providing four walls and a ceiling. It includes what architects refer to as place- making; in other words, providing the qualities that turn a house into a home, a tenement into a community, and a community into a place which you can say that you are proud to come from. When this Labour Government build a new neighbourhood, we want people in 50 and 100 years to say that they are proud to come from, and want to live in, that neighbourhood.

This means building durable spaces and places—places where people remain in their old age, alongside the new generations growing up behind them. Providing these and other requirements in the same place is how strong communities are created. In addition—reverting to my criminal law theme—another benefit is that strong communities self-regulate. It is axiomatic that there is far less anti-social behaviour—far less graffiti, for example—in places in which people are proud to live.

Since large-scale council house building effectively ended in 1979, although architects have been involved in many projects and some have produced wonderful designs, the housebuilders have been the dominant partners. As the noble Lord, Lord Best, said in his powerful speech, this has led, certainly on occasion, to profit being a more important concept than community. But good design—the creation of the good place—should be at the beating heart of every development.

One of the first actions undertaken by a certain Director of Public Prosecutions—who may or may not now be the Prime Minister—was to publish a document on core quality standards, by which every prosecution could be judged and, most importantly, measured. Along with some noble friends and colleagues in your Lordships’ House, I am currently working with a group of architects and planners to draw up a list of just such core quality standards for new housing, which we will ask the Government to enshrine in policy and, if necessary, in the legislation.

We want to be sure that everyone involved in planning homes is expected to reach high standards of place-making and that these are integral to every scheme put forward. By way of example, one of the things that I think we would all like to ensure is that when housebuilders put together their applications, the word “child” appears more often than the word “car”. The Bill provides an opportunity to strengthen and clarify design requirements.

In the view of these professionals, it is not necessary to make radical changes to the current planning system in order to achieve improved quality outcomes. Rather, what is needed is to ensure that quality is embedded in all applications for new development. What is needed are clear, predictable and measurable design requirements; if these are met, this would enable planning officers to sign off significant components of planning applications. A consequence of that would be to reduce the number of areas which will then be subject to democratic debate and decision-making. Applications which demonstrate compliance with the standards could be processed speedily within the current system, and thus the promise of speedy approvals will provide an incentive for the housebuilders to incorporate these measurable standards in their applications.

In other words, if there are core quality standards in place, this should speed up delivery of the new homes which the Government have promised and are determined to deliver. The aim is to provide homes at scale and at pace which will give people better lives throughout their lives.

20:35

[Baroness McIntosh of Pickering (Con)]

My Lords, I welcome the opportunity to speak on this Bill. I declare my interest as honorary president of National Energy Action, vice-president of the Association of Drainage Authorities, and as an officer of the water and flooding all-party parliamentary groups.

I have to ask where the interests of rural England lie in this Bill. The Bill envisages virtually no benefits for rural areas—quite the reverse. Rural communities are seen as the vehicle through which to deliver the Government’s infrastructure and energy policies. Combined with the fact that compulsory purchase compensation is dramatically reduced and curtailed, and that the power to object to a planning application is severely limited, it represents a full assault on rural communities.

The Government’s clean energy policies specifically disadvantage rural dwellers. The standing charge on energy bills is used to pay for future energy structures in a way not allowed by other utilities. The standing charge is the part of the energy bill that the householder cannot control. It is already high, and no doubt it will go higher.

The Government’s clean energy policy will also take 10% of farmland and 10% of fisheries out of production, which will inevitably have an impact on food security. The compulsory compensation provisions in the Bill need to be revisited. I urge the Government to proceed wherever possible by agreement with the landowner, and not to remove the requirement to carry out pre-application consultation on a proposed project with landowners and occupiers of the land, and not to remove the hope value. Villages and rural communities are in need of small, affordable one or two-bedroomed homes, not the three, four or five-bedroomed homes currently being offered. New build is attractive to developers as it is free of VAT. One possibility is for the Government to consider switching how VAT is charged: to put 20% VAT on new build and take the VAT off renovations and repairs of older buildings. That alone would revolutionise communities, with housing stock being refurbished, with better insulation and energy provision.

The issue of building on functional flood plains must be addressed, along with the end to the automatic right to connect, so easily achieved with the implementation of Schedule 3 to the Flood and Water Management Act 2010. When we considered the levelling-up Bill, we were told that that was not the appropriate Bill for the measure. When we considered the Water (Special Measures) Bill, we were told that that was not appropriate, and that the Bill before us was the appropriate home for it. So I hope that the Government will consider supporting that.

On improvements to the Bill, I seek government support in a number of areas: implementing, as mentioned, Schedule 3 to the Flood and Water Management Act 2010; ending the automatic right to connect to inadequate pipes; ending building on functional flood plains, particularly in zone 3b areas; implementing property flood resilience measures where buildings are built on functional flood plains; creating transparent conditions for planning approvals and consents; and envisaging a role for internal drainage boards in the planning process and in the prevention of floods. I will also seek to amend the Reservoirs Act, particularly the de minimis rules in that Act permitting the building of small reservoirs on farms and golf courses.

The Government have not published statistics on the number of houses built on functional flood plains since 2022. The statistics for 2021-22 show that in England, 7% of new residential addresses were in flood zone b, described by the Environment Agency as its best estimate of areas of land at risk of flooding. I put it to Ministers that any development in zone 3b should be resisted. When in opposition, they supported an amendment to the levelling-up Bill on not building on flood plains. I am hoping that that support will be repeated in this Bill, or perhaps the Government might even bring forward their own amendment to achieve the same end.

20:40

[The Earl of Lytton (CB)]

My Lords, I must remind your Lordships of my professional involvement in aspects of this sector as a fellow of the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors, an honorary fellow of the Chartered Association of Building Engineers, a vice-president of the National Association of Local Councils and joint president of the East Sussex Association of Local Councils. I am also a CLA member and a small-scale landowner.

There is much to welcome in this Bill, especially on the need to speed up the pace of delivery. Inordinate delays involve substantial cost and risk. However—and I apologise for concentrating on some of the bits that concern me—cutting out consultees and some local deliberations, which seems to be part of the proposal, strikes me as an unlikely saving. I feel that a more systematic approach to a rather labyrinthine planning system is in fact needed. The main focus of the Bill is infrastructure rollout, but delivery seems to remain via a rather poorly regulated private sector and still risks putting commercial imperatives in front of national policy and public interest, both as to rollout and cost to the taxpayer. Look where we are with utilities and telecoms right now.

As to electrical power, for instance, the rate of transfer of carbon-based road fuel and heating loads on to a greener electricity grid remains fettered by excessive cost per unit, while generation capacity and distribution lag years behind need, arguably requiring significant redesign beyond ever more pylons—which, of course, is a challenge in itself.

Water quality and quantity affect several key regions. Limiting consumption of a finite resource by the rest of us is a necessary offset as part of new housing and water neutrality, but that is happening only at the margins. Simply adopting an aspirational cut of 40% in per capita consumption is nonsense, if my information is correct; there is a good trade in removing water flow restrictors and upgrading showers. Nobody seems to have any incentive to monitor or enforce neutrality offsets effectively.

The same could easily happen with environment and nature. Will there be eco-deserts of some sort where development takes place, but for commercial convenience ecology has been traded away to another location? Or will the immediate locality have priority, as it rightly should? Will nature offsets still be adequately managed in 100 years’ time—as mentioned by other noble Lords—and will Natural England remain the objective government conservation adviser, or become the agent for a developer-led offsetting activity based on viability? Will it continue to command respect, especially if environmental NGOs start being excluded as consultees—they are, after all, the source of one’s information.

We have a system that involves democracy and rights of public audience; that has been mentioned by other noble Lords, and needs to be fostered. Councillor training has been referred to more than adequately by others.

I am unclear what Part 3 means for urban density or long-promised reforms to tenure, for individual autonomy and exclusivity—the sort of things that go into building a concept of one’s home, whether it be by ownership or otherwise—for communities that are stable, engaged and self-sustaining, and for making the best use of urban infrastructure as a means of preventing endless development on the fringes and urban sprawl.

I am concerned about the commercial risks to urban redevelopment, in particular those caused by the expanded compulsory purchase powers in the Bill. All of these issues are interlinked and need to be dealt with together, unless coherence is to be lost.

I turn specifically to the compulsory purchase step-in powers under Part 5 of the Bill and the removal of hope value from compensation. The Bill does not actually say that it will use existing use value as the basis for land value, but the Explanatory Notes do say that. However, there is no national or international definition of this term, without which the measures are flawed, uncertain of outcomes and, arguably, expropriatory and open to challenge. Many desirable sites are under option, so I simply ask: whose existing use are we addressing? Others, including society at large, make large profits from developers on greenfield sites, whereas the landowner often gets quite a small proportion of the overall profit after it has been totted up.

I will make one point that I was not going to make. For too long, emphasis on housing development has been a proxy for growth in the economy. There is evidence that this is reaching an endpoint. Whether we are going to continue to have year-on-year increases in values, including in the value of the housing inventory, is in doubt; if that is correct, it will have profound implications, socially and economically. I therefore agree with the noble Lord, Lord Best—but for other reasons—that a different delivery model is in fact needed.

Unless these critical factors are addressed, many of the measures in this Bill risk substantial failure. I look forward to pursuing these as the Bill moves forward.

20:45

[Baroness Parminter (LD)]

My Lords, I will contain my remarks to Part 3 of this Bill, which rips up the current planning rules that have, for decades, ensured that the environmental outcomes of developments have been taken into account. In their place, the Government are saying great things about their proposals: that they will speed up the planning process; that they will deliver the homes we need; and that they will restore nature through this overall improvement test. To my mind, however, the proposals in Part 3 will allow developers to buy out of their obligations and will dismantle the environmental protections that we have had in favour of some vague promise that Natural England will somehow make the situation better in the long term.

Worryingly, as it stands, the Bill will get rid of three fundamental environmental governance structures. It will get rid of the precautionary principle that we do not allow environmental destruction until we know exactly what is going to be lost; with the proposals, we will move straight to buying offsets elsewhere. It will lose the mitigation hierarchy, which many other noble Lords have raised as being of great concern—not just because we need first to move to ensure that we avoid harm but because the mitigation hierarchy has been the means for, when you cannot always avoid harm, improving the area around. As the noble Baroness, Lady Willis of Summertown, said, we need planning to help build green spaces into communities.

With the new proposals, under which you can go straight ahead without worrying about mitigation moving to support an EDP, these EDPs could be anywhere in the country. As it stands, the Bill does not say that they have to be in the same locality, and Natural England confirmed today that it does not know how many EDPs there will be or where they are going to be. For example, we could have planning applications in Burnley but the EDPs could be down in heathlands in Dorset. The Minister is looking at me—I hope that she will be able to clarify in her final remarks that there is no guarantee in this Bill about how many EDPs there are going to be or when they will come forward in the next timeframe. This is an extremely worrying point that I do not think has been picked up fully yet this evening; I am glad to have had the opportunity to make it. We need to look at this issue seriously.

The third main environmental governance tool that is disappearing is the “polluter pays” principle. In the past, people paid up front for the amount of pollution and destruction that they were responsible for. Now, there will be a fixed fee, paid at some point in the future. As the noble Lord, Lord Goldsmith, said, there is even an economic viability opt-out in the Bill. Those of us who have sat on planning committees for a long time know just how much the economic viability clause has in the past prevented social housing being built in developments. We are facing the same prospect happening here with environmental projects.

I am not opposed to strategic landscape-scale nature recovery—we all know that it can have benefits—but not for irreplaceable habitats and species. I am not going to revisit that point, because others have made it so well.

What particularly worries me about these proposals is that it is the Secretary of State at DCLG who is going to determine whether these EDPs are strong enough to outweigh the harm undertaken by the developments. In the Bill, it is not that they have to; it just says that they will determine whether it is “likely” that they will outweigh the harm. That is not strong enough. Nor does the Bill say anything about the Secretary of State having to look at scientific evidence—to make sure that the decisions are robust—that can give us any form of confidence or certainty that the environmental losses we are having to take up front will be mitigated for in the future.

This Government are saying that the environmental regulations need to be changed because planning needs to be speeded up. Other Members have said why environmental regulations have not been the cause of those delays. In her opening remarks, the noble Baroness, Lady Scott of Bybrook, made the very important point that this new system will create uncertainty, which will be legally tested. Part 3 will deliver more uncertainty, while stopping the Government delivering on their legally binding environmental targets. We need more quality affordable homes, but we also need homes for nature.

20:50

[Lord Fuller (Con)]

My Lords, I speak today as someone who has led a council for 20 years. I have sat on more planning committees than I care to remember. I have been accountable for three local plans, and I sat on the CIL review for the Minister in 2016-17—I have even built a few homes on my own account. I chaired a district council for four years, and established a public sector environmental credits company. I am well qualified to participate in this Bill.

The Bill is defective because it does not remind us that the purpose of planning is to arbitrate between the private and the public interest. Our work is important here. We need to optimise housing and economic growth within the context of optimising the burden of well-meaning regulations. We need to get the public-private balance right.

Let us not be churlish: there are several welcome moves in this Bill. It should not take 10 years to produce a local plan, which is how long the last local plan I was involved with took. However, superficial headlines fail to finger the felons who hold up progress and, most perversely, potentially reward the biggest blockers. This Bill perpetrates the myth that councils and councillors are a block on progress. That is wrong. Local councillors should not be the scapegoats for wider failures in the rest of the regulatory public sector—those who the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, mentioned. It is a pity that he is not in his place because I agreed with every word that he said about silos. Training councillors and emasculating planning committees alone will not deliver millions of homes; that is just wishful thinking.

The Bill has a touching faith that officials can clear away the debris—as if they do not have any prejudices of their own—and get Britain building all by themselves. In my experience, too often officialdom, in its widest sense, is inflexible. It interprets the local plan grounded in data which might be several years old and stuck in the past, rather than addressing the needs of tomorrow. I have sat on enough planning committees to know that, too often, officials and other parts of the state put the black spot on proper proposals.

Too often statutory bodies claim a veto to advance their own narrow interest, and on their own timescales. The Minister will remember when we both worked together to get the Planning Inspectorate to do its job in Stevenage, when it thought that 1,000 days to start an inspection was an appropriate lead time.

If you give someone a veto, do not be surprised if they use it—Natural England, the Environment Agency, the MMO, the Highways Agency and whatever National Rail calls itself nowadays. I want to be charitable here, but often they use overly precious objections, advancing specious science or contested legal opinion, to make their “wait” points. That is before we deal with a whole new set of other regulators—for example, the building fire safety regulator, which acts as if, Canute-like, it can somehow abolish fire. This Bill does nothing to address all those other blockers.

Councillors are not the problem here. In fact, we need elected officials at all levels to arbitrate positively in the public interest, to get through these vetoes and to ensure that those bodies do not use them capriciously.

Turning to Part 3, there has been a lot of NGO shroud-waving, telling us how a cottage industry of well-meaning ecologists has turned into a drag anchor on our economy. We should not ignore them, but we must roll back their veto on environmental protections, because their demands have become disproportionate and detached from reality.

Only this afternoon, I received an email as part of my casework as a councillor. A development in Norfolk has been told, on the basis of Natural England’s calculation, that the cost of installing a loo in a proposed single dwelling in a village not far from where I live will be £32,450. We have to stop this. It is on different continents with regard to value from what is reasonable or achievable.

I am concerned that proposals to give Natural England judge-and-jury powers will effectively nationalise nature. To set mitigation measures at state-run prices is dangerous. To set the price too low would kill the incentive to innovate in an area where the UK has developed some world-leading market leadership. I am anxious that we will undermine innovative local schemes where nutrient neutrality, biodiversity net gain, GIRAMS and SANGS, whatever they are, have been contracted and executed with 80-year tail liabilities. That is completely inconsistent with the 10-year life of an EDP.

On a much more positive note, I broadly welcome the proposals for development corporations in Part 4. But I have concerns over the financial models for the organisations, and it will be important to clarify the relationship between compulsory purchase and the cat’s cradle of responsibilities between the mayor, development corporation boards, planning authorities and the interactions with the money and finance that deliver the infrastructure.

There is much more that I want to say and will later on in the process. For the moment, I welcome the Bill and will do much to improve it, as there is more polishing to be done.

20:56

[Lord Liddle (Lab)]

My Lords, this is a crucial Bill. It is a key enabler of this Government’s programme to get Britain building again, tackle the housing crisis, and build the infrastructure that levels up the country and enables it to grow while at the same time achieving our net-zero commitments.

Strangely, I rather liked what the noble Lord, Lord Lilley, said when he said that the “vetocracy” has to be overcome. As someone who, like the noble Lord, Lord Fuller, served for 20 years in local government, I strongly agree with him that the problem is not local councillors, who in my experience are quite keen on development, but rather the special interests, the inquiry system and the judicial review system that give far too much weight to delay and to the people who want to obstruct. It is the nonsense of the bat tunnel and the fact that we spent £1.X billion on the Lower Thames Crossing without achieving a single thing. Those are the things the Bill intends to overcome.

I have two particular points. I am a strong believer in the need for us to accept climate transition and move to net zero. I reinforce the points made by the noble Baroness, Lady Pidgeon, about the need to do more to facilitate electric cars in cities and towns. The Bill contains some useful measures on public charging points, but it neglects the key problem for the take-up of electric cars, which is the need to simplify the system whereby you can charge your car on the street from your own home if you do not have off-street parking. Something has to be put right there, and I have some ideas that we can discuss in Committee.

The other thing that I think is very important is the role of development corporations, and I back what the noble Lord, Lord Best, said at the start of this debate. When people think of development corporations, of course there is the wonderful brilliance of the then Michael Heseltine’s Docklands Development Corporation, and the noble Lord, Lord Heseltine, is one of the great sort of enablers of modern Britain. But I also think of the post-war generation of new towns. I have a special affection for Stevenage, because I knew Shirley Williams very well and she was devoted to Stevenage as a new town, and it would not have happened without the setting up of a development corporation. Milton Keynes is one of the most successful places in modern Britain, again because of a development corporation. I think the model worked because the development corporation had the ability to borrow, to buy land at existing use value, by compulsory purchase if necessary, to prepare that land for development and then to get the money back from the developers. That then allowed it to reinvest in further schemes.

The Bill contains some progress towards this model, but I think there is a significant problem in that the borrowing of the development corporations counts against the department’s expenditure limit, even though the money will be got back as a result of the land being developed and the developers paying for it. We have to overcome what I think is this significant block on reinvestment. It is a typical Treasury thing, frankly. It wants to keep control of borrowing, but in fact you could do it in other ways by having regular audits of how the development corporations are working. I hope that our Front Bench might look at this, and I particularly hope that my noble friend Lady Taylor of Stevenage, for whom I have great admiration, will look favourably on enabling development corporations to do the best job they can.

21:02

[Lord Evans of Guisborough (Con)]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure and something of a challenge to follow the noble Lord, Lord Liddle, in this debate. Indeed, it is something of a challenge to follow the 50-odd other contributors whom we have had today, because there is little left to say that has not already been said. In that respect, I would like to go in to bat to defend council planning committees, notwithstanding the fact that several other people have done the job already.

I spent four years chairing the planning committee in the London Borough of Havering, on the north-east border of London, where the city meets the country. There was a great deal of pressure there between the housing demand and the green space that people wanted to build on, so it was quite a tough place to do that job. All my committee members were trained in basic planning law so that they could do their jobs better, so I do not think that is a bad idea; I think it is a bad idea to insist that they be trained and then to take their powers away from them and have them discharged somewhere else. That seems somewhat perverse.

I must admit to the Minister that, even though we were a good planning committee, occasionally we discussed people’s extensions and modifications to their homes. That was quite important because, in allowing something to change on one house, you created a precedent and the ones next door could do the same thing. You could pretty soon see whole streets, and whole neighbourhoods even, change substantially because of decisions made on a relatively small number of properties. Because of that, it is still a really good idea to allow some democratic involvement in those decisions, because people will look at their changing neighbourhood and say, “Where did I vote for this? Where did I have a say in what is happening?”

I also used to feel that it was very important to run a committee that was fair and gave people a say because, for quite a lot of the public, the planning committee was the only democratic part of the council that they met or encountered. If we did our job badly, were unsympathetic or were poorly briefed, that reflected badly not just on the committee but on the whole of the authority.

On occasions, we were quite independent. We even sent the council’s own applications back for changes to be made to them. A good committee should not be scared to do that. We had some challenges while I was there. We had a race for golf courses. Suddenly, there was a demand for lots of golf courses around north-east London—not because there was a demand for golf, but because there was a demand for space to dump inert waste from building sites without having to pay the landfill tax. It is that sort of perverse incentive that, if we are not very careful, badly drafted environment law creates. I urge Ministers to take a close look, particularly at Part 3 of the Bill, to imagine how it might be misused. If they do not take that look, I am sure people in the property industry will do so—and will take advantage of it. It is worth taking the time.

I was also impressed by the speech made by the noble Lord, Lord Best, at the start of the debate. He said some fairly strong things about the big housebuilders. The noble Baroness, Lady Levitt, said some good things about design and architecture in the future, but I think they could have been a lot more cutting than they were. I have lived in new-build flats in London for the past 30 years. There have been a considerable number of problems with not just the design but the execution of the build. We hear a lot about fire safety—quite rightly after the Grenfell disaster—but the shortcomings go much further than that. I can give the Minister, if she wants, a whole list of defects and problems that regularly occur in new builds.

I hope the Government achieve their target to massively increase housebuilding, but a wave of increased housebuilding must not come at the expense of the quality of the properties that are built. We do not want to see people who buy their houses and flats landed with the costs of repairing them and making changes to them a short time after they have been built. To allow that to happen is bad news anyway for the housing market in the UK in the long run, because people will not want to participate in it if they think that what they are buying is junk. I am really looking forward to taking part in the scrutiny of the Bill in the coming weeks. I hope we can do a constructive job of it.

21:07

[Lord Thurlow (CB)]

My Lords, I will speak on Part 2 of the Bill. I declare my interests in the register, as a former practising chartered surveyor. I certainly support the Bill. I like it very much. I wish to address just a few concerns this evening.

Most of the ground has been well covered. I will try not to repeat too much. First, I want to touch on housing. One and half million homes in a short window of time is a huge undertaking. It will not be done piecemeal. It requires many vast new-build schemes. These are going to be predominantly, I am sure, on green spaces. We must learn from the mistakes of the last 30 or 40 years, when acres of matchboxes identical to each other have been built with no thought whatever to the appearance to those passing by, or nearby, or living in them. What an opportunity this is to introduce some design vision to the process—style guides and development themes. Please, let us move on from matchboxes.

Introducing design at the outset is free. It is more expensive—only slightly more expensive—because it is cosmetic, but it costs nothing to the developer. It is factored into its appraisal, and it comes off site value. Living in an attractive, landscaped environment has a great impact on society as a whole and, of course, to the people who live there themselves. The Bill refers to design training for planning committee members. This is an excellent suggestion and will inform the design vision I refer to. The RIBA states that feedback from its members over the last couple of years suggests that 54% of local planning authorities lack any design expertise.

Secondly, I am very pleased the Bill refers to brownfield land, but it is not much more than that. The reference to passports to accelerate the development process is welcome and applauded, but I regret there is no single brownfield land clause in the Bill. It merits and deserves a clause of its own. It is of primary importance because tens of thousands of residential dwelling units could be built on brownfield land. They are usually in metropolitan areas. There is no need for the additional infrastructure services of schools and transport infrastructure, medical centres and shops—simply expenditure on expanding the existing provision in the metropolitan areas.

My third concern is planning departments. I will build on the excellent words of the noble Lord, Lord Evans, and support the planning system as it was structured. I do not want to refer at all to the roll call of consultants who surround and influence the planning process. The system of local planning authorities itself is well designed, but it is broken. Years of under-resourcing have taken their toll. The Government’s Autumn Statement had £45 million for 300 new apprentice planners, which is a woefully inadequate addition to the cohort. It is fewer than one per local planning authority. There are 2,200 current vacancies in the planning system among local planning authorities and 13% of planning authorities are trying to operate with a shortfall of 25% or more in their numbers. Morale is understandably low. They are under-resourced and unloved.

It is a revolving door of employment. Case handlers change, sometimes twice, for an applicant. Knowledge of the file is interrupted. Site visits, meetings and relationships are destroyed as the faces change. Delays are inevitable. The Government must act and rebuild from the bottom up. Do not break the structure, but rebuild, recruit and retrain. Return professional pride to these wonderful teams of people. Let them take pride in their work again.

Finally, there is flood risk. The Bill makes no direct reference to flood risk management. There are too many homes being built with a one in 100 likelihood of flooding, which, as we all know, is accelerating rapidly with climate change. We should not build on flood-risk land; it is madness. The Bill could stop it. To conclude, this is a good Bill, but there are gaps which need filling.

21:13

[Lord Murray of Blidworth (Con)]

My Lords, it is always a joy to follow the noble Lord, Lord Thurlow. It is perhaps slightly less of a joy to be speaker number 59 on the speakers’ list and honorary tail-end Charlie. I can reassure the House of two things. First, I have only one point. Secondly, it is a new one.

[Noble Lords]

Oh!

[Lord Murray of Blidworth (Con)]

I declare my interest as a practising barrister and mediator in a set of chambers that specialises in public and planning law.

The specific issue I want to discuss is, perhaps counterintuitively, the reduction of statutory appeals and contentious litigation in the planning sphere. I suggest that we do this by expanding the use of mediation and alternative dispute resolution. We should aim in the Bill to ensure that landowners, housebuilders, local authorities, nature conservation bodies, local people and other stakeholders are having proper and more constructive conversations. If they do, the likelihood of litigation in the planning sphere, with all its delay and division, could and should be reduced. In Committee, I hope to table amendments that will offer a way forward in this regard.

The Scots have been ahead of us in this game for some time. Section 40 of the Planning (Scotland) Act 2019 contains a measure introduced by the Scottish Government to provide specific legislative provision that focuses on the promotion and use of mediation in the planning process. Those measures in that Act require Scottish Ministers to issue guidance on

“the promotion and use of mediation”

and other methods for resolving disagreements related to planning matters. Experience tells us that it is working.

On the other hand, while mediation within the English planning system is known and has been successfully used, it continues to be a significantly under-deployed and under-appreciated resource. Generally, while mediation has become central—and is increasingly becoming mandatory—to the civil justice system in other fields and has been greatly encouraged by repeated appellate court judgments, the planning system lags somewhat behind, despite its potential for avoiding conflict having long been acknowledged in numerous reviews and reports from 2006, 2009, 2010 and 2011.

Despite these reviews and reports, in practice there has been little sustained progress towards the formal adoption of mediation in planning. For example, when he was Communities Secretary, the noble Lord, Lord Pickles, introduced “Section 106 brokers” in the summer of 2012. The initiative was then taken into legislation through the short-lived Sections 106BA to 106BC of the Town and Country Planning Act 1990, as inserted by the Growth and Infrastructure Act 2013, which allowed for renegotiation in respect of those agreements. However, that measure was subject to a sunset provision and expired on 30 April 2016.

Another provision was that of the Planning Minister, Sir Brandon Lewis, who included in Sections 106ZA and 106ZB of the Planning and Housing Act 2016 a measure through which a form of dispute adjudication was to be introduced. However, it was never implemented. Most recently, in summer 2021 the then Government introduced the pathfinder scheme to deploy mediation to reduce the enforcement appeal backlog. I am told that that scheme was not a success because a lot of local planning officers were less than enthusiastic about engaging in meaningful discussion about mediation, often because they did not understand the process. The experience from Scotland is that those efforts can be facilitated only by greater education and training as to the merits of and costs that can be saved by adopting that course.

It is tolerably clear, though, that where formal mediation has been used in planning scenarios, it has often been successful. Even where its techniques have been deployed informally through the presence of a neutral facilitator or chair, negotiations have been accelerated and produced better outcomes. Consequently, public and private resources have been saved, stakeholder relations have been improved and, crucially, earlier delivery of new developments and infrastructure has been the result.

Therefore, if the Bill is truly going to succeed where other measures have failed in bringing about meaningful and lasting reform of our planning system, a culture of better, more constructive and less disputatious conversations should be a part of the changed regime. Having a statutory provision promoting mediation would be timely. In the planning context, it would reflect the new mood music from the senior courts about resolving differences through better conversations, and lead to quicker, cheaper and more certain outcomes.

21:18

[Baroness Pinnock (LD)]

My Lords, I am speaker number 60, and this has been a long and wide-ranging debate. I thank all noble Lords who have raised important and pertinent issues for the House to address at the next stage. Some have been new issues, and I look forward to hearing about mediation processes within the planning system. I particularly thank my 10 Liberal Democrat colleagues for their contributions, which have been, as noble Lords have heard, both supportive and challenging in equal measure. Many of us have benefited from the professional groups, charities and individuals who have provided helpful information on which we could base our debate today. I remind the House that I have a relevant interest as a councillor on Kirklees Council in West Yorkshire.

This is a very significant Bill for our nation. It has the potential to fundamentally change the foundation of the Town and Country Planning Act 1947, which established the principle that planning permission is required for land development. It separated land ownership from the automatic right to develop it. Enshrined in that Act is local democratic decision-making, on both what land can be developed and how it can be developed. This democratic principle has gradually and properly expanded over the years to include and involve in the process those affected by potential development.

In the era of instant and easy communication of both factual and inaccurate information, the principle of local communities having their say and elected representatives making the decisions is ever more important. Ensuring the involvement of communities is vital in both hearing local information about a site and demonstrating that those directly affected are important in the process. The erosion of the local democratic process, as proposed in the Bill, is not acceptable and will not lead to swifter planning decisions, as many noble Lords from across the House have referenced. A better balance must be found between the needs of development and of local communities and their elected representatives.

Major infrastructure projects are, as we have heard, beset with delays and eye-watering cost rises—HS2 is just one of the examples that has been referred to in our debate—and change is necessary. Reducing the time taken to reach a decision is critical. Removing the pre-application stage, however, is a false economy, as it is at that stage that interested parties are alerted to the scheme and can have input, which helps the applicant make amendments in response. As there will be increasing numbers of nationally significant infrastructure projects, it is vital that communities are informed and engaged at an early stage, both in the detail of the application and in its prime purpose for the nation. Communities must feel that they can have their say if resentment at change is not to thrive.

Turning to the more specific planning process changes, spatial development strategies will do much to inform economic development, infrastructure investment and local strategies in a mayoral authority. I too remember, and was part of helping to develop, the previous regional development strategies 20-odd years ago. However, any such strategy must have the support of communities and their local elected representatives if it is not to be constantly challenged. The new clauses introduced into the Bill when it was taken through the Commons throw some light on how this will be achieved. What is not clear is whether all constituent authorities will have a place on a joint board and what decision-making powers the board jointly and severally has in relation to the mayor. Perhaps the Minister can provide some details on the membership and powers of the joint boards. She will have thousands of questions to answer when she sums up, so maybe a note would suffice.

On the proposed changes to the local planning system, the starting point for these discussions must be the knowledge that the local authority planning procedures vary greatly according to the type and size of council. Differences reflect the communities that are served, and a one-size approach to local planning definitely does not fit all.

Like other noble Lords who have spoken, I agree with mandatory training for members of local planning committees. I introduced it when I was leader of Kirklees 20 years ago. Members of planning committees then understand the constraints of planning and highways legislation; it is important and it helps the debate on any planning applications to focus on planning issues.

The number of members of a planning committee is also important. Limiting the membership must go alongside the rights of ward councillors to speak to the committee on a pertinent application. That is their elected duty and responsibility. Equally, as other noble Lords have said, local councils should have the right to choose the size of their planning committee so that it suits their local needs. Imposing top-down schemes of national delegation is not the way forward. There is no evidence that planning committees are the blockers—a contemptible accusation. Some 80% of planning applications are already approved, one way or another; some 90% are already delegated to officers’ decision-making. Of those referred to the Planning Inspectorate by developers, less than 3% are overturned on appeal. The planning system works—it just needs more investment.

The real blockers to housing development are the major housebuilders which acquire planning consent and then wait for an upturn in the market or even play the system with constant applications to alter aspects of the original planning permission. The evidence is clear. The Government could easily reach their target of 1.5 million new homes in this Parliament if the 1.2 million currently with planning permission were built. Reform of this part of the process is desperately needed. That is what needs to change.

There are families in every community who are desperate for a home at a social rent. The scandal of the Bill is that this need is not specifically addressed, nor is the urgent need to provide a definition of so-called affordable housing.

Part 3 of the Bill has attracted a very large number of comments and challenges from across the House, and rightly so. The proposal for a nature restoration fund reads like a developers’ charter. It enables developers to disregard the impact on and destruction of nature as a result of their development and salve their consciences by contributing to the fund. That will not do. Developers must be cognisant of the effect of their construction on habitats. The Bill could well result in some localities having their local habitats and green spaces destroyed, and the recompense is miles away. That is no good for them or for the biodiversity of the area. Fundamental changes to this part of the Bill are essential, and no doubt will be proposed.

Finally, the direction of travel envisaged in the Bill is one that we on these Benches support. However, the Bill has absolutely failed in finding the right balance between the competing ambitions of infrastructure provision, housebuilding and economic development on the one hand and community involvement, democratic decision-making and nature protection and enhancement on the other. We on these Benches will do all we can to work with the Government, where this is possible, to tip the scales in support of democracy, nature and communities.

21:30

[Lord Roborough (Con)]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to rise to speak to the Government’s Planning and Infrastructure Bill—second last, as I am sure that noble Lords are aware. There is much to commend in the Bill, easing the path to building more homes for the people in this country and allowing strengthening of our infrastructure.

Before I begin, I draw the House’s attention to my register of interests as a farmer and landowner, an owner of residential development land, a developer of commercial property, renewable energy infrastructure and new forests, and an investor in natural capital-related businesses: Agricarbon, Cecil Earth, John Deere and Circular FX.

Planning goes to the heart of how homes are supplied. I hope that the Minister will consider the means by which we bolster much-needed supply, including the supply of planning officers, as many noble Lords have mentioned. We are deeply concerned about the proposed national scheme of delegation, which would remove councillors’ ability to vote on individual planning applications. As my noble friend Lady Scott of Bybrook set out earlier, democratic accountability matters, especially when it comes to housebuilding. Many noble Lords clearly agree.

Local consent, legitimacy and trust are essential to delivering not just more homes, but the right homes. While the planning system is part of the problem in the housing shortage and slow and expensive delivery of critical infrastructure, we must also address cost of delivery, heavily impacted by inflation on labour and materials; increasing energy-efficiency regulations; tighter environmental regulations; and accessibility and safety requirements. All these add to the cost, and we need to question whether we can truly afford all of them.

Housing affordability has also been impacted by the increase in mortgage rates, thanks to inflation and this Government’s forecast expenditure remaining at 45% of GDP over this Parliament, even with optimistic productivity forecasts, undermining financial markets’ confidence. What plans do the Government have to reduce the cost of building new homes and providing their infrastructure to make houses more affordable? Does the Minister intend to drive down new and existing house prices by creating a larger supply of houses than can be absorbed by the market at current prices? The housebuilders have received a bruising this evening, but what proportion of the 1.5 million target is expected to be supplied by the private housebuilding sector and what by the public sector?

I would like to focus on the environmental aspects of the Bill, set out in Part 3. While a nature restoration levy may appear to be a welcome simplification of the environmental conditions attached to the planning system, this is a problem that is more imaginary than real. As Richard Benwell from Wildlife and Countryside Link said in giving evidence to the other place:

“It is worth noting that Natural England reckons that 99% of the housing applications that it is consulted on go through perfectly properly; only 1% receive objections on the basis of environmental concerns. It is also worth noting that … the long-term trend is that only 10% of major infrastructure projects are challenged”.


Where is the problem that the Government are trying to fix with a radical overhaul of how environmental damage is dealt with in planning? Is this really because the Government resent £100 million being spent on a bat tunnel, or because the previous Opposition, now Government, rejected our amendment to the levelling-up Bill, which would have removed the blockage by Natural England advice on nutrient neutrality rules of well over 100,000 houses?

The fingerprints of Natural England are all over those instances, and I support my noble friends Lord Gascoigne and Lady Coffey and others in questioning whether Natural England should really be allowed to build an authoritarian empire to deliver these EDPs. Natural England will have forcible powers of entry, the ability to set its own fees, and uncontrolled compulsory purchase order powers, extending even to gardens and allotments. This does not seem right. We will be seeking to remove or restrict these powers and to challenge the role of Natural England in Committee.

We hear major concerns about Part 3 of this Bill from the National Trust, the NFU, the Wildlife Trusts, the Woodland Trust, Wildlife and Countryside Link, the Better Planning Coalition, the CPRE, the CLA, the RSPB and many more—I do not think I have ever come across an issue on which they were united. As the noble Baroness, Lady Young, highlighted, even the supposed beneficiaries are very concerned about Part 3 of the Bill. Many noble Lords from all Benches have added their voices today, and I hope the Government are listening to this debate and the negative response to Part 3 from all those organisations with deep domain expertise.

The Office for Environmental Protection has been cited in passing by a number of noble Lords. In its letter to the Government, it said that

“aiming to improve environmental outcomes overall, whilst laudable, is not the same as maintaining in law high levels of protection for specific habitats and species. In our considered view, the Bill would have the effect of reducing the level of environmental protection provided for by existing environmental law”—

the Environment Act.

“As drafted, the provisions are a regression.”

I have a number of amendments that would have the effect of underpinning the Environment Act and simplifying the interrelationship between legacy EU law and our own law, which has driven confusion. I hope the Minister will take these in the constructive spirit in which they are offered.

The apparent removal of the mitigation hierarchy, mentioned by many noble Lords, appears to lead to the potential for a complete loss of protection for key environmental features, which is both a destruction of nature but also a loss of access to that nature for local communities. The requirements on the Secretary of State are very weak, with only a “likely” overall improvement in the same type of feature over 10 years—a vanishingly small amount of time in the lifespans of ecosystems, let alone trees, and a very low bar for decision-making. This does not fill the House with confidence, and we would be interested in working with all noble Lords to strengthen these environmental protections and restore the mitigation hierarchy in the Bill.

I question whether it is appropriate that the nature restoration levy should be used for compulsory purchase by Natural England. Why should developers funding EDPs be subsidising the Government’s acquisition of land? In the other place, we suggested this should fall to the Treasury, and I expect to repeat those arguments in more depth in Committee.

The Secretary of State in the other place mentioned that

“we expect farmers and land managers to benefit, with the nature restoration fund providing opportunities to diversify their business income”.—[Official Report, Commons, Planning and Infrastructure Bill Committee, 15/5/25; col. 427.]

That is a generous sentiment but, as my noble friend Lord Lucas highlighted, nowhere in this Bill do I see any requirement for Natural England to consult with land managers and farmers, or to work with them on delivering environmental improvement within EDPs. At a time when the Government have imposed the family farm death tax, slashed delinked payments and slammed shut SFI applications, I am surprised that the Government do not look to allow farmers and landowners to provide these services commercially to developers or Natural England.

To add insult to injury, the publication of this Bill has chilled the biodiversity net gain and nutrient neutrality markets, undermining an existing business activity for many farmers. I join my noble friend Lord Goldsmith in asking the Minister how she sees Part 3 of the Bill relating to those markets? What role can they play if developers are forced to pay the nature restoration levy without the option of their own full or partial mitigation activities, either on-site or through these existing markets?

The Minister was unable to tell me, in an Answer to a Written Question, what levy rate developers will be required to pay nor how large the nature restoration fund is likely to be. I wonder whether the Government have given more thought to this and whether they can answer those questions now. How can we be confident this will not undermine the financial viability of developments or, as other noble Lords have mentioned, be used as an excuse to reduce other contributions made by developers?

Moving outside of Part 3 of the Bill and addressing other concerns that impact on the environment and rural community, I have been confused by comments from the Minister and her officials in meetings, and by the Secretary of State, in their descriptions of when they see compulsory purchase orders being used without hope value. I would be most grateful if the Minister could lay out exactly those circumstances.

Depending on the answer to the previous question, I also ask the Minister how this Bill really can be compatible with the European Convention on Human Rights, given that it allows the compulsory purchase of property at beneath its market price. Let me remind the House of the Council of Europe’s explanation of the ECHR:

“Under the European Convention on Human Rights, people have the right to possess property that is lawfully theirs. Governments cannot take property away without proper reasons - and neither can other people. For example, if a government takes land away from someone for public use, the former owner has to be properly compensated”.

In response to a Written Question, the Government helpfully cited that in 2024, local authorities used CPOs 54 times and others used them seven times. Can the Minister indicate what increase in frequency of CPOs is expected, both by Natural England and other bodies with CPO powers? Will these CPO powers be used on land already controlled by housebuilders, by Forestry England, by university colleges or by the Church? Who is excluded, apart from the Crown Estate?

I expect we will also address in Committee whether the Government have got right the balance and extent of compensation to landowners and occupants. Agricultural tenants invest heavily in equipment, buildings, soil, and indeed their businesses. Their economic loss as a result of a CPO is very material. To back up my noble friend Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts, I highlight that the Bill provides no protection to our best and most versatile land that is responsible for much of our food security, alongside reducing protections for other land.

The Bill is attracting considerable attention in this House and beyond. As His Majesty’s Official Opposition, we intend to play a detailed and constructive role in improving the Bill and helping to deliver a better outcome for all stakeholders. Noble Lords have raised considerable concerns, many reflecting those of rural representation groups and conservation bodies. I am grateful to the Minister for conceding that there is scope for strengthening the Bill, suggesting an openness to constructive amendments.

There have been many contributions over the course of the evening. Given the hour, I will return to those in Committee. We hope that the Government are able to take a co-operative approach, engaging with all Members of this House, and have an open mind to amendments that will allow better delivery of houses and infrastructure while restoring nature and protecting those impacted by development. I very much look forward to the Minister’s response.

21:41

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (Baroness Taylor of Stevenage) (Lab)]

I thank all noble Lords for this wide-ranging, very productive and comprehensive debate. With over 60 contributions made, I am obviously not going to be able to reply in detail to every one. I will do my best; I have tried to put first the things that were talked about the most. If I do not get to some of the questions I will of course reply in writing.

I have been very encouraged to hear the degree of consensus on the need for action and on much of the intent of the Bill, even if there has been some reference to what the noble Baroness, Lady Thornhill, referred to in her characteristically direct way as the bad and the ugly in the Bill. It has been a very good discussion, and I do not think there is any difference of opinion about the need for things to change.

I especially thank the noble Lord, Lord Banner, for his contribution to the Bill, particularly in the critical area of judicial reviews, which we have looked at in great detail; I am grateful for his support in that work. The contributions of the noble Lords, Lord Fuller and Lord Liddle, from opposite sides of the House, definitely showed why the Bill is so important. The noble Lord, Lord Gascoigne, described it well when he said the Bill is “about the kinds of places we want to build and the kind of country we want to be”. That is a very good way of describing what we are doing here.

I will make a few general points and then turn to some of the specific issues that were raised. The noble Lord, Lord Best, referred very powerfully to the housing crisis and the broken model of relying on volume housebuilders to deliver against the housing need which we definitely have. We currently have 160,000 children in temporary and emergency accommodation. That is an absolute scandal—we have to deal with these issues.

I was at St Mary’s school in Walthamstow yesterday, where the children are doing a project on homelessness, and I asked them what they would say to the Prime Minister. They said, “Can you tell the Prime Minister to build some more homes that people can afford?” I think that was quite right. I said that I will tell the Prime Minister that, so we will get on with that as quickly as we can.

Since 1990, home ownership for 19 to 29 year-olds has more than halved. Homes cost eight times the annual earnings of an average worker. The number of homes granted planning permission has fallen from 310,000 in 2021 to 235,000 in 2025 Q1. The number of new homes is estimated to drop to around 200,000 this year, and this would be the lowest year for net additional dwellings in England since 2015-16.

Infrastructure costs have increased by 30%—more than GDP per capita—since 2007, and the time it takes to secure planning permission for major economic infrastructure projects has almost doubled in the last decade to more than four years. We are not putting the blame on planning officers or councillors. I pay tribute to all those planning officers across the country who work with this system day in, day out, and to all the councillors who play their part in it as well.

We know that 96% of planning decisions were made by planning officers in the year ending March 2025, and it was that small percentage outside of that which were made by planning committees. Only 20% of planning applications for major development are decided within the 13-week statutory deadline. It is important that we focus now on how we are going to improve this system.

I will comment on the points made by the noble Baronesses, Lady Coffey and Lady Grender. On the 700,000 empty homes in this country, once housebuilders have been granted permission for residential development, meeting local housing needs and preferences, we expect to see them built out as quickly as possible. Local planning authorities already have powers to issue completion notices to require a developer to complete its development if it is stalled, and if they fail to do so the planning permission for the development will lapse.

On homes being approved but not yet built, we know that too many developments secure planning permission and then are either stalled or not built out quickly, to the frustration of local planning committees and authorities and their communities. That is why we are proposing to introduce a new statutory build-out reporting framework to ensure that there is greater transparency and accountability about the build-out of new residential development. We are currently consulting on that, but we are determined to make sure that communities do not see empty homes, or homes that are permissioned and are not built, when there is such an enormous need for housing around the country.

[Lord Fuller (Con)]

Will the Minister accept that in many of the cases where permissions are granted, pre-commencement conditions are not yet met and that is the reason these permissions are not executed or completed? In so many cases it is because of the other statutory consultees: it is not the council; the baton passes from the council to the developers at that stage. They are the hold-up, and they are that break between the issuance of permission and commencement on site, and that is really where much of the government effort needs to be.

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

I understand exactly the point the noble Lord, Lord Fuller, is making and there are measures in the Bill which will ease that pressure. We are looking at stat cons and how that process works but, overall, we need to make sure that we get a very smooth process, where we speed up the whole application process, the pre-commencement phase and the build-out phase, because that is what will start delivering housing at pace in this country.

Some noble Lords have mentioned the New Towns Taskforce. It will be reporting this summer, and we will also be publishing a comprehensive housing strategy. I cannot say exactly when; I have that Civil Service phrase “in the not too distant future”, which is frustrating, but I hope it will be very soon.

The right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Manchester mentioned the very excellent report of the Church housing commission and the Nationwide Foundation. I was very grateful for that piece of work; it has been incredibly helpful in shaping thinking, particularly on social, affordable and specialist housing.

The noble Lord, Lord Patten, and other noble Lords mentioned that planning is not necessarily the block to growth. It is not the only key to growth, but it too often can be a substantial constraint on it. We want to move that forward as quickly as possible.

I was asked for the number of homes we are going to be building and exactly what the plan is over the years. We are working on that plan, particularly for the social and affordable housing. It was going down— I have mentioned the figures already—and it will ramp up to deliver those 1.5 million homes during the course of this Parliament. It is very important that, as we do that, we deliver the kind of homes we want to see, in relation to design and net zero, and that they do not have a detrimental impact on our environment. My noble friends Lord Hunt and Lady Liddell have emphasised skills and investor confidence as further parts of this picture. They are very important, and I will say a little bit more about those in a moment.

The ambition of the Bill is really transformative. We want to mark the next step in the most significant reforms to the planning system in a generation. We are building on urgent action to unlock development, including: our new pro-growth National Planning Policy Framework published in December; ending the de facto ban on onshore wind; a review of the role of stat cons, as I mentioned to the noble Lord, Lord Fuller; supporting SME builders; and boosting local authority capacity. I have spoken before about the Government’s action on skills. All of this and the Bill will help deliver our Plan for Change, get 1.5 million safe and decent homes built and fast-track planning decisions on 150 major economic infrastructure projects by the end of this Parliament. We recognise the scale of the challenge. I look forward to working with noble Lords in this House to make sure that the Bill facilitates that scale of ambition.

On the specific issue of the reform of planning committees, many noble Lords have mentioned this, including the noble Baronesses, Lady Scott, Lady Coffey, Lady Jones, Lady Miller and Lady Pinnock, the noble Earl, Lord Russell, the noble Lords, Lord Mawson, Lord Gascoigne, Lord Shipley and Lord Bailey, and the noble Viscount, Lord Trenchard, and probably some others that I did not get round to writing down. This is a very important part of the Bill. Planning committees play a critical role in the planning system, ensuring adequate scrutiny is in place for developments and providing local democratic oversight of planning decisions. However, they are not currently operating as effectively as they could be.

We are not taking local decision-making out of local hands. Those decisions will continue to be vested locally, but we want to engage the public and councillors more at the stage of the local plan, where they can really have an influence on place shaping and can influence what they want to see in their communities, as a number of noble Lords have said.

We will be introducing a national scheme of delegation, which will facilitate faster decision-making, bring greater certainty to stakeholders and applicants and effectively utilise the planning professionals, by doing what they are best at. We are also introducing mandatory training for committee members. We have always had compulsory training for planning members in my local authority— I did not realise that it was not compulsory. We need to make sure we do that to get well-informed decision-making and improve consistency across the country.

A number of noble Lords mentioned the role of AI in planning. I met with the digital team in our department this morning, and it is making great strides forward in planning. This is very exciting: it is not just for digitising the planning system and mapping out all the spatial issues we face in the country, including all the nature mitigation that is needed, but it is also to help with consultation. On the local government consultations we are doing at the moment, we are getting hundreds of responses. If you can digitise the assessment of that, it is really going to help with the planning process, though, of course, it always needs human oversight.

The noble Lord, Lord Banner, rightly referred to resources and capacity in the Planning Inspectorate. I reassure noble Lords that consideration is being given to this.

The noble Baroness, Lady Miller, referred to Planning for Real; I remember it very well—just before I became a councillor, I got involved in a Planning for Real exercise. We are hoping to engage and encourage people with those kind of exercises as they draw up their local plans.

The noble Lord, Lord Lucas, spoke about digital twins and AI, which is another thing I have been very interested in. I know that Singapore has a fabulous way of doing this, and it is very important to planning.

I thank the noble Lord, Lord Murray, for his contribution on mediation. We are very supportive of that and are looking at it.

Some noble Lords suggested that reforms within our Bill remove democratic control from local people and restrict the input of community voices in the planning process. That is simply not the case. Engagement with communities is, and will remain, the cornerstone of our planning system and a vital step in the design of major infrastructure. We are currently consulting on the proposals for the scheme of delegation, so everybody will have a chance to contribute to that.

I will move on to wider housing and planning issues, including affordable housing. A number of noble Lords raised the issue of social and affordable housing, including the noble Lords, Lord Cameron, Lord Teverson, Lord Best and Lord Evans, and the noble Baronesses, Lady Jones and Lady Levitt. This is a vitally important issue. The Government’s manifesto commits us to delivering the biggest increase in social and affordable housing in a generation. The spending review confirmed £39 billion for a successor to the affordable homes programme. For the first time in recent memory, we will be able to give providers a decade of certainty over the capital funding they will have to build new, more ambitious housing development proposals. In the National Planning Policy Framework, we have asked local councils that, when they draw up their local plans, they assess the need not just for affordable housing, because that is a very difficult definition, but for social housing. That is critical.

On housing quality and design, the noble Lords, Lord Thurlow, Lord Crisp, Lord Shipley, Lord Carlile and Lord Best, the noble Earl, Lord Caithness, and the noble Baroness, Lady Levitt, all raised this issue. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Crisp, for meeting me to discuss this. We need to ensure that new developments are built to a high standard and the importance of good design, promoting the health and well-being of all those who live there. I apologise to the noble Lord, Lord Carlile, that architects have not been mentioned perhaps as much as he would have liked, but the NPPF makes clear the importance of well-designed, inclusive and safe places and how this can be achieved through local design policies, design codes and guidance. That includes transport, open spaces, and climate change mitigation and adaptation.

I will move on now, because time is pressing on, to the issues that I think were probably mentioned by most noble Lords: namely, the nature restoration fund and Part 3. If your Lordships do not mind, I will not read out all the names, because we would be here most of the evening.

When it comes to development and nature, the status quo is not working. We need to build on the success of policies such as diversity net gain and ensure that we do everything we can to deliver positive development. By moving to a more strategic approach to discharging obligations, the nature restoration fund will allow us to deliver environmental improvements at greater scale, with greater impact, while unlocking the development this country needs. We are confident that the new model will secure better outcomes for nature, driving meaningful nature recovery and moving us away from a system that is at the moment only treading water.

On the issue of regression, I reassure noble Lords that this new strategic approach will deliver more for nature, not less. That is why we have confirmed in the Bill that our reforms will not have the effect of reducing the level of environmental protection of existing environmental law. Through the NRF model we are moving away from piecemeal interventions and going further than simply offsetting harm, as is required under current legislation. We have been clear that environmental delivery plans will be put in place only where they are able to deliver better outcomes which will leave a lasting legacy of environmental improvement. I will not go into more detail on that now but will set it out in writing, because I know that lots of noble Lords are concerned about it.

On irreplaceable habitats, let me reassure everyone that we consider them to be just that: irreplaceable. The legislation is clear that an EDP can relate to a protected site or a protected species, with these being tightly defined in the legislation. As the Housing Minister made clear in the other place, the Bill does not affect existing protections for irreplaceable habitats under the National Planning Policy Framework. While there may be circumstances where an environmental feature is part of both a protected site and an irreplaceable habitat, an EDP will not allow action to be taken that damaged an irreplaceable habitat, as this would by definition be incapable of passing the overall improvement test. I hope that that has provided some reassurance.

I reassure the noble Baroness, Lady Willis, that green space in urban areas is already part of the planning system through the National Planning Policy Framework. A number of noble Lords commented on the capacity and capability of Natural England, and I will write to noble Lords on that, if that is okay.

The noble Lord, Lord Roborough, talked about the impact of the NRF on farmers. I know that that is a very important issue, and many in this House very ably represent the interests of farmers, so I welcome the opportunity to flag the opportunities the NRF presents for farming communities. We want to work in partnership with farmers and land managers to deliver conservation measures which will provide opportunities for them to support the delivery of such measures and diversify their business revenues.

I will write to all noble Lords about EDPs and all the other issues relating to Part 3. I say to the noble Lord, Lord Goldsmith, that he quoted my words back to me very accurately. I have now been to Poundbury, by the way, and seen the swift bricks in action. We recognise that these are a significant tool, and we have made it clear in the revised NPPF that developments should provide net gains such as that. I recognise why many would want to mandate this through legislation, but we think there is a better way of doing that, so we will be consulting on a new set of national policies, including a requirement for swift bricks to be incorporated into new buildings. I hope that that answers the question.

I shall talk briefly about the Gypsy and Traveller housing, mentioned by my noble friend Lady Whitaker, the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Manchester and the noble Baroness, Lady Bakewell. I share their frustrations at how this has been dealt with. As part of the revised National Planning Policy Framework, we have corrected long-standing inconsistencies in the way applications for sites are considered and provided greater clarity. We have revised the definition of Gypsies and Travellers to align with domestic and European law.

I see that I have run out of time. I will not try to cover all the other issues. I have got plenty to say on development corporations, infrastructure and so on, but I will write to all noble Lords who have taken part in this debate and answer the questions I have been asked, including on rural housing, protection of the green belt and so on.

I reiterate my thanks to your Lordships for your engagement with the Bill to this point and give particular thanks to the opposition spokespeople: I have been there, so I know what that is like, and I am grateful to you.

I look forward to working with all of you during the passage of this important and truly ambitious piece of legislation. My noble friend Lord Hanworth referred to the ambition shown by the post-war Government when reconstructing our country. It was that Government who took the pre-war planning inspiration from garden cities and Ebenezer Howard a step further to create my town and other first-generation new towns, with the boost that gave to the economy. We now have the opportunity to take the next step to clean energy, to use artificial intelligence, to have a new clean energy transport infrastructure and to plan the new homes and communities that a new generation will need. I look forward to working with all of you on that over the next few weeks and months.

Bill read a second time and committed to a Committee of the Whole House.

House adjourned at 10.04 pm.