Planning and Infrastructure Bill

Debate between Baroness Pinnock and Lord Fuller

Report stage
Wednesday 22nd October 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Pinnock (LD)]

My Lords, we on the Liberal Democrat Benches are firm and constant supporters of the right of locally elected councillors to make decisions in their area based on clear national policies. The proposals in the Bill for a national diktat of delegation are the backdrop to this group of amendments. The Government are ostensibly in favour of devolution of decision-making. However, there is a tendency within the Bill to centralise decisions on planning by making it virtually impossible for local decisions to reflect local need and nuance.

Amendment 62A, tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Coffey, is interesting but could be problematic—actually, I thought it less problematic when I heard the noble Baroness’s explanation of the first part of the amendment. Although there are occasions during the life of a plan when unforeseen events arise which mean the local plan is not sacrosanct, on the whole it ought to be, otherwise it will be nibbled away at during its lifetime through precedent.

I have some sympathy with the second part of the noble Baroness’s amendment. Too often, housing sites are assessed as being able to accommodate a large number of units, then along comes the developer—with his eyes on the profit line—who applies for a different balance of houses in which larger, more expensive and more profitable units are to be built. The consequence is that the balance that we need, which is somewhere in between, is not met. The result of allowing developers to determine the density of a site is that more land then has to be allocated for development. I will give one example from my own area. A housing site was allocated in the local plan, under the national rules, for 402 homes. Currently, just over 200 are being built, because of the need—apparently—for five-bed exec homes. The local assessment of housing need shows that what are required are start-up homes and smaller homes with two or three beds. I have a lot of sympathy with that part of the amendment.

Amendment 63, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, is right to seek to put safeguards in place in the rush to take the local out of local democracy. As the noble Lord explained, the amendment is to ensure that the affirmative resolution would be required for the initial changes to the national scheme of delegation. That has got to be right, because it will set the tone for the future of what is accepted as being part of a national scheme of delegation and what is okay for local decision-makers. That is fundamental, and the noble Lord is right to raise it in the amendment. If he wishes to take it to a vote, we on these Benches will support him.

The noble Baroness, Lady Scott of Bybrook, has not yet had the opportunity to speak to her Amendment 76, so I hope she does not mind if I comment on it. We on these Benches will support the noble Baroness if she wishes to take it to a vote. This amendment would be another move towards empowering local decision-makers with the right to take planning applications to committee where there is a volume of valid objections to an application, and then to have the debate in a public setting.

Amendment 87F, tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Coffey, seeks a sensible change to help understand where the real problems lie in the failure to build the houses the country needs. As the noble Baroness hinted, it is not with local planning committees or authorities, otherwise there would not be 1.2 million units with full planning permission waiting for construction. Those figures are from the ONS, and I am not going to quarrel with the ONS. If the Government could get the housing developers to start building those 1.2 million units, we would be well on the way to the 1.5 million that the Government reckon they need during the lifetime of this Parliament.

This is an important group because it is about getting the balance between national need and local decision-making, and between a national view of what is acceptable and local elected councillors being able to reflect local need, nuance and requirements in their local setting. I hope that at least the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, will put his amendment to the vote. It is fundamental to the democratic process to have local decisions on planning.

[Lord Fuller (Con)]

My Lords, I strongly support Amendment 76 in the name of my noble friends on the Front Bench. As I have reminded noble Lords before, I have sat on a planning committee many times, I have appointed such a committee as a leader of a council and chosen the chairman, and I know it is a very important quasi-judicial position. Planning exists to arbitrate between the public good and the private interest. I use the word arbitrate purposely because people who sit on the planning committee have a difficult job. They have to weigh up so much conflicting information. It is an adversarial system, because, ultimately, either the proposer wins or the objector wins. There is no grey purpose in the middle.

Much of the Bill is established under the false premise that local planning committees are the blockers of development and it is only with the ranks of officials that we can get things going. Of course, this is rubbish. Evidence for that assertion was given by the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom, which this morning ruled that it was wrong that Governments and quangos had asserted that Ramsar sites had an equivalence to European sites and thus had to have a full environmental assessment, and overturned it on that narrow point. Within an hour, we had officials and Treasury solicitors boasting how this Bill is going to turn that around and reinstall that unnecessary gold-plating—gold-plating that, after four years, the Court of Appeal ruled should not have happened.

The Government’s suggestion that Ministers should usurp planning committees and instead form a national planning committee among themselves in Marsham Street is as fanciful as it is risible. It is a recipe for hurry up and slow down, and it is not fooling anybody that that is going to speed up development.

The premise is that officialdom brings none of its own particular personal or institutional prejudices to bear, but each quango brings its own vetoes. We have Natural England, with a track record of leaving no stone unturned in blocking or delaying development. We have the railways, which ballast every proposal for a new footbridge with £5 million-worth of cost and preposterous delays. We have the highways authorities, which tie themselves in knots over overly precious technical guidance and misdirect themselves that the private motorcar is intrinsically bad, when it is not. And that is before we get to the other bad actors, which time does not permit me to list.

I do not deny the importance of these quango representations, but the problem is that they all claim a veto, and it is from this that we have the £100 million bat bridge or that mitigating trade in great crested newts, which are rare in Europe but commonplace in every pond in my electoral ward in Norfolk. It is the way that planning works: it takes only one of these proverbial blackballs or vetoes from one of the statutory consultees to stymie a proposal.

Planning and Infrastructure Bill

Debate between Baroness Pinnock and Lord Fuller

Report stage
Monday 20th October 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Pinnock (LD)]

My Lords, at the beginning of Report on this important Bill, I move my Amendment 1, which is to insert a new purpose clause at the beginning of the Bill to define what it is about. While this Bill aims to deliver significant change, without a clear guiding statement of intent we risk losing sight of the balanced objectives necessary to truly sustainable development. Amendment 1 sets out the core purposes of this Bill:

“to … accelerate the delivery of new homes and critical infrastructure … improve the planning and consenting processes … support nature recovery through more effective development and restoration, and … increase community acceptability of infrastructure and development”.

This is not merely a statement of aspiration. It is an important mechanism for accountability and clarity that directs the interpretation and implementation of every subsequent clause.

In Committee, there was support from across the Committee for a similar amendment. The benefit of adding a purpose clause to the Bill is that it will enshrine in law the tension between the need for construction and the requirement for robust environmental and democratic safeguards. The necessity of explicitly stating the duty to support nature recovery, for instance, directly addresses those profound concerns debated in Committee on Part 3 of the Bill.

Equally, many have voiced concerns about the negative impact of these reforms on local democracy and community voices. The CPRE, for instance, has concerns regarding the “dangerous erosion of democracy” inherent in measures that increase ministerial powers, such as the ability to issue holding directions to stop councils refusing planning permission when they do not accede to the law. To prevent them by issuing holding directions is a huge step in denuding local voices and local democratic councils from making the decisions about issues that affect their areas and communities. The inclusion of, for instance, the need to

“increase community acceptability of infrastructure and development”

directly mandates that the Government and implementing authorities address these democratic deficits. It would transform community engagement from a burdensome hoop to jump through—a problem noted by the previous regime in the Planning Act 2008, which led to proposals removing pre-application consultation requirements—into a stated core objective of the entire legislative framework.

The Government’s stated objective for this Bill remains the right one: we must

“speed up and streamline the delivery of new homes and critical infrastructure”;

however, acceleration without clear direction risks unintended long-term consequences that undermine the very public good that the Government seek to achieve. By accepting Amendment 1, we would embed clarity, provide a crucial framework for legal interpretation and establish legislative accountability for all stakeholders, ensuring that this major infrastructure Bill delivers not just efficiency but genuine sustainable development and broad public confidence. I beg to move.

[Lord Fuller (Con)]

My Lords, so here we are again. I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, for focusing our minds at the outset on what this Bill is about. It is a welcome amendment because the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, has at least attempted to bring some thematic coherence to a ragbag of proposals from a dozen departments, none of which appears to be talking to each other.

I have read the press notices and compared them to the Bill’s text—never has a Bill been more oversold by a Government. Belatedly, it now seems that the Government’s purpose for this Bill is to persuade the OBR that it will speed up the process of development so that its economic forecasts can help the Chancellor balance her books. But most of the proposals of this Bill will prove that Newtonian notion that, for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. It hands development veto powers to a self-serving quango and it talks about empowerment and streamlining processes, but it emasculates those with the local knowledge and mandate to unblock officialdom. Instead, it proposes a system whereby the Secretary of State is to become a one-person planning committee—good luck keeping to the 12-week determination deadlines on that one. It could have ironed out Hillside or introduced a proportionality test so that at least the little boys could get on, but there is boneheaded resistance there.

One talking head on the “Today” programme this morning bemoaned the lack of planning permissions, the number of which seems to be falling like autumn leaves, but failed to realise that it is the building safety regulator that has put the black spot on building in London, with a response rate of at least 44 weeks. On that, the Bill is silent. So, instead of unblocking the blockers, it creates an EDP process that is so ponderous that it is unlikely to unlock any stalled homes within this Parliament. It is three and a half years since we started the neutrality madness, and it will be at least another three and a half years before we can rip off that scab. So much for speeding up building; all it is doing is putting speed bumps in the way.

Of course, I welcome the important and critical proposals to free up the placement of roadside power poles to improve the electricity grid. But even this Government recognise that the potential of development corporations is something for the next Parliament—just at the moment that those structures and powers to unleash them are being thrown up in the air. For all the bluster and press notices, this Bill will slow development, not speed it up. By any measure, the Government’s purpose will be frustrated by their own legislation.

I come to the amendment of the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, which would

“accelerate the delivery of new homes … improve the planning and consenting processes … support nature … and … increase community acceptability”.

This is what we will debate over four long days. But what the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, has done is laid out the functions of the Bill; they are not its purpose. The reason that this Bill is in such a muddle is that it has not been framed through the purpose lens that dates back to the Labour Government of the post-war period, when the planning system was established in the first place.

Quite simply, the purpose of planning is to arbitrate between private interests and the public good; everything flows from there, and that balance between private and public is what makes the system work. It makes the economy flourish and enhances the environment. This Bill gets that balance all wrong, with too much state interference and not enough private initiative, so I am sorry to say that it is bound to fail. That is a shame, because we need to get those homes built and those rivers cleaned up, that clean power flowing and those new towns going—but little will be achieved, because in this Bill all roads flow to Marsham Street, back home to the dead hand of the state.

Planning and Infrastructure Bill

Debate between Baroness Pinnock and Lord Fuller

Committee stage
Tuesday 9th September 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Fuller (Con)]

I had not realised what the noble Lord was going to say from the Dispatch Box, but I wish to support his Amendments 135HZG and 135HZH What he could have said—but did not—was that there is almost an interaction with the previous group, in that sometimes there is a perverse incentive to add delay to a process to run down the clock. However, in this case, the noble Lord could have said that, as a result of those delays, a whole series of new studies would need to be remade. For instance, ecology studies may last for only two or three years so may be triggered once more, and they in turn can only be created at certain times of the year—in the spring, for example. The combination effect, in respect not just of the previous group but of this group, means that the delays could be even longer, so I strongly support the noble Lord. Finality and certainty are important, and I support him not only for the reasons he gives but for the avoidance of interference with the previous set of amendments.

[Baroness Pinnock (LD)]

My Lords, my noble friend Lord Teverson has raised an important aspect of the planning process in his amendment on planning enforcement. Planning enforcement can be a neglected part of the planning system, partly because it is not a statutory function but a discretionary one, and as such is not necessarily funded to the extent that it ought to be. Effective enforcement is vital in the planning process so that everyone—the developer, the council and local people—can have trust that what has been agreed will be fulfilled.

I will give noble Lords one example from my role as a councillor, when I was contacted about a housing development which is adjacent to a motorway. A resident raised the concern that the developers were not adhering to the agreed siting of units. Planning enforcement went on site to investigate and discovered that the construction was undermining the motorway banking, which would have had catastrophic consequences if it had continued. A stop notice was issued and the matter resolved; I should say that this was a major housing developer.

Enforcement is key for the integrity of the planning system, for the conditions that are applied to a planning application when it is given consent and for residents who have asked questions about its impact. It is therefore key to retaining the trust of residents, as my noble friend has said, and so that democratic decision-making can be relied on to check that planning conditions are properly fulfilled. That requires adequate funding. I would like to hear from the Minister whether the Government are of a mind to make a move from a discretionary function to a statutory one, which would then be adequately funded for the very important role that planning enforcement plays.

Planning and Infrastructure Bill

Debate between Baroness Pinnock and Lord Fuller

Committee stage
Thursday 4th September 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Pinnock (LD)]

The intervention by the noble Baroness, Lady Laing, seemed to distance where somebody lives from their behaviours. The intervention she made was irrelevant. The fact is that the previous Conservative Government started using hotels for temporary accommodation for asylum seekers and made no effort to increase the speed of assessment for those asylum seekers, so that they could have certainty in their lives and local accommodation would not be put under undue stress. It was not only a failure of public policy by the previous Government; it was inhumane. It surprised me that the noble Baroness, Lady Scott, for whom I have high regard, has seen fit to bring these amendments. It is out of character for her to do so. Perhaps on later reflection, she will regret bringing them.

[Lord Fuller (Con)]

This is the Planning and Infrastructure Bill—the opportunity to have this sort of wider debate on asylum, borders and infrastructure was yesterday with the borders and asylum Bill. What we are trying to do here is focus on the very narrow point about when there is a change in the planning status. As my noble friend said, when there is development, should the rules that cover planning and development be engaged and, if so, to what extent? I think my noble friend’s amendments—I am sure she will say something aligned with this when she winds up—would establish the principle that, when development happens, we cannot just pick and choose which bits are subject to planning law and which are not. When development happens, local people should be able to have their say.

It pains me to do so, but I ask the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, directly: is it her position that local people should not have a say when development happens and there is a material change of use, either from a hotel to an HMO or from an HMO to a hostel? If it is, we need to know.

[Lord in Waiting/Government Whip (Lord Wilson of Sedgefield) (Lab)]

I ask the noble Lord to get to the point of his question.