Planning and Infrastructure Bill

Lord Cameron of Dillington Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 25th June 2025 Lords Chamber

[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.