Planning and Infrastructure Bill (Second sitting)

Amanda Martin Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 24th April 2025 Public Bill Committees

[David Simmonds]

I think it covers both, but each of those things is addressed separately in the Bill.

Jack Airey: It goes back to my initial point that community participation in the planning process is so low, and you often only hear about the negative parts. If we could boost that a bit—in truth, I am not sure how you do that in a way that is not totally burdensome on local authorities, because often people have better things to do than go to a town hall on a Tuesday evening. Raising that is a difficult but necessary thing to do. That is how you begin to spell out not just the negatives but the benefits of development on the local planning system side.

On the NSIP reforms, I know you will hear later from Catherine Howard, who is much more of an expert on this than I am. It looks like a wholly positive thing to me. The Government press release talked about saving around 12 months off an NSIP development consent order process, which is a hugely positive thing.

Sam Richards: I agree with Jack. Dare I say it, I think there is a role here for elected representatives in making the case when we need to build things. I know it is hard, not least when development is poorly planned or ugly, and of course when there is local opposition it is often tempting to row in on the side of those who are opposing development, but there is a job to do here. Fundamentally, we have not built sufficient infrastructure for decades and, as a result, we have the highest industrial energy costs in the world. London has the most expensive housing in Europe. We have not built the infrastructure we need for decades. It is incumbent on all of us, including our elected representatives, to make the case for the building that we need.

[Amanda Martin (Portsmouth North) (Lab)]

Q Very few homes have been built in my constituency in the last decade. Sam, you highlighted how previous Governments failed catastrophically with the amount of time and taxpayers’ money that was put into planning and development across the country. Jack, you said the existing system is “okay”. Is “okay” enough for my constituents who need homes and communities with natural environments around them?

Jack Airey: I think what I said is that the system for securing and spending developer contributions is okay. I do not think the wider planning system is okay. In terms of how you can improve it, a lot of the measures in the Bill are very worth while, and a lot of the changes in the NPPF are incredibly worth while. There are many more things that the Government can do, especially on the national development management policies.

Sam Richards: The system is fundamentally broken. I am sure your constituents are furious that their energy bills are through the roof and they cannot afford the rent, and they are right to be so.

[Lewis Cocking]

Q I want to come back to something you said at the beginning, Jack—I probably should say that I am still a local councillor until 1 May. You basically said that no one engages with the planning system, or that the public—constituents—do not engage with it. What evidence do you have to suggest that? I would slightly push back on such a sweeping statement, so I just want to understand what evidence you have to back that up.

Jack Airey: At Public First we do lots of opinion research. We do public polling, focus groups and something we call immersives. We go and speak to people and ask what they think about things. In some polling we have asked, “Have you engaged in planning applications? Do you get involved in the local plan?” and it is minuscule proportions of people. We go and speak to people about developments that are happening.

There is definitely opposition to development and it is often very intense. Often, if you listen to debates in the building across the road or you look online, it looks like it is totally representative of a local community, but often, if you speak to people on the ground, most do not care about it. They might even support it. While there is some opposition—I am sure you hear it a lot in your constituencies when you go doorstep to doorstep —it is much smaller than it seems. That is the message I was trying to give. It is about engaging those people who need to be housed, if we are talking about housing, just as much as the people who oppose development. We should talk to them a bit more.

--- Later in debate ---

[David Simmonds]

Q I have two connected questions. A lot has been said about the role of local authorities in decision making on planning. I am aware that councils are not short of planning guidance from central Government—every element of a local plan must already be in detailed conformity with 19 chapters of the national planning policy framework. Is there any element of your local planning process that is there for any other purpose than complying with the law, as passed by Parliament, in respect of planning? Have you gold plated locally?

Secondly, coming back to the point about strategic infrastructure projects, one of the issues is that local authorities have a lot of obligations, particularly under environmental law, whereby they have a specific legal duty around issues like air quality. Effectively excluding them from the decision-making process or even a failure to intervene in the process would leave them open to legal challenge. Air quality is a good example: I know from my experience at Heathrow airport that there was a local authority fine of £300 million per annum for the level of air quality breaches caused by Heathrow airport, through which we would have been judicially reviewed by ClientEarth had we not judicially reviewed central Government over their proposals to expand that.

Can you think of some other areas, around either environmental or other legal obligations, that are imposed on local authorities where the role you play in either the development and consent order process or those national strategic infrastructure projects is arising not simply out of local politics but because of legal obligations to your residents that you have to fulfil?

Councillor Wright: With regard to nationally significant infrastructure projects, for instance, I was thinking about the fact that we are responsible for the environmental impact assessments. I worry at times that we do not have enough weight with those when it comes to the actual decision making.

One example, which we are testing at the moment, relates to battery storage—a new thing that is exciting lots of people—and whether we can predict not just the here and now, but what would happen in the event of a problem. If we are going to have a huge array of batteries on what was good agricultural land suddenly blighting the landscape, we could ensure that the industry is not allowed to use a type of battery that is more prone to cause huge environmental issues if it catches fire, when there are already good batteries that could be used. But it comes down to a financial decision. In some places, we would actually like more weight to be given to the powers that we already have, but quite often, as you say, we find ourselves guarding the place but not being able to make the decisions that would avoid the need for guards in the first place.

Councillor Hug: My concern is not about gold plating. It is about the question whether local authorities across the country have the capacity on their planning teams to deal with the range and breadth of the requirements that are placed on them. That is one reason why local government reform is in the air, but I would also welcome some movement on fees. We have to make sure that planning is seen as a field that people want to go into, to help unlock these things, rather than these people being seen purely as the blockers. Ultimately, part of the blockage is that the system is not working effectively. The question is how we can work with local authorities to deliver not only training to communities, but greater support to the officer core so that they can move stuff through as quickly as possible.

Councillor Clewer: I do not think we gold plate our local plans. There are many councils that want to go beyond existing guidance, particularly on net zero, for example. That is mostly to stop expensive retrofitting in future and make people’s bills cheaper. There are areas where councils will want to go beyond existing national policy, but every example I can think of was done for a very good reason and will end up with broad public support.

On the bigger issue of legislation, yes, there are some real challenges. Some environmental legislation can be significantly challenging when you want to see building or when you are looking to find a way to mitigate or even unlock. For example, I have a brownfield site in Trowbridge where they need to leave a bat corridor by a train line. How on earth that makes sense I honestly do not know, but it is making the viability of the site really challenging. Some sort of off-site provision would be far more appropriate: it would be far better for the bats and would help to unlock development.

There are also problems around highways issues, for example. Whether it be for economic development or building land, there is an inability for us to work properly with National Highways to deal with motorway junctions, or the A36 in my case. The constraints that that places on us can be real blockers to our desire to build in areas that would be sensible, as opposed to in areas where developers are putting forward planning permissions.

Lastly, it would be really nice if we could tell developers where they should be building, rather than developers saying, “This bit of land? We can’t build on it yet,” when we know full well that we will get a speculative application the moment the local plan is through for that bit of land as well, having just fought the contentious bit of land.

[Amanda Martin]

Q I am not a councillor, so I am coming at this from a different angle. We had some answers from the previous panel on compulsory purchase orders, particularly from the NFU. I am not dismissing its comments in any way, but not all compulsory purchase orders are about farmland and areas like that. In my city of Portsmouth, we have buildings and derelict land that have had no planning on them for decades. How could the Government support local authorities to deliver schemes in the public interest using these powers?

Councillor Hug: The LGA broadly supports the new powers. Obviously we are looking to find ways to ensure that local authorities can take advantage of those new powers when they come in. That goes back to helping councils to be more entrepreneurial about unlocking land and giving them the support that they need to do that. Whether it is in Portsmouth—a place I know well; I was born there—or to a certain extent in parts of my patch, these are important tools in the arsenal, but it is also about unlocking those conversations. Having that on the books should hopefully enable those conversations to happen, because ultimately you want to come to an agreement with a partner to avoid having to use legal powers. It will help to unlock those conversations. It is still not going to be a magic wand, and I am not going to be able to walk down my high street and say, “That, that and that,” and suddenly unlock all these things. There are processes in place to prevent this being misused. We strongly welcome the intention to go into this space and the proposals in front of us.

Councillor Clewer: If you look at the points about London and land assembly, they make a great deal of sense to me. Please be careful, however, with the assumption that brownfield land will be made viable simply through compulsory purchase. The problem with most brownfield development is a viability one. By the time you have demolished what is on it and then remediated the land, the net value of that land is negative.

There is no point in a council compulsorily purchasing something that then has negative value for the council. That will just bankrupt councils. If we are going to unlock brownfield, something more significant has to be done, either to use some sort of brownfield development fund—that feels a bit wrong, but it is a way you could look at it—or to compel developers to deal with brownfield before they are allowed to build on greenfield. We would suddenly see town centres all over the country being redeveloped if developers were not allowed to build on the greenfield until they had built on the brownfield.

Councillor Wright: I will not repeat any points. Brownfield, for instance, in a rural area could be something that had glass houses on it. It could be a site that has no connectivity whatever to any settlement and has no services, and still be brownfield land. It would potentially come under CPO. At DCN, we think that there should be a subsection to CPO, and not just concentrating on land. If we want to look at regeneration and the issues in town centres, where there are vacant properties and areas blighted by crime or that just need added value, at the moment the CPO process is still a little too legal-heavy. The route to appeal, which a lot of it will go through, takes far too long. Perhaps there is a role going forward with mayoral authorities for that to be the appeal route. If we could see a system that shortens the CPO process for regen of property in town centres, different from land assembly, that would be useful.

[The Chair]

That brings us to the end of the allocated time for questions. I thank the panel for answering the questions and for their time.

Examination of Witness

Catherine Howard gave evidence.

--- Later in debate ---

[Gideon Amos]

Q I, too, am grateful for the Ministers’ time today. In the interests of brevity, I want to ask a question of the Energy Minister. There are provisions in the Bill on overhead lines at generating stations. Are the Government looking at further reforms that would make the delivery of the electricity network simpler and more straightforward, by widening permitted development for the electricity distribution network and transmission network, given that we all want to reach net zero and the challenges that industry faces?

Michael Shanks: That is a really important question. Probably the single most important part of us being able to achieve our clean power mission will be the necessary grid upgrades, many of which should have been decades before. We now need to build out the grid, so we are looking at a range of options. I think that connections reform is important for making sure that we are only building the grid that we absolutely need to build. The bill discounts and the community benefits that go with that are all around trying to improve acceptability, but we will look at a range of other issues as well, including around permitted development rights.

What we are really clear on is that we have a clear indication of the projects necessary to hit clean power by 2030. We know where those need to be built and what the barriers are to doing that, and we want to move forward with those as quickly as possible. I think that the community acceptability point is key because, unlike some of the other parts of our electricity system, pylons and substations are probably the ones that communities have the biggest challenge with, particularly because they are going through multiple communities in the course of a line. We have evidenced that the bill-discount scheme will improve that acceptability to help build those much faster. Of course, that is the only way that we will achieve clean power—by getting the power to where it is needed most.

[Amanda Martin]

Q First, it is welcome that we have a Government who are working on a Bill across Departments, so it is not only on planning but also on the environment. We have heard from a panel today on the move from the “first come, first served” approach to “first ready, first connected” for connections to the grid. We know, and have heard from other panellists, that, in recent years, the delivery of new homes across the country has been delayed by grid capacity. We also know that this particularly affects small and medium-sized developers. How will the Bill support our SME developers—and, in turn, growth—in our communities?

Michael Shanks: It is a really good question. To Mr Amos’s question, I said that network was probably the single most important thing, but connections reform is probably the single most important lever in clearing out what is now 756 GW in a queue to connect, which is frankly an absurd amount. This is therefore really a fundamental shift to move from “first applied, first in the queue” to what is strategically important: is a project actually ready to be connected? As has been discussed, we have so many of these zombie projects that take up a space in the queue for years on end.

We have also been clear about prioritising what is strategically important to our energy mix, particularly on some of the questions around storage, to make sure we actually have the right capacity. Connecting is really important, so we want to bring that queue down as quickly as possible. That frees up the connections process for new generation to join far faster, but the other important side of it is that, for the projects in the queue on the demand side, it frees up capacity for those to connect much more quickly as well.

The estimates at the moment are probably conservative, based on how quickly the growth of AI, datacentres and things are taking hold, but the estimate is that, by 2050, the demand for electricity in this country will have doubled. This step—clearing out the queue now—is therefore really important, but so is putting in place a process that makes sure that the queue does not fill back up after we have done this particular clear-out. The Bill therefore details the process that will be taken, but also the role that the Government will have in setting strategic priorities for queue management for future connections.

The first stage of that will be the clean power action plan, but it will allow us in the future to look at some other aspects of the economy to ensure that we are prioritising the projects that get through. We have resisted the approach of prioritising demand projects, because obviously how you prioritise those becomes much more subjective, but if we clear out a lot of the 756 GW now, we can connect projects and get the economy growing as a result.

[Amanda Martin]

Q Minister Pennycook, how will this help SMEs, obviously when we have unlocked that grid?

Matthew Pennycook: There are a variety of ways in which the Bill will help SMEs. It is probably worth my saying, because we have had a variety of questions on issues that are not directly within the scope of the Bill—the new towns taskforce and programme, and build-out rates where the Government have taken action and are exploring what further steps we can take—that this is not the totality of the interventions that we are introducing to support SMEs.

However, to go back to Mr Murphy’s question, a good example would be the nature restoration fund. We know that nutrient neutrality and diffuse constraints of that kind are particularly affecting SME house builders in those sensitive river catchments, so there are a number of ways in which the provisions in the Bill will directly benefit small and medium house builders.

[Olly Glover]

Q Recent Government announcements on housing targets—around 1.5 million, but only 18,000 will be social homes—have led some to ask whether the Government are doing enough to promote affordable and social housing. Does the Bill go far enough, particularly in relation to spatial development strategies, to mandate more affordable and social housing provision?

Matthew Pennycook: To correct you on a point made there, I think the figure of 18,000 that you referenced is solely what we think could be delivered through the £2 billion we secured recently and announced as a down payment on the future grant funding through the successor programme to the affordable homes programme. It is not 18,000 affordable homes as social out of 1.5 million—that would be completely unacceptable. We are trying to, through all of our reforms, deliver the biggest increase in social and affordable house building in a generation.