Planning and Infrastructure Bill

Baroness Grender Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 25th June 2025 Lords Chamber

[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.