Planning and Infrastructure Bill

Baroness Thornhill Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 25th June 2025 Lords Chamber

[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delivery has been sluggish, housing needs remain unmet, and many local authorities are still grappling with outdated planning frameworks and, as has been said, many do not have an up-to-date local plan.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.