Planning and Infrastructure Bill

Dan Tomlinson Excerpts

Report stage
Monday 9th June 2025 Commons Chamber

[Paul Holmes]

The hon. Gentleman says “only up to 1%”, but given the international situation, this country should be producing its own food, and that land should be protected. He may need to catch up, because I understand that the NFU now wants the Bill to go further and completely ban solar panels on high-quality land. I suggest that he speaks to the NFU again, and then comes back to this House and backs new clause 39. The NFU speaks up for our farmers, so we should listen if it is not happy with what is in the Bill. Instead of giving me a quote from a former NFU employee, the hon. Gentleman should listen to the NFU’s current leadership, and then maybe change his comments.

[Dan Tomlinson (Chipping Barnet) (Lab)]

Does the hon. Member believe that farmers are able to choose how best to use their land?

[Paul Holmes]

Of course I believe that farmers know how to make best use of their land, but this Government are taking power away from farmers, whether by increasing the power to issue compulsory purchase orders for land that farmers want to use to produce food, or by reducing the money that they will get from the CPOs that the Government are advocating for. Farmers see more and more agricultural land being taken out of use. I suggest that the hon. Gentleman reads the Bill and the measures that the Minister is bringing forward, which undermine our farmers and stop them from being able to do the job that they want to do.

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[Dan Tomlinson (Chipping Barnet) (Lab)]

The Bill before the House has the potential to be one of the most pro-growth pieces of legislation passed by this place for decades and to transform our country for the better, but the amendments proposed will blunt its impact and make us all worse off. We should reject them for the prosperity of our constituents and the future of our country.

Every day in this place has to be about our constituents and the lives they lead. In Chipping Barnet, time and again I see the impact of our failure to build homes. Take Maryam—a victim of domestic violence and mother of a seven-year-old, working a zero-hours contract. She found herself with nowhere suitable to live to the point that she was living in a car. Or take Hayley—a wheelchair user living in a property that is not accessible for her. Due to a lack of available housing that is appropriate for her, she is often housebound because she simply cannot leave her home without support.

These are the stories of Britain today, but it does not need to be like this. This Bill gives us a once-in-a-generation opportunity to fix many of the things holding our country back. For too long, we have not built enough in this country, and we are paying a huge price for that. Under-investment in our homes and infrastructure has made us all worse off, both financially and socially, living in homes that skewer the prospect of a good life. That is why I do not support the Opposition amendments.

I also do not support amendment 69 proposed by my hon. Friend the Member for North East Hertfordshire (Chris Hinchliff), which sadly misses the mark. Labour was elected on a manifesto that sought to prioritise growth and making people better off. The Bill demonstrates how that is possible, alongside improved protections for nature. The nature restoration fund is a genuine win-win, but its successful and timely implementation is put at risk by the amendment.

[Ellie Chowns]

Will the hon. Member give way?

[Dan Tomlinson]

I will make a bit more progress.

Let us take the example of nutrient neutrality. It is estimated that no fewer than 160,000 homes across the country have been blocked by Natural England on that basis. That is because on-site mitigation on a site-by-site basis is often virtually impossible, and those homes remain stalled. The environmental delivery plans that Natural England will produce will mean that rather than homes being held up by those rules, the very issues causing nutrient neutrality challenges can be addressed in a strategic way—better for building, for nature and for people. EDPs take the challenge of nutrient neutrality seriously and mean that builders can get stalled sites built, providing much-needed new homes.

[Chris Hinchliff (North East Hertfordshire) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend may have slightly confused the point of amendment 69, which is merely to address the concerns raised by the Office for Environmental Protection and to ensure that the nature restoration fund works to deliver exactly the points that he describes with the right nature protection.

[Dan Tomlinson]

I will come to the point my hon. Friend raises in a second.

If the amendment were adopted, the homes that have been blocked to date would continue to be blocked, and vast numbers would face unacceptable delays or, indeed, never be built. What would happen under the amendment, as we can interpret it, is that we would first have to wait for the EDP to be drafted, for the relevant funding to be secured and for the funding to be distributed to the relevant farmers or others who can help with the mitigation. The works would then have to take place; the impact of the mitigation would have to be monitored; and the monitoring would then have to conclude that it had been a success before any new homes in an area could be built where nutrient neutrality is a concern.

[Chris Curtis]

Does the hon. Member agree that what he has just described would lead to more delays in the system, which would mean that more planning permissions were held up—something that Opposition Members have complained about? If the amendment were passed, the requirement would also add a lot more expense to the system, which would mean more viability problems and fewer social homes being built.

[Dan Tomlinson]

I agree with those points. It would also make it virtually impossible to meet our manifesto commitment, on which we were elected, to build the 1.5 million homes that we need over this Parliament.

[Paul Holmes]

The hon. Member knows that I am a big fan of his. He makes a speech about our and other amendments blocking the delivery of homes. Will he therefore criticise his Government, who have reduced the number of homes required in his constituency through reducing the number of houses being built in London under his mayor?

[Dan Tomlinson]

I expect the hon. Member knows that the housing targets have been reduced in London because of the additional premium that was put on by the previous Government just to make life more difficult for the Mayor of London, which we all know Conservatives love to do. We are trying to be reasonable and proportionate in the location of the new homes.

As I was saying, it is important for us to do all we can to ensure that we can hit our target of 1.5 million new homes. As much as I respect my hon. Friend the Member for North East Hertfordshire and his work in this space, I hope his amendment will not command the support of the House today.

I know my hon. Friend and Members on both sides of the House are strong supporters of social housing, but without the unamended changes in the Bill, we will not get the social homes that we need to be built. People have spoken movingly about those living in temporary accommodation. I spent four years or so as a child living in emergency and temporary accommodation. I was homeless for a number of years. Back then—15 or 20 years ago—there were not that many young children who were homeless and in temporary accommodation. There are now 160,000 children—one in 21 children in London, one in every single class—in temporary accommodation. We cannot allow a system that fails both nature and those children to persist. I implore any colleagues thinking of voting for the amendment to think of those children and the vital homes that could be built, and built quickly and at pace.

[Sean Woodcock (Banbury) (Lab)]

Will my hon. Friend give way?

[Dan Tomlinson]

I should make progress so that others can speak; my hon. Friend and I will have to talk later.

This Bill and this Government are all about the economic growth that ultimately is the route to more jobs, more opportunities and higher living standards—a better life for all of us in every part of the country. That is the potential of this Bill, and we must match the scale of the problem with the scale of our ambition. Britain’s economic decline has gone on for too long. Families are suffering with a crippling cost of living crisis, driven by high housing costs in many parts of the country and high energy bills everywhere. We just do not invest as a country; we do not build, and year after year we find ourselves surprised that we are worse off and that we are stuck in a doom loop from which no politicians in recent decades, if we are honest, have had the guts to pull us out.

We finally have a Government elected on a promise to wrest us from this decline, and legislation that takes steps in the right direction to do just that. Of course, there is more to do—much more—but this is a strong legislative start. For the prosperity of all our constituents, I hope the Bill passes unamended today.

[Blake Stephenson (Mid Bedfordshire) (Con)]

I rise to speak in support of new clauses 43, 44, 52, 53 and 81, if I have time. Mid Bedfordshire is a fast-growing area and has accommodated more than its fair share of new homes in the past decade. Since 2012, the two districts that my constituency covers have delivered over 35,000 new homes, including the new town of Wixams. Yet this Government would have us believe that those people in my constituency who have seen housing growth outpace services, who are still waiting for the long-promised GP surgery, for train stations and for other infrastructure, and who fear that the character of their historic Ends villages is being lost, are all blockers because they are concerned about what more badly planned development would mean for the overstretched amenities and services in their area.

The Bill is an opportunity to lead. It is an opportunity not to pit blockers against builders but to deliver a system that turns blockers into builders. Regrettably, as it stands, the Bill will fail, but it does not have to fail. My new clause 52 would create a fairer way of managing new towns by reforming the new towns programme, which seems expressly designed to make local communities resent the towns foisted upon them. It would replace that new towns model with one that does not involve a double whammy of house building—currently, communities that want to do the right thing and build the houses that people need find every patch of countryside is hoovered up because the Government have added a new town on top of the developable area in their district.

My new clause 53 would close the loophole that allows planning authorities to grant developments on floodplains. That is a perfectly sensible and pragmatic position. People in Maulden in my constituency know all too well how bad development compounds the risk of flooding. They are honest hard-working people who want to enjoy the warm and dry homes that their hard work has paid for, but the Government are backing big-box developers, not them. The new clause would prevent developers from getting away high and dry with their profits while our constituents pay the price in flooded homes. New clause 44, in the name of my hon. Friend the Member for Ruislip, Northwood and Pinner (David Simmonds), would do the same by ensuring that where development does happen, developers must deliver and maintain sustainable urban drainage infrastructure. The current guidance is too vague and the current rules too lax to ensure that our residents are protected.

My Mid Bedfordshire constituency has lots of beautiful villages, but they are under threat from the creeping spread of urban sprawl that threatens to merge them into a conglomerate mass of development, which flies in the face of the historically gentle and natural evolution of our beautiful estate villages. I therefore endorse new clause 43 for its efforts to stop our beautiful villages from being lost to future generations.

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[Neil Duncan-Jordan]

Yes, I wholeheartedly agree.

Amendment 69 also mandates that improvements be delivered before harm occurs. Without that, we risk species being pushed closer to extinction before their habitats are replaced. Worst of all, the Bill still will not deliver the affordable homes we desperately need.

[Dan Tomlinson]

The explanatory statement to amendment 69 states:

“This amendment would require Environmental Delivery Plans to set out a timetable for, and thereafter report on, conservation measures, and require improvement of the…status…before development takes place in areas where Natural England”—

thinks there could be harm. How long does my hon. Friend think that that would take in the case of nutrient neutrality and a developer who wanted to build a new social home?

[Neil Duncan-Jordan]

I do not have a specific answer to that point. I cannot give my hon. Friend an answer to that.

The Government’s own impact assessment provided no data that environmental protections are a blocker. Nature in the Bill is being scapegoated to distract from a broken developer-led model.