Planning and Infrastructure Bill (Second sitting)

Debate between Ellie Chowns and Olly Glover

Committee stage
Thursday 24th April 2025 Public Bill Committees

[Olly Glover]

Accepted.

Matthew Pennycook: In terms of the top-up, we have already allocated £800 million to the affordable homes programme since coming into office. We have also pulled forward £2 billion as a down payment. A significant proportion of the homes coming through those funding routes are social rented homes—almost half, but I am happy to provide the Committee with the specific figure. So we are getting a huge uplift coming through, and the successor grant programme will give particular priority to social rented homes coming through.

Where I think spatial development strategies can add to what we see coming through is that these will not be big local plans—let us be very clear. They need to be pretty high-level documents that make decisions about where housing growth and infrastructure provision is best sited and delivered on a sub-regional basis. That will allow groups of local authorities to take a far more sophisticated approach to, for example, bringing forward large-scale new communities in strategic locations that allow them to meet housing targets in a more sophisticated way. Through other measures that we are introducing—the CPO measures in the Bill are a good example—we will capture more land-value uplift and deliver more social and affordable homes.

[Ellie Chowns]

Q To Minister Pennycook, I welcome your confirmation that you recognise that environmental, social and economic goals can be achieved together, and are not automatically or even frequently in contradiction with each other. Likewise, I welcome your confirmation that, as it says in the Bill, the purpose of the Government in bringing forward the Bill is to retain the existing level of environmental protections.

Given that commitment from the Government, given Richard Benwell’s observation that there are risks that could be addressed through amendments and given Marian Spain’s comments—that the Bill needs robust safeguards and that drafting amendments may make it more robust—I return to the question that Mr Murphy asked. Can you confirm that you retain an open mind and that you may consider tabling further Government amendments in response to the concerns raised, so that the Bill does what you are saying it does on the tin?

Matthew Pennycook: I appreciate the question. To reiterate—and this is where I slightly disagree with Mr Benwell and others—we are very clear that the Bill will not have the effect of reducing the level of environmental protections, in terms of existing environmental law. We are very clear about that, and confident in the safeguards that exist in the Bill.

I am happy to look at any amendment, and we will in the normal course of the Bill Committee; we will debate each of them in turn and I will keep an open mind about any that we think is feasible, workable, aligns with the objectives of the Bill and delivers what we want to see—absolutely. We will debate all of those in due course. As you rightly made clear, we tabled a package of Government amendments yesterday.

To bring it back to the specific point, some of those amendments on removing the statutory requirement for pre-applications consultation in relation to national significant infrastructure projects were tabled partly because we were getting feedback through the working paper, and also because there were a number of calls on Second Reading for us to specifically look at that area of reform. As you would expect in the normal course of the Bill, we will respond to challenge, criticism, scrutiny and any amendments, which we will debate in due course.