Draft Planning and Infrastructure Act 2025 (Consequential Amendments) Regulations 2026

Gareth Bacon Excerpts

Wednesday 17th June 2026 General Committees

[Gareth Bacon (Orpington) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve with you in the Chair, Ms Jardine, for the first time. I welcome the opportunity to sit opposite the Minister—I appreciate the remarks that he has made—and to address this draft statutory instrument on behalf of His Majesty’s Opposition.

The Planning and Infrastructure Act was a mammoth undertaking and has in many ways transformed how our planning system operates. In this House and in the other place, one of the key areas of concern for the Opposition when the Bill was being debated was local consent, democracy and control. The Opposition keenly recognise the importance of getting Britain building—we share that desire with the Government—be it more homes, more transport links or more new infrastructure. However, we acknowledge that that requires change in how the issues are addressed. For too long it has been too expensive, too cumbersome and too controversial to see major housing and infrastructure projects through to complete realisation. That is why the overarching ambition to streamline the planning process is welcome and is something that we in the Opposition are sympathetic to.

Although the regulations are, according to the civil servants who wrote the accompanying explanatory notes,

“consequential and/or minor and technical in nature”,

they continue a worrying trend of centralisation that I hope the Minister will comment on in a moment. Through the regulations, the Government will make England-wide the system of spatial development strategies: a form of sub-regional mandatory strategic planning. The spatial development strategies are plans that look ahead a minimum of two decades and set the framework for local plans. For democratically elected local authorities, that means 20 years of subordinating the democratically accountable local plan to the “high-level documents”. However, it is not hard to see how that inevitably leads to institutional conflict.

I take London as the example. In London, the spatial development plan is known as the London plan and is produced by the Mayor of London. Far from being a high-level strategic document, it is a 526-page tome containing more than 100 separate policies—often of a very granular and sometimes conflicting nature, which makes navigating the system excessively complex. In an area as huge and varied as Greater London, the “one size fits all” approach to the London plan is often in conflict with boroughs’ local plans. Given that spatial development strategies produce a mandatory framework, what recourse of action is available to local councils and local people who find it hard to reconcile the local plan of their local area with the determination of the overriding strategy? How will their voices continue to be heard?

Secondly, and most importantly, I must press the Minister again to adopt a genuinely brownfield approach. This is not the first time we have conversed, debated and potentially sparred over this issue; there is widespread concern. Will the Minister make it clear how he intends to ensure that any long-term strategies encourage a “brownfield first” approach? How will he ensure that the spatial development strategies do not give a new and undemocratic weight to greenbelt developments by overriding any elements of local plans that currently prioritise brownfield development? The Government have spoken before about their reluctance to enshrine a genuine brownfield approach into law, but the Opposition believe it is far better that we deal with the issues now, rather than sandwich them in at a later and perhaps overdue date.

Finally, we were told that a primary aim of the Planning and Infrastructure Act was to streamline and speed up the planning process. What assessment has the Minister made of the potential for the statutory inquiries that he has just referred to, authorised under regulation 2, to increase the amount of time necessary to get the planning system moving, rather than enlivening and quickening the process? Those important questions drive into the heart of the purpose of the very Act that the regulations seek to enforce. I hope that when the Minister sums up, he will address those points and provide the assurances necessary to make the system workable.