Draft Town and Country Planning (Discharge of Local Planning Authority Functions) (England) Regulations 2026

Gareth Bacon Excerpts

Tuesday 30th June 2026 General Committees

[Gareth Bacon (Orpington) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship for, I think, the first time, Sir Desmond. I welcome the opportunity to address the statutory instrument on behalf of His Majesty’s Opposition and I thank the Minister for his detailed opening remarks. At the outset I state that it is our intention to divide the Committee on the SI. Notwithstanding that, I am aware of the political balance of the Committee and the Government are likely to carry the day, so I have some comments and questions for the Minister.

As I said in a Delegated Legislation Committee two weeks ago,

“The Planning and Infrastructure Act was a mammoth undertaking”—[Official Report, Sixth Delegated Legislation Committee, 17 June 2026; c. 4.].

It is therefore no surprise to be back again debating regulations relating to the Act. In that Committee I raised some of the Opposition’s important and long-held concerns about local democracy. This SI may be about the planning system on paper, but the core of the changes it seeks to make strike at the heart of future local democratic voices and their ability to scrutinise planning applications.

As I did two weeks ago, I am keen to make plain once again the Opposition’s firm view that we must get Britain building. There is broad consensus among the Government and the Opposition that this must happen, albeit with differences as to how it should happen. Still, that is better than the purely nimby sentiments expressed by some minor opposition parties.

Where the Government and the Opposition most notably differ is over the issue of local democratic oversight and scrutiny, and the uncertain future of planning committees. As the Minister said in his opening remarks, just 4% of all planning applications are decided by a planning committee rather than by a planning officer. However, it is that 4% in which local voices—democratically elected local voices—are so critical. That is because at present, local councillors can call in planning applications for democratic determination, but the Government seem determined to remove that ability by mandating which applications must go to committee and which cannot.

Can the Minister confirm that this is indeed the Government’s intention? If so, how does he plan to ensure that planning officers are held to account under a national scheme of delegation? I know this is not the first time the Opposition have put this question to the Government, but it is of too great an importance not to be considered at every stage of this march towards a national scheme of delegation.

Secondly, any attempt to suggest that the 4% represents either a great blockage or an insignificant hill on which to plant one’s flag is very far from the truth. In the period from January to March, 91% of major planning applications were decided within 13 weeks of the agreed time, up from 89% towards the end of 2024. That is the same system that delivered consent for 1 million homes in England between 2019 and 2024, and 2.5 million between 2010 and 2024. Given that 96% of all applications are already decided outside planning committees, and given the high number of planning permissions granted, why is curtailing democratic participation necessary?

Removing local councillors’ ability to have their say is one thing, but doing so in exchange for a national scheme of delegation written and imposed top-down from Whitehall is a further insult to the town hall. I ask the Minister: how will the Government ensure that the scheme includes the same local knowledge and understanding that local, democratically elected councillors provide at present? That is a concern not just on the Opposition Benches but for the Local Government Association, which, during the passage of the Planning and Infrastructure Act, said:

“there remain concerns around how it”—

“it” meaning the national scheme of delegation—

“will ensure that councils—who know their areas best and what they need—remain at the heart of the planning process. The democratic role of councillors in decision-making is the backbone of the English planning system, and this should not be diminished.”

As local authorities are being asked to deliver increases in new homes of up to 487%, what assessment has the Minister made of the loss of local knowledge and local democratic input to planning applications? As I said at the outset, we agree that there is a need to build more homes, but why do local people need to be taken out of the equation by removing their democratically elected representatives from the process?

There is also the question of transparency. How will the Government ensure that decisions taken by unelected officials are taken with sufficient probity? Then there is the question of applications made by local councillors themselves. For the sake of probity, it is usual for those to be heard by the full planning committee. Will that continue to be the case? What safeguards will be in place in the event that the council has a direct interest in an application—for example, where the application is made by the council itself or where it has a financial interest in it, perhaps by virtue of a loan to the developer?

Finally, between the removal of locally elected voices and the introduction of overarching and subsuming spatial development strategies, what role will local plans, which are decided by elected councillors, play after all of this? I hope that the Minister will carefully consider each of those points and address them fully as we continue this debate.

[Chris Curtis (Milton Keynes North) (Lab)]

It is a privilege to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Desmond. I would like to make a couple of additional points, adding to the really important comments made by the Minister about why these changes are important. It is worth dwelling on the fact that housing in this country is prohibitively expensive for too many people. That is the reason why people are increasingly having to wait so long to get on the housing ladder.

Fundamentally, housing is too expensive because, first, there is not enough of it and, secondly, increasingly it is too expensive to build new housing units. If we want to bring the cost of housing down, we have to address those two problems. We have to increase the number of new homes that are built, but also decrease the cost of building them. On the latter, increasing global pressures, from supply chain disruptions to the impact of geopolitical events, are pushing up construction and labour costs. Most of those headwinds are outside our control, but when we have difficult headwinds it is even more important that we do everything we can with the levers that are within our control to bring down the cost of construction.

I mention that because one of the most damaging, self-inflicted and unnecessary costs in our current house building system is uncertainty. Right now, there could be companies out there—including developers, housing associations or, as the shadow Minister said, local councils—that are looking to build new homes. They could be doing everything right; they could be putting the land together and coming up with a plan that builds the right amount of affordable housing, gives local planning gains and supports local infrastructure. After putting all that investment and support in, coming up with a plan and designing a project, they could still face the daunting prospect of having that development blocked at the eleventh hour by the whims of a small number of local councillors, who are often responding completely rationally to local political incentives.

Obviously, those trade-offs exists. That uncertainty comes at a cost: we either add to the price of a house that constituents are paying for, or we decrease the amount of planning gain that we can make from the developers. By definition, it either means higher housing costs or it means fewer GP surgeries, less road infrastructure or fewer affordable homes being built. That is the cost of having more uncertainty in the system. It is right that we reduce that uncertainty; one way to do that is by having decisions made by officers who are following planning laws, rather than by people who are responding to political incentives.

[Gareth Bacon]

There is a strong corelation between the hon. Gentleman’s argument and our position. I agree with much of what he has said, but I cannot get away from the ratio that both the Minister and I have outlined in our speeches: 96% of planning applications are already decided by officers under delegated powers. Is the hon. Gentleman’s position that democracy is the inhibitor here? Is democracy introducing uncertainty into the system? If that is the case, he should say so.

[Chris Curtis]

I do not believe that democracy is changing it. It is fundamentally the incentives of certain local politicians to do this when they can have a veto power over a development that has a wider gain, often outside their local constituencies. That is a wider consequence. I am democratically elected, as is the shadow Minister, so in this sovereign Parliament we have the ability and right to set the rules under which that democracy operates.

[Gareth Bacon]

The hon. Gentleman is being very generous with his time. Does he not agree that that is the reason for the existence of the Planning Inspectorate? If planning applications are refused for reasons that are not in accordance with planning policy, will they not be overturned by the Planning Inspectorate?

--- Later in debate ---

[Matthew Pennycook]

That is a fair question. As I set out in my opening remarks, if such an application were to meet the conditions in schedule 2, it would go in front of the chief planning officer, in most instances, and the chair of the planning committee, and a gateway test would determine whether it meets the criteria that I have set out. If it does, the local authority can put the decision in front of elected members, as happens now with an officer recommendation, so we are not changing that. I have listed the types of application that fall under schedule 1: minor residential development under 10 units, minor commercial development and so on. There might be a principled difference of opinion here, which I respect, but we do think that expert planning officers should be able to take decisions on those matters.

The hon. Member for Orpington challenged me on the impact of the fact that 96% are already not determined by committee. In a sense, he was saying, “What’s the point of these regulations, given that we have local schemes of delegation doing the job?” As highlighted in the impact assessment for these reforms to the Planning and Infrastructure Act, we expect these reforms to have a small but positive impact on the delivery of housing in this Parliament. We have never suggested that they are a silver bullet for all the issues that we face in the planning system. The Act’s impact assessment covered a number of options, including our lead option of delegating when applications are in line with local plans. We explored that issue, but the regulations take a more structured approach to delegating along the lines of application type, so we need to update the assessment to reflect that.

We recognise that only approximately 4% of decisions are made by committees at present, but that percentage represents a substantial proportion of total units in the planning process because many major applications go to planning committee for consideration. Under the circumstances that we have outlined for the gateway test, they might not necessarily do so as they might not meet those criteria. Streamlining the planning process will make a meaningful contribution to the delivery of much-needed housing and sustainable communities.

[Gareth Bacon]

The Minister is being very generous in giving way. I understand his point that the 4% of applications contain a significant number of units, but does he have a figure for that? How many extra units will be granted planning permission as a result of this change?

[Matthew Pennycook]

I refer the hon. Gentleman to the comments that I have just made. The impact assessment for the Act was published on the basis of a particular scenario, which we have modified. We need to update the impact assessment and we will do so in due course so that he has a better sense of the impact.

The impact is tangible and real, in terms of what can go through schedule 2. We also anticipate that it will mean less time and resource spent on preparing for committee meetings for smaller applications in schedule 1, so it will speed up the decision-making process more broadly and free up important officer time to focus on larger applications that have a real impact on housing delivery.

Several hon. Members mentioned councillors’ ability to call in applications, which we are removing. The regulations do not require local authorities to put every schedule 2 application through the gateway test. It will be for individual local planning authorities to put in place their own arrangements for how the consideration of cases for referral to committee will operate in practice. In other words, it will be open to individual LPAs to triage their schedule 2 applications in ways that are appropriate for them so that only certain schedule 2 applications are considered by the nominated officer and member. Under those arrangements, it would be open to a local planning authority to include a mechanism for councillors to ask for applications that fall under schedule 2 to be considered under the gateway test, and if they meet that test they can be looked at by committee.