Planning and Infrastructure Bill (Second sitting)

Gideon Amos Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 24th April 2025 Public Bill Committees

[The Minister for Housing and Planning (Matthew Pennycook)]

Q I have two quick questions: one on planning decisions for Victoria and one on development corporations for Hugh. Victoria, you will know that at the moment individual local planning authorities have schemes of delegation. It would be great to get your take on how effective they are. What variation do we see out there? What principles should inform the national scheme of delegation that we intend to introduce via the Bill?

Hugh—the Bill provides a clearer, more flexible and more robust framework for the operation of development corporations. You know that it is clearly our view that they have to do a lot of work in the coming years to drive the kind of delivery we need and the types of development we want to see come forward. What is your assessment of how effective those development corporation powers are to support development and regeneration?

Victoria Hills: One thing we know about from our members, but also from those people who are actually in the business of building things—of course, that is really what is important if you want to see some growth coming—is consistency. You asked about the variation. Some councils have fantastic schemes of delegation and it is very clear what is and is not going to committee, but other councils have a slightly more grey scheme of delegation—let’s call it that—whereby things can pop up in committee on the basis of an individual issue or individual councillor.

The opportunity afforded to us by the Bill is for some consistency through a national scheme of delegation. We have in place some very robust processes that look at the business of development, through the local plan process. It goes to not one but two public inquiries, through the Government’s inspectorate, and then back to the community. What we recognise is that if you have had some very robust considerations of the principles of development and you have good development prescribed by, for example, a design code that says, “This is what good development looks like here”—so we have worked out what we want, where it is going and what it looks like—it is perfectly possible that suitably qualified chief planning officers can work out whether something is in conformity with a plan. We therefore welcome the opportunity to clarify that through a national scheme of delegation.

This is not to take away anybody’s democratic mandate to have their say. Of course, there are all sorts of opportunities to have that say in the local plan process, but if we are to move to a national scheme of delegation, we would want a statutory chief planning officer who has that statutory wraparound and has the appropriate level of competency and gravitas to be able to drive forward that change, because it will be a change for some authorities. For some, it will not be a change at all, but taking forward that innovation via a national scheme of delegation will require that statutory post, so that those decisions cannot be challenged, because they will be made in a professionally competent way.

Hugh Ellis: I think development corporations are essential if we are going to achieve this mission. You would expect the TCPA to say that, because we are inheritors of the new towns programme. The interesting thing about them is that, for the first time, they bolt together strategy and delivery. The existing town and country planning system is often blamed for not delivering homes, but it has no power to build them.

The development corporation solves that problem by creating a delivery arm that can effectively deliver homes, as we saw with the new towns programme, which housed 2.8 million people in 32 places in less than 20 years of designation, and it also paid for itself—it is an extraordinary model. The measures in the Bill to modernise overall duties on development corporations are really welcome. I assume you do not want me to talk about compulsory purchase orders right now, but hope value and CPOs are critical accompanying ideas in the reform package that go with that. In the long run, I think that they will become critical.

Obviously, the new towns taskforce has to decide what it wants on policy. The challenge that we face with them is legitimacy, and there is still work to do in making sure that there is a Rolls-Royce process of getting public consent for this new generation of places. However, the outcome is such an opportunity to generate places that genuinely enhance people’s health, deal with the climate crisis and provide high levels of affordability. What a contrast that is with what we have delivered through town and country planning at local plan level, which is a lot of the bolt-on, car-dependent development. Frankly, as a planner, I find that shameful. The opportunity with development corporations is there and I hope that the Government seize it.

[Gideon Amos (Taunton and Wellington) (LD)]

Q Clause 46 is about delegating decisions away from elected councillors, which is something that the Liberal Democrats oppose. This is directed to Dr Hugh Ellis, but the others may wish to jump in. I am a planner, you are a planner; perhaps all these decisions should be taken by planners. Would you like to respond?

Hugh Ellis: I will be honest: as a planner, I am really worried about it. The one difficult thing is that you cannot build without consent, and I think governance in planning is really important. Environmental governance in general is important. I am sceptical about the degree to which this is a really big problem. I can see evidence coming through to suggest that delegation rates for normal applications that you can decide locally are very high already.

I made this point earlier on, but what worries me more than anything else is that if you sideline the opportunity that the public currently have to be represented at committee, the appearance—if not the intent—is that you are excluding people. In periods of change, you have to lean into consultation, participation and democratic accountability. You must accept that while it is not a veto, because you as parliamentarians may wish to decide that the development proceeds, it is either democracy or it is not.

For us, the idea of democratic planning is so central, and it was so important in 1947. That Government had a choice: it had proposed a Land Board, which could have made all the planning decisions centrally, but it gave those decisions to local government on the basis that people locally understand decision making best. My own experience is that people are a solution, not a problem. Wherever I go, I find people who know detail about development and can improve it, particularly on flood risk, and they want to contribute.

I do not accept that there is an anti-development lobby everywhere, and there certainly is not in my community. Instead, there are people concerned about quality, affordability and service provision, and their voice should be heard. The Bill could create the impression, even if it is not the intent, that there is a non-respectful conversation going on. Finally, as a planner, I would never want to be in the firing line for taking a decision on a major housing scheme that is ultimately a matter of politics, and should always be so.

[Paul Holmes]

Quite right!

Faraz Baber: If I may respond on that, there is real merit in the delegation scheme being proposed, within the confines of ensuring that the plan-making process is robust, and that there is engagement by community representatives through the EIP process, as well as other avenues that can help the plan-making take place.

I have created neighbourhood plans as much as I have worked on regional spatial strategies and the London plan. I know that if you get those processes to a place where, from the outset, everyone has engaged with the plan, and communities buy in from that point, you see the follow-through in the consistency of the delivery of the plan. Actually, it is not then a brave decision for a planning officer to make because they are following the lines of what the community has charged them to go and deliver for them. We must remind ourselves that it is about cases that are devoid of those policies and try to do something else, which is where it then needs further democratic overview. In the broadest sense, if we are looking at the growth that this country needs, at the delivery this country needs and at the pace at which that needs to come, we do need to think in a more dynamic fashion, and I think the delegation scheme does have merit.

I take the point that Victoria made about the chief officer. That seniority does provide good cover in a council, and it will enable them to provide that oversight and ensure that things that are required for the community are also delivered. Working in tandem provides a real opportunity for a good national delegation scheme to come forward.

Victoria Hills: To add to that, a professionally competent chartered town planner is very capable at ensuring that all the community interests are represented and balanced. That drives really excellent outcomes, and certainly that is the business that our members are in: delivering great places.

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[Luke Murphy (Basingstoke) (Lab)]

Q You both worked for the previous Government in different roles, one in housing and the other in climate and the environment. Are there things in the Bill that you would have argued for then but that did not happen under the previous Government? Are there any areas where you would go further? Does the Bill deliver on the need to build more homes and get the growth that we need while protecting the environment?

Sam Richards: For those of you who do not know, Britain Remade is a campaign, and 35,000 people across the country support us building the homes, energy and transport infrastructure that we need. It is worth briefly stepping back and remembering why we desperately need to streamline the planning system. I am going to give you four quick examples.

First, the planning application for the lower Thames crossing—I see the relevant Member here—has cost more than £250 million. That is more than it cost Norway to actually build the world’s longest tunnel. That has been all in planning. That is all paperwork—not a single spade in the ground.

Secondly, High Speed 2 is the world’s most expensive railway line, in no small part because we are doing things like building a £121 million bat tunnel to protect 300 Bechstein’s bats that live in a nearby wood—not actually the wood that the line goes through, but a nearby wood. I think most people would agree that that is a disproportionate response.

Thirdly, we are currently building the world’s most expensive nuclear power plant, at Hinkley. It is the most expensive nuclear power plant ever constructed in the history of the human race. Why is it so expensive? We used to build them more cheaply: 20 years ago, they were half the price; when we built the fleets in the ’50s and ’60s, they were a quarter of the cost of the ones that we are building now. Why is it costing so much more? In no small part, it is to do with the environmental rules that mean that EDF is currently wrangling with regulators, and has been for eight years, about installing an underwater fish disco—an acoustic deterrent to stop the fish from swimming into the exhaust pipes of the power plant. Millions of pounds are currently being spent on that.

Fourthly, the planning application for a 3.3-mile railway line between Bristol and Portishead—reopening an existing line that was cut in the Beeching cuts—is 80,000 pages long, with more than 1,000 pages dedicated to bats, on what is an existing line.

It is important to make those points, because the ambition of the Bill is absolutely right: we need to make it much easier to build the homes, energy and transport links that we need. In many ways, the Government are delivering on what they are setting out to do, but there is one crucial area where they are going to need to go further, and that is on the changes to the application of the Conservation of Habitats and Species Regulations 2017.

It is worth saying that while we are failing to build, we are failing to protect nature; all our key biodiversity indicators are in decline. The shift to a strategic approach to environmental protections is absolutely the right one: getting away from this site-by-site approach, which has led to the bat tunnels and the fish discos, is absolutely right. We need to do that both to help us build the stuff quicker and to help us better protect nature. My fear with the way the Bill is currently written and how the environmental delivery plans will be implemented is that, because the habitats rules remain untouched and sit underneath them, if EDPs are not brought in, the habitats rules kick in as they do currently. It relies on Natural England bringing out all these EDPs and, indeed, those EDPs working for species.

It is easy to see how they will apply in the case of, say, nutrient neutrality. We have basically already started doing that with the nutrient mitigation schemes that started two years ago. That is all to the good, and that should unlock lots of house building in the south of England. That is brilliant, but I fear that as things stand, the Government have not solved the bat tunnel issue, and they will need to come back to that.

Jack Airey: Whether it delivers more homes and infrastructure is almost an unfair question, because legislative reforms to the planning system take so long to have an effect. While a lot of the things in the Bill are very positive and will improve the structure of the planning system, it will take a long time for them to have an effect and for the various bits of regulation to be laid. I worked on the Levelling-up and Regeneration Act 2023. So much of that has not been implemented and probably will not ever be implemented, and I fear we will be in that situation with this Bill, too.

The reforms the Government have brought forward in the national planning policy framework are much more radical and impactful, certainly in the short to medium term; ditto forthcoming reforms to the national development management policies, if they are done the right way. Policy changes by the Department have a quicker effect, and I would be looking to that in the short term.

In terms of where I would go further, I agree with Sam on that part of the Bill. If I were a Government who wanted to deliver a lot of homes very quickly, I am not sure this is the reform I would have brought forward. I would have looked again at the reform that was put forward by the previous Government, which would have totally disapplied habitats regulations when they related to nutrient neutrality requirements, so there would be no need to produce an EDP or for the developer to pay a levy. That would have been the quickest way to unblock the homes that are currently stalled by this issue.

[Gideon Amos]

Q That is a very interesting analysis. You touched on Hinkley, which is close to my constituency. I want to drill down into where you see the delays in the planning system. All the examples you mentioned were delivered within the six-month examination, but the points you raised were about species. You mentioned bats and fish. Is it those species protections that are really holding things up?

Sam Richards: As I said, that is where I think the big gap in the Bill is. There is a range of things. There are the rounds and rounds of consultation, which the Government have made some good progress on just this week by announcing that they will reduce the pre-application consultation stages. That is to be welcomed. It is the rounds and rounds of judicial reviews and the fact that the vast majority of major infrastructure projects in this country are brought to the courts. That has been the case multiple times for Hinkley and will be the case for Sizewell. Again, what the Government have done there is welcome, by reducing the opportunity for vexatious judicial reviews and reducing the number of opportunities from three to one and a half. That is to be welcomed, but it is also the additional environmental mitigations that have to be brought and the disproportionate responses that add costs and delay to building major infrastructure.

[Gideon Amos]

Q The Liberal Democrats have sympathy for a lot of the measures in the Bill. To come back to the point about the species, I have just checked, and removing the fish disco, which was a famous feature of the Hinkley development, would cost about 3 million fish a year. Is that an expendable species? Does it not matter?

Sam Richards: The key point is not just whether a particular species matters but the mitigation measures that developers are able and allowed to take under the current framework. I am not here to represent EDF, but it proposed that you could basically pay a fishing vessel to not fish a similar species in a similar area, which would then allow the replenishment of an equivalent amount of stocks. Under the current rules, you are not able to do that strategic-level mitigation.

[Jim Dickson (Dartford) (Lab)]

Q Very many new homes have been built in my constituency over the past decade. Unfortunately, residents believe—and I think it is undoubtedly the case—that that has put a huge strain on local infrastructure, which has not kept pace. Do you feel that the Bill provides the opportunity to ensure that we have the right infrastructure—the medical facilities, the schools, the affordable homes—as we build the many more homes that will be built in Dartford and other parts of the country over the next period? Does the Bill give us the framework to ensure that that happens, unlike what has happened previously on infrastructure and homes being built together?

Jack Airey: The existing framework for doing that is the section 106 system and the community infrastructure levy system. I am not sure whether the CIL applies in Dartford, but in my mind that provides a fairly effective method of doing this in a way that does not make development totally unviable, while extracting enough value to provide some contribution to the community. I do not think there is anything in the Bill that really focuses on this—I could be proven wrong—but I think the existing system works okay.

It is really difficult to do this and it does not always work. Rightly, communities always want the right amount of infrastructure. This might relate to other comments I might make: we rely on the planning system to do so much heavy lifting to deliver all sorts of things that everyone wants, and we try to prioritise everything and end up prioritising nothing. We could have a system where we extracted more from developer contributions and that went to community infrastructure, but that would come with a trade-off, probably around provision of affordable housing and things like that. That would be a sensible debate to have if that is what your constituents want, but it is also quite difficult politically.

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[Matthew Pennycook]

I take the point about the nuance. That is helpful—thank you.

[Gideon Amos]

Q As a former councillor whose wife is a current councillor, I know the struggles and challenges. You have made a powerful case about the importance of councillors and the public acceptance of the decisions that you are talking about, and you have highlighted approvals where the recommendation has been refusal. As Liberal Democrats we oppose the clause completely, but if the Government insist on it, would you want to see in the Bill some qualification of the power of central Government to write your delegation agreements to your officers, because at the moment the regulations that could be laid are completely unqualified?

Councillor Hug: As the Minister pointed out, the consultation is going on in parallel with the Bill. Hopefully we can make this national scheme of delegation work, provided that there is a degree of flexibility built into it. I hope that working between local government and national Government can help to resolve some of those issues at pace. Obviously some things may need to be specified, but we are hopeful that that kind of engagement can help to resolve some of the issues.

Councillor Clewer: If in the scheme of delegation we see guidelines around how a scheme of delegation should work, I am not sure that that would concern me hugely. If they are prescriptive rather than guidelines, we will fall into the problem that you will create cases where you need to get round them but you cannot.

This is a simplistic example—I will get into trouble now with the New Forest national park authority—but we allow parish councils there to call things into committee. I think that that is crazy. It ends up with all sorts of things coming to committee that should never go near them. I would love a delegation that said that they cannot do that, on a personal level. There are elements where I think Government guidance would be really helpful.

[Gideon Amos]

Guidance?

Councillor Clewer: Yes. Pretty firm guidance, but still guidance, with the ability where you really have the nuance to be able to work around it.

Councillor Hug: It goes to the point about having a common core of things, with certain things that apply in certain areas but then a space for guidance on top of that.

Councillor Wright: I agree that it should be guidance, not mandatory. We always seem to see policy brought forward on the basis that there is a problem. Perhaps for once we could go out to where planning is actually done well—where authorities have gone through modernisation and done things in the way you would expect them to be done—and work with those authorities, instead of assuming that there is a problem in the planning system.

Also, how far will this delegation go? If it turns into nothing more than delegation that is almost similar to permitted development rights, if people think that that is not dangerous, they should look at a picture of Terminus House in Harlow. They would see somewhere where they would not want to live. Members were nowhere near that.

[John Grady (Glasgow East) (Lab)]

Q It is great to have three very experienced councillors before the Committee. We have heard evidence today, including from two former special advisers to No. 10 under the last Government, that the Bill will help with energy security and energy costs, driving forward housing and getting jobs and significant investment. To channel your discussion about the beam in the person’s house, Councillor Clewer, a significant amount of frustration was evinced about where we are with things in planning more generally. Could each of you identify what you see as positive in the Bill?

Councillor Clewer: I agree that there are areas at the moment where planning simply delays or blocks infrastructure provision. That needs changing; I absolutely agree with that. I suspect people will judge the extent to which it needs changing based on where they live and the specific infrastructure that they are facing, but I think that that needs unblocking.

You need to be very careful with the assumption that the Bill will build more houses. It will not build more houses. The Bill, and the reforms that we have seen to the NPPF, will see more planning permissions. I have 18,837 extant planning permissions in Wiltshire at the moment. Developers told me that they could build only about 6,000 the last time I asked them, which strangely enough was just under the four-year housing land supply under the last Government. I am sure that if I asked them today, they would say that they could build just about 8,000.

I have 2,400 houses south of Trowbridge that have been stuck, failing to get the section 106 agreement signed, for something like 14 years. There has to be something in the Bill that forces building. If we are to issue planning, it has to come with the actual development. We have to compel. If developers have signed a commitment that they will complete houses on whatever basis and have fallen behind, they need to start paying the council tax on them or something. At the moment, the Bill is not going to do that, I am afraid. I do not see anything in it that will actually achieve that.

Councillor Hug: I support Richard’s point about working for more “use it or lose it” powers to ensure that planning permission does not just go on the books to raise land value and not do much else, although I note the points about hope value and everything. We recognise that there is a whole heap of challenges to delivery that sit outside the scope of the Bill.

On the Bill, we support the Government’s general principles about clarification and simplification. We recognise that the strong national growth and infrastructure demands open up some of the opportunities for green energy and all sorts of other things that we are calling for in local government.

I want to draw attention to the work being done on planning fees. Ensuring that local authorities have the best possible remuneration for the work to make sure they are covering their costs fully is key to making the system work well to deliver the outcomes that you are looking for. But we recognise that that alone will not deal with it, so we have to look at how we can further strengthen the planning workforce. Again, that is about making sure that the language does not say that the planning system or the planners are the problem. We want people to go into the industry and we want them to do it, but the planning fee stuff is helpful in supporting that.

We support the principles, but the key thing is to ensure that the local authorities retain a voice in what goes forward and work with the Government on some of the practical things such as the scheme of delegations.

Councillor Wright: I think we have got close to it. As we said, we have nothing against the professional training of planning committees so that the industry knows what it is dealing with and so that the idea that we do not know what we are doing on planning committees cannot be used to beat us over the head all the time. In my district, similarly to Richard’s, 11,500 permissions were put in place between 2016 and 2024 and 5,500 were built out. There is no excuse for the rest not to be built.

Unfortunately, the proposals that have been put forward do not include anything at all to mandate that builders will build. There is a proposal over CPO powers, and the missing thing that we would like to see is “build it or lose it”. If there is an allocated site and they have permissions, but they simply do not build on it, give us the CPO powers so we can CPO that. That would help to build houses, because we could then start to control the destiny of those sites. At the moment, there are some really useful things that could have been in the Bill that are missing.

Councillor Clewer: But CPO it at agricultural value.

Councillor Wright: Yes: agricultural value, not hope value.

Councillor Hug: I very much support the planning training. The LGA supports the approach to hope value that the Government are taking. The CPO power is particularly being deployed in urban settings around land assembly, which is the intent behind the Bill.

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[Gideon Amos]

Q We Liberal Democrats are sympathetic to a number of the changes that the Government are proposing to compulsory purchase and the nationally significant infrastructure projects regime. You mentioned the length of examinations, and you are absolutely right that inspectors have taken longer and longer—I did one in four months, which is two thirds of the statutory time of six months. People are trying to avoid judicial review by asking as many questions as possible and making sure all the issues are addressed. We are in a more litigious society, are we not? How do we get out of the loop of trying to de-risk to prevent judicial review, but have speedier examinations?

Catherine Howard: There should be some education on judicial review for inspectors. As a lawyer, I can tell you that people do not bring judicial reviews because not enough questions were asked or the environmental statement was not long enough; you will never pick the one thing that someone brings a judicial review on. Most of them are not successful, and they are very niche.

That probably is one of inspectors’ fears, but I also think that they want to be seen to be hearing all the issues, even if they know that those are not going to be material to the determination. That was not really the purpose of the regime; it was supposed to be mostly written reps and so on. We could do some education for the inspectorate about the things that do and do not lead to judicial reviews. Inspectors actually have a lot of latitude about what it is rational for them to consider a material planning consideration and what it is not, and so the depth at which they need to look into things. I think they sometimes go slightly overboard.

[Gideon Amos]

Q Let us turn to the compulsory purchase changes and the clause on hope value, which would enable the acquisition of land at existing use value. I support that clause, but as someone practising in the private sector and representing landowners, how do you think that it will take effect? Will it be plain sailing?

Catherine Howard: That side of the planning regime is not my specialism, but hope value is part of the value of the land, as far as the ordinary person sees it, so they will not be delighted if they are not going to get paid what they see as part of the value of the land. It is a wider public interest test, is it not? I am not saying that it is the wrong thing to do, but I imagine that if people know that they are not going to get the market value, they will object to compulsory purchase orders perhaps a bit more than they otherwise would have.

Of course, if the compulsory purchase order is made, people might try to bring more judicial reviews. However, I think that it would be quite hard for them to bring a judicial review on the basis of the test, which is quite wide in terms of the purposes for which hope value can be disapplied. As long as the acquiring local authority is within those tests, I think it would be hard to JR on that basis, but people might find other grounds, such as procedural grounds, on which to have a go.

[The Chair]

We have just over a minute, John Grady, so it will have to be a very quick question and answer.

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[Paul Holmes]

That is very clear—thank you very much.

[Gideon Amos]

Q Welcome to the Committee, and thank you for coming today. We hear a lot of debate around targets for housing numbers, the NPPF and so on. What should be the role of targets for the delivery of social homes in the planning system?

Kate Henderson: First, it is a pleasure to be before the Committee; thank you for inviting the National Housing Federation to give evidence. Just to be clear, I want to declare up front that I am a member of the Government’s new towns taskforce, working to advise Government on a new generation of new towns, so I will not be commenting on—

[Paul Holmes]

Forgive me; I should have asked you, Mrs Henderson.

Kate Henderson: No problem. I will not be commenting specifically on what is coming forward from that piece of work.

From a National Housing Association perspective, on the principle of new towns, it is worth recognising just how acute housing need is in this country. Right now, we have 160,000 children who are homeless. We have 310,000 children who had to share a bed with a family member last night. The need is acute and spread right across the country. The need for social housing is huge. The Government have set out a very ambitious target of a million and a half homes across the course of this Parliament. We think that about a third of those need to be affordable and social housing. Research that we have commissioned shows that we need around 90,000 social rented homes every year. That is not just in this Parliament but over the course of a decade, to meet the backlog of need.

We are a long way off that target, but an important part of it is to have reform, not just of the planning mechanisms and targets within the planning system—and the standard method is an important part of that—but of the resources within the social housing sector, local government and delivery partners to crank up the delivery. That is an important part of the piece, but we are also very much looking forward to the spending review to get a long-term housing strategy in place that also has measures to inject stability, certainty and confidence back into the social housing sector to crank up delivery.

James Stevens: I absolutely agree with Kate that it is very important that we do what we can to support affordable housing delivery. The Government’s proposals around spatial development strategies, which would allow those strategies to define policies on affordable housing, would be very beneficial. On the work looking at the section 106 model—which is a current barrier—as Kate said, the Government probably need to invest to ensure that the long-term rent settlement provides more assurance for housing associations in that regard. That is a major obstacle to housing delivery at the moment. In London, for example, that is resulting in a major shortfall in supply.

The spatial development strategies should be quite useful mechanisms, so long as they are not too prescriptive. The problem we have with London, as an example, is that it had a very prescriptive affordable housing policy, which did not really last through the economic cycles that we are experiencing at the moment. You need something that is looser fitting and that constituent local authorities can adapt to their own local circumstances.

[Gideon Amos]

Q May I ask a supplementary of James? We hear a lot from the federation about the viability challenge of sites. Without rehearsing the whole system and the pressures on development value, what is the HBF’s approach to resolving that issue so that there are fewer schemes going back to appeal, with 106s renegotiated and affordable housing targets reduced? That is something that we see in all our constituencies.

James Stevens: We think that affordable housing, as part of section 106, is probably one of the most important planning obligations, and our members generally support that, because they know how to build houses. Capturing an element of development gain is a real feeding frenzy, particularly among every public agency. They are all attempting to finance their policy objectives off the back of capturing an element of the developed land value. That can result in very difficult competing claims over viability. I have looked at viability plans supporting lots of spatial strategies and local plans up and down the country, and very often large elements of a local authority area are unviable because they just cannot afford the cumulative claims upon that development value. Greater scrutiny at the examination level, and perhaps a stronger steer from the Government that affordable housing and public contributions to public transport are the foremost claims upon development value, would be a major step forward.

Savills has identified that the viability system—section 106 and the community infrastructure levy—is fairly successful. It is pretty successful at capturing the majority of development value that is out there. The Government could go further by being very clear that these are the requirements in local plans, they are not negotiable and schemes are expected to be policy compliant, but that would need to be underpinned by a more rigorous system of assessing viability of the local plan stage. That would provide the Government with the certainty.

[Rachel Taylor]

Q James, I would like to ask you a question first. We heard a lot on earlier panels about the number of permissions that have been granted but not yet delivered. How do you think your members can be helped by the Bill to deliver those homes? Also, when we talk about affordable housing, how much of that really needs to be socially rented housing to help deliver homes that homeless people need? That second question is more for Kate.

James Stevens: On the first element of that question, we really dispute the notion that house builders just bank land and are not interested in building out. Craig Bennett of the Wildlife Trusts cited a figure on Radio 4, I think, of 1.4 million homes that have granted permission but that have not been built out. We strongly contest that. A lot of those things are not counted as a completion until they are actually completed. A lot of those schemes have to work through very complicated discharge conditions. A lot of those permissions can just be outline planning permissions, and not the detailed planning permissions that you need to be an implementable consent. A lot of those figures are just poor figures that do not reflect the true numbers that have actually been built out.

Lastly on that, this accusation of land banking has often been levelled at the house building industry over the last 20 years. Consistently, independent studies, including one by the Competition and Markets Authority last year, have given us a clean bill of health on that. There is an issue about absorption rates—the ability of a local market to absorb certain sales—but house builders do not make their money from sitting on land. That costs them money. We make money from the sale of homes.

The issue of social housing—I will allow Kate to come in shortly—is very important. The problem is that we have a severe housing crisis. As Kate said, we have many thousands of children in temporary accommodation. Local authorities had to spend something like £2.3 billion last year on temporary accommodation; local authorities would go bankrupt there. Therefore, the tendency is to try to maximise social housing provision—social rented housing. We can understand why local authorities want to do that. However, to follow up on the point I made to Gideon Amos, the problem is that if local authority policies are too prescriptive on the tenure split, that can make it very difficult for house builders to contract with registered providers, to provide registered providers with the type of tenure mix that they need. We need to be a bit more realistic and flexible about that.

The key issue is to get houses built—to focus upon the quantity—in order to alleviate the affordability problems that make people so dependent upon social housing in the first place. But absolutely, social rented housing is very important. We are not trying to say that we do not want to build it.

Kate Henderson: Social housing is needed in every part of the country. What is really important is that we have objectively assessed needs and that those needs are then incorporated in local plans, and that we deliver mixed, sustainable communities that reflect the needs of those areas.

I will just dispute a little bit the point about the London situation and the London plan. London is the only part of the country where we have a strategic development strategy. The reason that we have a crash of supply in London is not because of strategic planning. It is because of a building safety crisis, hugely high inflation, huge land prices, an absolute crisis in temporary accommodation, and huge pressures that have happened across the social housing sector over the last 15 years in terms of cuts and caps to our income.

To get out of the situation in London and in the rest of the country, we need a comprehensive planning system that is based on objectively assessed need; a long-term housing strategy that looks at our existing homes as well as new homes; a rent settlement, including convergence, and funding that addresses building safety as well as new supply. Those are all things that the Government are looking at, which is welcome.

As for bringing forward those spatial development strategies in the rest of the country, it is really important that they have a focus on social and affordable housing, and that that should be mandated within them. The percentages will need to reflect the context of the areas and the need in those areas, so there will need to be a degree of flexibility in accordance with place, but it is vital that that is mandated as part of the remit of those strategies. We welcome their introduction.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Chair]

Can I remind you again to keep questions as short as possible? It is entirely up to you, but I am just advising so that as many Members get in as possible.

Matthew Pennycook: I will take both questions in turn. The first is really important, and I am glad to have the chance to say very clearly again—as I did to Mr Benwell—that we do not accept as a Government that development has to come at the expense of nature. We have put a huge amount of effort into engaging with Mr Benwell’s organisation and many others, as well as other Government Departments, to ensure that the clauses allow us to deliver that win-win for development and the environment.

We are confident that the Bill will not undermine or reduce environmental protections, which is why we confirmed that to be the case under section 20 of the previous Government’s Environment Act 2021. As you heard from the chief exec of Natural England, our reforms are very much built around delivering overall positive outcomes for protected sites and species.

Specifically on the viability point, there are existing environmental obligations that developers have to pay to address. Moving to a more strategic scale and large geographies where we can get those better outcomes will allow us to drive down costs through strategic action through those economies of scale. We think that the approach will be beneficial overall, but viability has to be a consideration in the levy fee that we will eventually set.

[Gideon Amos]

Q I, too, am grateful for the Ministers’ time today. In the interests of brevity, I want to ask a question of the Energy Minister. There are provisions in the Bill on overhead lines at generating stations. Are the Government looking at further reforms that would make the delivery of the electricity network simpler and more straightforward, by widening permitted development for the electricity distribution network and transmission network, given that we all want to reach net zero and the challenges that industry faces?

Michael Shanks: That is a really important question. Probably the single most important part of us being able to achieve our clean power mission will be the necessary grid upgrades, many of which should have been decades before. We now need to build out the grid, so we are looking at a range of options. I think that connections reform is important for making sure that we are only building the grid that we absolutely need to build. The bill discounts and the community benefits that go with that are all around trying to improve acceptability, but we will look at a range of other issues as well, including around permitted development rights.

What we are really clear on is that we have a clear indication of the projects necessary to hit clean power by 2030. We know where those need to be built and what the barriers are to doing that, and we want to move forward with those as quickly as possible. I think that the community acceptability point is key because, unlike some of the other parts of our electricity system, pylons and substations are probably the ones that communities have the biggest challenge with, particularly because they are going through multiple communities in the course of a line. We have evidenced that the bill-discount scheme will improve that acceptability to help build those much faster. Of course, that is the only way that we will achieve clean power—by getting the power to where it is needed most.

[Amanda Martin]

Q First, it is welcome that we have a Government who are working on a Bill across Departments, so it is not only on planning but also on the environment. We have heard from a panel today on the move from the “first come, first served” approach to “first ready, first connected” for connections to the grid. We know, and have heard from other panellists, that, in recent years, the delivery of new homes across the country has been delayed by grid capacity. We also know that this particularly affects small and medium-sized developers. How will the Bill support our SME developers—and, in turn, growth—in our communities?

Michael Shanks: It is a really good question. To Mr Amos’s question, I said that network was probably the single most important thing, but connections reform is probably the single most important lever in clearing out what is now 756 GW in a queue to connect, which is frankly an absurd amount. This is therefore really a fundamental shift to move from “first applied, first in the queue” to what is strategically important: is a project actually ready to be connected? As has been discussed, we have so many of these zombie projects that take up a space in the queue for years on end.

We have also been clear about prioritising what is strategically important to our energy mix, particularly on some of the questions around storage, to make sure we actually have the right capacity. Connecting is really important, so we want to bring that queue down as quickly as possible. That frees up the connections process for new generation to join far faster, but the other important side of it is that, for the projects in the queue on the demand side, it frees up capacity for those to connect much more quickly as well.

The estimates at the moment are probably conservative, based on how quickly the growth of AI, datacentres and things are taking hold, but the estimate is that, by 2050, the demand for electricity in this country will have doubled. This step—clearing out the queue now—is therefore really important, but so is putting in place a process that makes sure that the queue does not fill back up after we have done this particular clear-out. The Bill therefore details the process that will be taken, but also the role that the Government will have in setting strategic priorities for queue management for future connections.

The first stage of that will be the clean power action plan, but it will allow us in the future to look at some other aspects of the economy to ensure that we are prioritising the projects that get through. We have resisted the approach of prioritising demand projects, because obviously how you prioritise those becomes much more subjective, but if we clear out a lot of the 756 GW now, we can connect projects and get the economy growing as a result.