Planning and Infrastructure Bill

Gideon Amos Excerpts

Report stage
Monday 9th June 2025 Commons Chamber

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

On that point, will the Minister give way?

[Matthew Pennycook]

I will not. I have just been very clear that I am not going to give way again as I want to make some progress.

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[Gideon Amos]

Let me start by thanking all the members of the Bill Committee, the Clerks, and the officials whose joy at receiving our 78 amendments I can only imagine to have been unbounded. The House will be pleased to hear that I will now be focusing only on those that we have prioritised for this debate.

On Second Reading, the Liberal Democrats and Plaid Cymru were the only parties to vote against the Bill. All the others were content to support it; Labour and Green party Members nodded it through, while the Conservatives—the official Opposition—abstained. I hope that they will all consider their position more seriously on this occasion, and reconsider supporting some of the measures in the Bill, but if today the Liberal Democrats are again the only party to vote against the Bill—

[Kevin Hollinrake (Thirsk and Malton) (Con)]

Tomorrow.

[Gideon Amos]

Tomorrow, as the hon. Gentleman has reminded me. If, tomorrow, the Liberal Democrats are the only party to vote against the Bill because of the harm that it does to the rights of communities and local people, to fairness and to nature, all three of which are cornerstones of what liberals believe in, we shall bear that standard proudly—and we shall do so again.

[Caroline Voaden (South Devon) (LD)]

I have tabled new clause 65, which would require housing development applications to include provision for green space within 15 minutes of new homes, supporting nature and helping people to lead happier, healthier lives. Does my hon. Friend agree that the Government have missed an opportunity to require new housing developments to be designed in a way that would be not only good for nature and the environment, but good for the health and wellbeing of residents?

[Gideon Amos]

I agree with my hon. Friend, who is a great champion of green spaces in development. In our contribution, we are showing how the protections of nature could be strengthened in the Bill without entire chunks of it being deleted. I shall say more about that later.

As we heard from the Chair of the Select Committee, the hon. Member for Vauxhall and Camberwell Green (Florence Eshalomi), when it comes to rights for individuals, real freedom often depends on decent homes that people can afford and where they can bring up their families. When homes are genuinely affordable for local people, they will command real community consent and support in the planning process. Unless we give a commitment to a massive increase in the number of social and council rent homes, we will not be responding to the needs of those people, and we will fail to meet head-on the criticism that housing developments today are more about profit than about people.

[Steve Darling (Torbay) (LD)]

My constituency contains less than the national average proportion of social rented housing, at 7%. Does my hon. Friend agree that it is shocking that the new Government have been asleep at the wheel, and have lacked the ambition to deal with the desperate need for more social rented housing during their first 11 months in power?

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[Gideon Amos]

I thank my hon. Friend for championing the need for social and council rent homes, which is exactly what the Liberal Democrats are doing. We welcome the £2 billion commitment that the Government have made to social housing, and we are listening carefully to what they are saying about the spending review, but there is still no target for new social homes in either this Bill or any of the relevant Government policy. That absence needs to be put right.

[Paul Holmes]

We agree with many of the amendments that the hon. Gentleman’s party has put forward. He outlines a target for new social homes. How would he afford that, and where would the money come from?

[Gideon Amos]

The hon. Gentleman leads me on to the next part of my speech. Our amendment 15, which would support the delivery of 150,000 new social homes per year, would be funded by the taxation proposal set out in our costed manifesto. That would provide an extra £6 billion per year, on top of the existing affordable housing programme and section 106 contributions. According to the Centre for Economics and Business Research, that would be enough to enable us to deliver 150,000 social homes per year by the end of the Parliament.

On the rights of communities, more people engage with their local councils on planning than on almost any other area, but far too often that engagement becomes a dawning recognition that all the key powers and levers on planning have been taken away from local areas by successive Governments, leaving local communities and the elected councillors who represent them increasingly powerless over the development that takes place around them. Housing numbers are set by a formula made in Whitehall and dictated not by population, but by demand and supply ratios, even though studies show that that has never yet reduced the price of a single house. Private builders will quite reasonably act to sustain the price of their product, and adding consents in this context is only likely to unleash development in inappropriate areas.

[Martin Wrigley (Newton Abbot) (LD)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that we saw in the recent Westminster Hall debate that the standard method for calculating the number of homes not only does not reduce prices, but inevitably ratchets them up and increases them?

[Gideon Amos]

My hon. Friend is very perceptive and hard-working on this issue. He raises a significant problem with the current standard method, and I pay tribute to him.

It is not just the standard method that is dictated from Whitehall; so too are rules on second homes and short-term lets, so communities cannot stem the loss of family homes for local people—something that our new clause 20 would put right. Rules on transport and highway capacity are also set by Whitehall, so local authorities such as my own Cheddon Fitzpaine parish council cannot question them. In the battle between underfunded local authorities and developers with big profits to make, Whitehall rules also mean that commitments to deliver affordable housing and infrastructure can all too often be evaded on grounds of viability—something that our new clause 112 would tackle by requiring an absolute minimum of 20% social housing in any development.

No wonder trust in local politics is at such a low. That has only been made worse by the chaos of the previous Conservative Government: with one rule for them and another for everyone else, basic fairness went out the window. The UK may rightly be ranked among the top 20 countries in the world by Transparency International, but nothing undermines fairness more than foul play, even if it is, as we know, very rare. Our new clause 11 would ensure that never again can Ministers favour a planning application from a donor without that being exposed in the public record. It cannot ever be right for a planning decision to be taken by those who will financially benefit from it.

Trust in the fairness of local democracy is so often shaped by how much trust people have in the local planning processes. Our amendment 1 would remove from this Bill the powers it gives Whitehall to control the running of councils, and the rights of councillors to make decisions on planning applications. The powers in this Bill mean that, for the first time, even a unanimous decision by every single councillor will not be enough to enable them to change a decision that their officers or planning consultants made on their behalf. Giving employees and consultants power over the heads of the elected representatives who employ them is a dangerous step, and no Parliament should endorse it.

It is not just elected councillors who will lose their vote on planning. Members of this House will lose their vote when it comes to changes to national policy statements that set the rules for the largest national infrastructure projects, from Hinkley C and Swansea tidal lagoon to the world’s biggest offshore and onshore wind and solar farms. Our amendment 128 would allow the Government to change national policy statements to reflect changes in the law, but it would preserve this House’s right to decide whether national policy on massive projects should be changed.

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[Dr Simon Opher (Stroud) (Lab)]

I agree with some of the things that the hon. Member is saying, but we all want to build faster. Under the local district plan in Stroud, we have been waiting four years for our housing plan, and this Bill will free us from the quagmire that is our current planning system. Last Friday, I met representatives of the Gloucestershire Wildlife Trust and the Severn Rivers Trust, who have serious concerns about part 3 of the Bill. Does the hon. Member agree that we should have a short pause on part 3 and keep some of it?

[Gideon Amos]

I certainly agree that part 3 requires amending. Our amendments seek to do that, as I will come to shortly.

People want to see development that treads lightly on the land and reduces harmful emissions. Our new clause 2 would enforce the zero carbon standard for all new homes, on which the Liberal Democrats and Labour Ministers worked so hard before the Conservatives cancelled the whole zero carbon homes programme in 2015.

[Claire Young (Thornbury and Yate) (LD)]

Net zero standards cut bills as well as carbon emissions, so does my hon. Friend share my incredulity that a Government who have been forced to U-turn on winter fuel payments are refusing to back new clause 2, which would cut bills for people of all ages?

[Gideon Amos]

It is absolutely right to say that we should be moving to zero carbon homes. In fact, one study shows that had they been introduced in 2015, new homeowners would have saved £9 billion.

Our new clause 25, tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Chichester (Jess Brown-Fuller), would give key national landscape partnerships, such as in the mellow and beautiful Blackdown hills in my constituency, a seat at the planning table.

As we see species becoming extinct before our eyes, people want to see new homes and nature thrive together. Crucially, our new clause 1 would put back the pre-eminent principle in all this: wherever possible, we must first do no harm to the environment on the sites that are being impacted. Of course, there are circumstances such as phosphate mitigation, where off-site measures can deal with the problem, but by completely removing from EDPs the hierarchy of mitigating impacts first and foremost on site, the Bill provides what the National Trust has called a “licence to kill nature”.

[Clive Lewis (Norwich South) (Lab)]

Does the hon. Member agree that the problem with the Bill is misdiagnosis? The problem is not nature holding up house building, or local authorities—which have been starved of cash for the last 15 years— holding up housing, but developers that are sitting on 1.4 million homes with planning permission, because they are land banking and profiteering. That is the problem that the Bill is not getting to. We do not have to destroy nature, and we do not have to undermine our future environmental protections.

[Gideon Amos]

The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right to draw attention to the thousands of homes that have planning permission and have not been built, including the 11,000 we have in Somerset. While I welcome what the Government have said about bringing those forward, a real “use it or lose it” power is missing from the Bill. The Liberal Democrats have tabled new clause 3 so that, unless those homes are built, the local authority would have powers to take over the land and to build the houses. That would ensure a real “use it or lose it” penalty for those that do not build out the permissions that they have.

Pitting communities and nature as the enemies of progress and development would be a massive mistake. Taking power away from councillors is taking it away from local people, and taking power away from Members of Parliament is taking it from the hands of the people who elect us to this place. Both are examples of centralisation and “Whitehall knows best” thinking, in which local views count for little and nature for even less. There is another way to build the hundreds of thousands of homes we need. It is to invest in 150,000 social homes per year to pump-prime our industry, give communities the funding for the jobs, transport, green space and energy infrastructure that our constituents want, build the new GP and healthcare facilities before building the houses and homes our communities will need, and build them in ways that will support rather than harm those communities.

[Dr Al Pinkerton (Surrey Heath) (LD)]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for giving way, particularly as it sounds as though he is coming to his conclusion, but I want to give him the best possible chance to talk about new clause 115. My constituency of Surrey Heath is made up of small villages divided by green-belt land and Ministry of Defence property. Without the protections afforded by new clause 115, I fear that the distinctiveness and sense of place of those villages will be gradually lost. Can he comment on how new clause 115 would protect the distinctiveness of place?

[Gideon Amos]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for the point he makes. It is vital to protect the character of existing places and communities that are so valued, which is why we want a more locally driven approach to assessing housing numbers and local plan making.

Finally, if we build the GP surgeries, the healthcare and the other infrastructure before the homes, we will be building in the interests of our communities, not against them. That is the kind of community-led development that Liberal Democrats want and that our amendments would help to bring about, and I humbly urge Members to support them.

[Mr Perkins]

I rise to set out the case for amendments 136 and 150 and new clause 62, in my name. I am very pleased to hear what the Minister has said so far. The Bill would tackle the long-standing conundrum of how to deliver the ambitious house building targets to which the Government are rightly committed, while protecting the environment and enhancing, not reducing, protections for nature. Before I turn to my amendments, I want to speak briefly about the extent to which the Bill achieves those aims.

I absolutely share the Government’s commitment to freeing up the planning system and ensuring that fewer people are unable to get on to the housing ladder and fewer children grow up in unsuitable, overcrowded and temporary accommodation. I see the impact of this country’s failure to build the homes it needs in my surgeries every single week, so I support the Government’s aims to speed up that process. I also agree that planning has too often been a barrier to those ambitions, and the Government are absolutely right to attempt to remove this blocker.

Freeing up unnecessary restrictions, however, must not mean allowing further nature degradation, nor does it have to. The Government have said that these ambitions will be achieved alongside nature recovery. Wildlife populations in England have fallen to around 67% of their 1970 level; as I said a few moments ago, Britain is now one of the “most nature-depleted” places on earth. Most of England’s rare and vulnerable habitats are in poor condition. Alongside building the homes and infrastructure that our society needs, we must rebuild our natural capital—the air, water, soils and biodiversity —on which our society depends.

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[Dame Meg Hillier (Hackney South and Shoreditch) (Lab/Co-op)]

I rise to speak to amendment 87, in my name and the names of most Select Committee Chairs—certainly most of those who cover Departments—including the Chair of the Business and Trade Committee, my right hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham Hodge Hill and Solihull North (Liam Byrne), the Chair of the Energy Security and Net Zero Committee, my hon. Friend the Member for Sefton Central (Bill Esterson), the Chair of the Environmental Audit Committee, my hon. Friend the Member for Chesterfield (Mr Perkins), the Chair of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee, the right hon. Member for Orkney and Shetland (Mr Carmichael), the Chair of the Housing, Communities and Local Government Committee, my hon. Friend the Member for Vauxhall and Camberwell Green (Florence Eshalomi), and the Chair of the Transport Committee, my hon. Friend the Member for Brentford and Isleworth (Ruth Cadbury).

The amendment relates to the Government’s new approach to the consultation around national policy statements, and in particular to the parliamentary scrutiny of those statements. There is currently a process by which Select Committees join forces to examine national policy statements and provide recommendations to the Government, but the Government are proposing to introduce what they call a new “reflective amendment” procedure where an amendment to planning policy reflects new legislation, changes to Government policy or a relevant court decision since the policy guidance was put in place. We all know that the Government’s aim is to speed up the planning process, but we need to be clear that reducing parliamentary scrutiny can have long-term consequences. I am therefore seeking reassurances from the Minister as to how this will be managed.

This proposal will remove the requirement to respond to either a resolution of either House of Parliament or recommendations from a Committee of either House of Parliament on the proposed changes; instead, the Government would write to the appropriate Select Committee at the start of the public consultation period, which is typically six to 12 weeks, and the Committee would then have the option of inviting Ministers to discuss the proposed changes during that time. My fellow Chairs and I are concerned about this change reducing the Committees’ influence and enshrining in law that the Government do not need to respond to the scrutiny or recommendations of Select Committees.

[Gideon Amos]

rose—

[Dame Meg Hillier]

I give way to the hon. Gentleman, who has tabled a similar amendment.

[Gideon Amos]

I am grateful to the hon. Lady and the other Select Committee Chairs for taking up an issue that we took up in Committee, and about which there has been concern across the House. The Government may wish to change NPSs in the light of legal judgments, but does she agree that changes to them for policy reasons, particularly when they affect massive projects like Hinkley Point C and Sizewell, should continue to come before the House?

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[Chris Curtis]

Hundreds of thousands of children will wake up tomorrow morning in temporary accommodation as a consequence of this, and millions of families will continue paying some of the highest energy bills in the western world. When Russian tanks rolled into Europe, we were dangerously reliant on foreign oil and gas because our planning system consistently blocked the clean, home-grown energy generation that we so desperately need. I see some Liberal Democrat Members laughing. I note that, in many cases, it was their councils that blocked that energy infrastructure from being built.

[Gideon Amos]

Will the hon. Member give way?

[Chris Curtis]

In one of the wettest countries in Europe, we could face summer water shortages because we have not built a single major reservoir in over 30 years. Here is the real kick in the teeth: we have paid all those prices for rules that have failed even on their own terms. We have created endless hoops to jump through and poured public money into bizarre mitigation schemes while Britain has become one of the most nature-depleted countries on Earth. We have lost over half our ancient woodland and one in six species are at risk of extinction. We have got fewer birds, fewer butterflies and fewer mammals, and yet more paperwork than ever before.

We should ask this: if these rules are not helping people and they are not helping nature, who on earth are they for? We throw money at scattergun mitigation—fish discos and bat tunnels—while failing to invest in strategic, landscape-scale restoration that actually works. We force every project to fit every issue on site, even when that is more expensive, less effective and totally irrational. That means tens of thousands of individual site-by-site protections, which are bureaucratic, inconsistent and scientifically out of date, and all despite the fact that modern ecological science is clear that nature recovery depends on scale and connectivity, not isolated microprojects.

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[Pippa Heylings (South Cambridgeshire) (LD)]

I declare my interest as co-chair of the all-party group on local nature recovery.

When the Government first introduced this Bill, they branded it a win-win. They said that we could build the homes and infrastructure that this country desperately needs and protect and restore nature. We have seen in my constituency—one of the fastest growing areas of the country, with a Liberal Democrat-run local planning authority—that it is indeed possible to demand from developers both ambitious house building and high environmental standards that restore nature. We Liberal Democrats believe that a healthy childhood for all children includes homes that are energy-efficient and warm, not cold and damp; access to green space for mental and physical health; and infrastructure, including public transport, GPs and schools.

When done well, nature is a partner to the healthy homes and green energy that our country needs. However, through this Bill, the Government risk taking a wrecking ball to good-quality development. Nature is not a blocker to development. We are pointing the figure at the wrong culprit, and this is cheap, false rhetoric. Nature is not to blame. The Government’s own watchdog, the Office for Environmental Protection, has publicly warned that the Bill in its current form will be a regression from current environmental protections, rather than increasing the number of homes, helping nature and helping us to meet our binding climate and nature pledges. Instead it will remove vital safeguards and put protected sites and species at risk.

Over 30 leading environmental organisations, including the RSPB, the wildlife trusts and the National Trust, have raised the alarm about part 3 of the Bill, with its very worrying plan to move to a “cash to trash” model for the nature restoration fund. I know the Minister has rejected that characterisation, but in the Environmental Audit Committee we heard robust evidence from expert witnesses that we could call it a “pay some amount later for something, somewhere” fund.

[Gideon Amos]

Does my hon. Friend share my dismay that the Government are not receptive to amendments to part 3 that would restore the mitigation hierarchy and protection for irreplaceable species and ancient woodland?

[Pippa Heylings]

I completely concur. We appreciate the work done by my hon. Friend and others in the Bill Committee, and by tabling numerous amendments at this stage to help the Government improve the Bill.

Why do we need more stringent regulations and demands on developers, rather than less? Why do we need evidence and mitigations approved prior to development, rather than a “pay later for something, somewhere” nature restoration fund? It is because we have the evidence to show what happens without much-needed investment in enforcement capacity for local councils. On the Environmental Audit Committee, we heard the conclusions of the Lost Nature report: for nearly 6,000 homes across 42 developments, only half of the environmental pledges were kept. The others were missing in action—a staggering 83% of hedgehog highways, 100% of bug boxes and 75% of both bat and bird boxes. We need more. That is why I am speaking to the targeted amendments my hon. Friend has mentioned, to make sure we can have this win-win. His ew clause 1 would reinstate the mitigation hierarchy as a legal duty. Simply put, the duty is: first, avoid harm; then mitigate if that is not possible; and only compensate and offset as a last resort. This principle has underpinned environmental planning for decades and cannot be cast aside.

Amendments 6 to 10 and new clauses 26 and 29 aim to address the Office for Environmental Protection’s concerns and strengthen the overall improvement test for environmental delivery plans. I support new clause 21, which requires local plans to have due consideration to the local nature recovery strategies, which are currently silent in the planning system. Amendments 16 and 70 would give protections to England’s globally rare chalk streams—our rainforest and our groundwater. We have 85% of the world’s chalk streams, many of them in Lib Dem constituencies, including mine, yet they remain unprotected.

I hope the Government will consider amendments to the Bill, because we face a choice: pass this nature-wrecking Bill as it stands, or fix it by adopting amendments to protect chalk streams, restore wildlife and create a planning system that works with nature, not against it. I know what the Liberal Democrats will be voting for.