Planning and Infrastructure Bill

Lord Bailey of Paddington Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 25th June 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bailey of Paddington (Con)]

My Lords, I refer to my register of interests: I am the chairman of Faraday Ventures, which was set up to provide social and key worker housing. Therefore, I am understandably keen to support any measures that will encourage the construction of a large quantity of high-quality housing, particularly if a large proportion is made up of social housing.

I welcome the spirit in which the Bill has been launched as it seeks to build on the progress made by the previous Government in delivering 2.5 million homes since 2010. However, there are some serious concerns, which I shall highlight. I question whether it is possible for the present Government to build 1.5 million homes by the end of this Parliament, as they have promised.

The Bill is designed to streamline planning and infrastructure delivery for homes, but in doing so it takes away powers from local councillors by reducing the strength of the planning committees through the national scheme of delegation to be introduced by Clause 51. This specifies at a national level which planning decisions would be decided on by officers and which by planning committees.

As the shadow Secretary of State responsible for housing said in the other place, if the Bill passes in its present form, residents will feel disappointed and disenfranchised when they raise concerns to their elected councillors about proposed developments. I believe that this will break the social contract if local people feel helpless around development; it will lead to less acceptance of new housing. Does the Minister agree? London Councils shares this concern, stating that councillors must retain the ability to scrutinise and influence certain developments, especially where there is significant local concern.

The role of councillors is further diminished through Clause 93, which would amend existing legislation to increase the flexibility and use of development corporations. To be clear, development corporations are, or can be, a very good thing, particularly in the provision of new towns. I believe that they will be necessary to deliver new towns, but here in London we have seen the best and the worst of development corporations. One delivered the Olympics, which was largely considered to be a good thing, and to this day housing is still coming forward. But in the West End, many local people feel that the Mayor of London is using the mayoral development corporation to ride roughshod over their plans, under a Labour-led council, to deliver the pedestrianisation of Oxford Street. If we have to vote on corporations, we need to know what type of corporation and what flexibility they will be given above beyond the ones we already recognise.

London Councils is also right to note that the planning system is not the main barrier to delivering new homes and infrastructure here in London, where there is a healthy pipeline of nearly 300,000 homes that have been approved by council planning departments. That is enough to meet future housing targets more than three times over, but those schemes are not coming forward for development, due to viability issues. Viability in a place like London with high land values is a real problem.

Some of the measures in the Bill will help planning reform, and I sincerely wish the Government all the success in the world with delivering their 1.5 million homes—and I personally, through my role here and on the GLA, will do my level best to help. This planning Bill could be a boon to that, or it could be a missed opportunity; it is about the detail, particularly around things such as the levels of social housing that we can expect to get and what we are going to do about development corporations, which will be vital.