Planning and Infrastructure Bill

Lord Berkeley Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 25th June 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Berkeley (Lab)]

My Lords, I want to say a few words about something that has not been talked about very much. Let me turn this damn phone off first—this happened in my Select Committee yesterday and it was not very good.

I want to talk about planning, because planning comes up a great deal in this Bill—quite rightly, and it is a great Bill. There is a lot about the different ways of obtaining planning, such as through the Transport and Works Act or through the Planning Inspectorate. What I cannot find is anything about planning when it comes to railways or canals. Historically, planning permission for them has been obtained through a hybrid Bill. I have been involved in a number of hybrid Bill projects: the Channel Tunnel was the first one; then there was HS1; and, more recently, HS2. I also chaired a Select Committee on a river project in east London—no, in the north-east somewhere.

There is one common thing that worries me; with greater pressure on people’s time, I have a serious worry. Who you would call a judge in any court, or an inspector in planning, becomes a group of a dozen or half a dozen Members of Parliament or Members of your Lordships’ House. They are expected to act as a judge with full transparency and full fairness; to listen to all the evidence, both from the promoter and from the people who are petitioning; and then to make a decision.

This all sounds very easy until you look at things and ask, “First of all, how is the Select Committee selected?” It is not like a Select Committee that we have here. It is a special Select Committee to act as judge and jury, so to speak, for the particular project—usually one promoted by the Government. I have to say, when you start looking at who is selected, a lot of the time the selection is based on: “Have you behaved in the House? Have you voted with your party, or have you not been there?” If you are speaking against the party too often, you are going on that committee. I could give several examples, which I will not do now, but it has got to a stage where you can look at the committee and say, “Well, I’ve got to open my correspondence in the morning meeting. Maybe I’ll be asleep after lunch, but nobody will notice”. That happens quite often.

The poor petitioners, who are not helped by the very expensive lawyers whom the promoter is employing, often have to speak on their own. They are told throughout the process, “It’s all very difficult. You’re probably not going to win, but I suppose you could try”. They then have to accept, more or less, the decision of this so-called court, which is under a lot of pressure from Ministers and everyone else to come out in favour of the promoter. I would like to ask my noble friend the Minister—I do not necessarily need an answer tonight, but I think that this deserves a petition when we get to Committee stage—do we need to use the hybrid Bill process for railways and canals anymore? The planning process that we have through the Planning Inspectorate and the Transport and Works Act seems to work very well and people have confidence in it. Certainly on the basis of HS1, I could go on to compensation and things like that, but I will not do so; I shall just say that people are very upset about it. They think that they have been treated badly, and then they do not get paid their compensation—whether or not that is related, I do not know.

We ought to have a debate about this because I suspect the reason for not having a change is because Parliament sees itself as supreme. We are very good at being supreme here, and they are very good at being even more supreme down at the other end of the Corridor. However, I think that, for something like this, which is basically a court, we should give it to the professionals. So I shall try to come up with a petition, which may at least enable some debate to take place; I may be told why that will not work, but let us hope that it will.

Planning and Infrastructure Bill

Lord Berkeley Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 17th July 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I will chiefly offer support to Amendment 46A from the noble Baroness, Lady Coffey.

In response to the challenge from the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, who said that of course the Government would not do this, I am afraid that we hear that very often in your Lordships’ House. The noble Lord may be speaking for his own Government, but we are making law for potential future Governments, and we cannot know how they will behave. That is a reason to put Amendment 46A in the Bill.

I respond to the speeches of the noble Lords, Lord Ravensdale and Lord Hunt, with a little reminder that we are one of the most nature-depleted corners of this battered planet. If our regulators have not succeeded in doing the job they should have done in protecting nature, the answer is not to take away more power from the regulators. By all means, make them work better. As the noble Baroness, Lady Coffey, said, we will undoubtedly discuss this at great length in relation to Part 3, but the Bill currently takes away an enormous amount of protection for nature, which is a huge problem.

In talking about Amendments 46 and 46A, I will refer to Defra’s own words from a blog post in 2025 that, we can assume, represents the Government’s view. It starts with a statement with which I can only agree:

“Nature is the bedrock of our entire way of life”.


As I often put it, the economy is a complete subset of the environment; none of the economy exists without a healthy environment. That blog seeks to defend the nature restoration fund, the environment delivery plans and all the other steps that this Government are introducing. You might say that the blog post is a little too vehement for its own good and that its tone sounds extremely defensive. None the less, we can all think of examples of where the Government have, on the one hand, done something for nature, but, on the other, done enormous damage with other policies.

One of the obvious examples that comes to mind here is peat. Peatland is terribly important for nature and for climate. Large amounts of money are spent on restoring peatlands. We also have continued use of the land for driven grouse shooting and the burning of large amounts of peat causing great damage—and continual horticultural use of peat. So we have the Government trying to expensively restore something while continuing to allow the destruction of it. That is why this needs to be in the Bill. I could give many more examples, but given the hour I will not, of where the Government are, in essence, facing in two directions at once and nature is torn down the middle as a result.

[Lord Berkeley (Lab)]

My Lords, the amendment from the noble Lord, Lord Ravensdale, is a very good amendment, but it refers only to low-carbon energy infrastructure. Of course, he is an expert in that, and that is fine. The comments made by him, my noble friend Lord Hunt and the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, referred to a much wider subject: are regulators a good thing or not and are we controlling them? To say that we want to make changes to the regulations on low-carbon energy infrastructure without looking at others means we are missing something. We have big problems with many regulators, but it should be a consistent policy. It needs to be done on a much more scientific and level playing field rather than it being just something which relates to whether we think what they are doing is a good thing or a bad thing. I do not think that is the right way to look forward. Maybe when the noble Lord comes to wind up, he can explain why the amendment refers just to low-carbon energy infrastructure.

[Lord Ravensdale (CB)]

Perhaps I may answer the noble Lord now. I thank him for his comments. He is absolutely right that there is a broader point here, but the amendment took into account the scope limitations of the Bill, which is why we raised it in that way. He is right that there is a broader point on regulators, but that would take it outside the scope of this legislation.

--- Later in debate ---

Amendment 52 would give development consent orders that concern nationally significant infrastructure projects the force of Acts of Parliament. It is intended that, after due consultation and consideration, and if enacted by Parliament, they would become essentially incontestable. The amendment would insert an extensive proposed new Schedule 3A that would declare how the system of parliamentary confirmation would operate in practice. It would provide for a process of consultation and petitioning against the Bill that would preserve the rights of the affected parties. However, once this process had been undergone, and once the DCO had been confirmed by an Act of Parliament, the possibilities of wilful obstruction would be minimised. Neither the Act nor the DCO could be questioned in any court or tribunal. Nevertheless, if circumstances changed, such as would require a modification of the DCO, the amendment would make full allowance for this in accordance with Schedule 6 to the Planning Act 2008. I earnestly hope that the Government will pay some attention to this amendment and perhaps adopt it in some form or other.

[Lord Berkeley (Lab)]

My Lords, my noble friend spent a lot of time complaining about the A303. The simple solution is to go by train.

My noble friend is quite right that the planning process takes a very long time. I spent many years trying to do it in relation to building the Channel Tunnel. It is a long time ago now, but we still had to go through the hybrid Bill process, which took quite a long time. My French opposite number kept asking me, “Why the hell are you taking so long to get permission?” I said that we had to go through Parliament and have several debates, Select Committees and things like that. I asked him how they did it so quickly in France, where they were taking six weeks and we were taking three years. He said, “Well, it’s quite simple. It’s a bit like Canada. If you want to go quickly, you don’t consult the frogs if you are draining the pond”. That sums it up.

My worry about these amendments is that the hybrid Bill process needs reviewing. There is a lot of work to be done to make sure that, whatever goes in its place, including my noble friend’s excellent amendments, achieves what it is trying to do, which is to balance the needs of not just the Government and industry but the public who they serve. We need much more information about how that would work before we can form a view.

Something that has not been mentioned much so far in this debate is the question of a business case and viability. It is fine pushing ahead with all these things, such as Sizewell B—or is it C?—because the Government have said they are a good idea, but they have not actually said they are going to fund them. The same could have applied to HS2, but that has gone further and got into a bigger mess. A proper business case needs to be produced for any of these projects, alongside the planning regime, so that we can all form a view about whether it is likely that these projects will go ahead or whether they will fall flat on their face, which would be the worst of all worlds.

I will be interested to hear what my noble friend the Minister says. Maybe there is something in these amendments that is worth looking at, but we have to accept that there are many people in this country who do not like change and who want to do JRs or some other way of opposing what is planned, and we have to respect them as well. I look forward to my noble friend’s comments.

[Lord Banner (Con)]

My Lords, it will probably already be apparent that in many respects the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, and I are in agreement about how the Bill can be made more effective, but on this group we are not yet quite aligned. I have a lot of sympathy with the intention behind Amendments 52 and 65 in particular, and I have immense respect for those behind the drafting. I myself wanted to go further when I was undertaking the review of legal challenges to M6, and I think it is important that I explain why I felt I could not, while I still need some convincing that it would be possible or sensible to go further.

When I did the review, I concluded that the evidence demonstrated that the overwhelming majority of judicial reviews of the M6 failed. It follows from this that the problem is not with the law, nor is it about “activist judges”, the term often used by some people about judges. It is about the time it takes for bad JRs to meet their doom. That is the problem, and to my mind the remedy for it is to shorten the judicial review process as much as possible. That is what my recommendations focused on, and I am told that Clause 12 in conjunction with the CPR changes—I have not been checking my emails so I still have not seen them—gives effect to those recommendations. That is what the changes would do.

To my mind, therefore, removing judicial review altogether, as things currently stand, would not achieve much more than a truncated JR process. For the really big stuff, the Heathrows and HS2s of this world, the system already allows for the JR process to be fast-tracked. The HS2 and Heathrow cases, both of which I was involved in, went from ground zero to the Supreme Court far quicker than normal cases—not much more than a year, in the HS2 case in particular.

The question then is: what are the downsides of going further, and does the relatively marginal benefit outweigh those downsides? In my view, the answer is no. There is a difficulty with ousters, whether done expressly through an ouster clause, which hardly ever works, or done in a more intelligent fashion than an express ouster, as the amendment from the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, does, essentially asking Parliament to endorse a DCO and thus giving it the benefit of parliamentary sovereignty. Most DCOs involve the compulsory purchase of land and/or the acquisition of individual rights. There is a real danger, if that approach is undertaken, that there will come a point—whether because someone was denied a hearing because there was a mistake or because someone involved in the decision-making process inadvertently failed to disclose an interest—where something goes wrong in a CPO context. A person whose land, maybe their home, is to be acquired—or there is to be some other fundamental interference with their rights—is, it is said, denied any possibility of correcting an obvious legal error.

In that scenario, there is a real danger that the untested working assumption that Parliament is sovereign—for there is no written tablet of stone saying that the Supreme Court cannot quash legislation—will be tested, and we will not get the right answer. Pandora’s box would be opened and the Supreme Court would quash the legislation in question, and once opened you would never be able to put it back in the box. The lessons from the USA Supreme Court tell us that it would not stop there. This building would no longer be the most important on Parliament Square; it would be the Supreme Court building. That would clearly be a fundamental constitutional change, and most people would regard it as unwelcome to our democracy.

I also have a degree of discomfort about what is fundamentally an executive process being essentially laundered by Parliament, as opposed to it being a legislative process from start to finish, as the HS2 and Crossrail hybrid Bill processes were. I do not want to rain on the noble Lord’s parade, and that of those behind this. As I said, I see a lot of merit in trying to go further, but once you realise that the adverse delaying effects of JR can be cut down very substantially, the question is: does going further risk the constitutional crisis that it may very well facilitate, bearing in mind the very severe consequences and implications of that?

On Amendment 47, I recommended that the single shot for cases totally without merit be an oral hearing—as opposed to a written procedure, which is what Amendment 47 covers—because we are dealing with something that interferes with people’s property rights and can take away someone’s home. To my mind, given that degree of interference in fundamental rights, the individuals in question ought to have the right to at least one hearing, even if it is a 30-minute JR permission hearing that declares a case to be totally without merit. There ought to be at least one day in court—otherwise, fundamental constitutional principles and the legitimacy of the process could be undermined. There is no doubt that we need to sharpen up planning and infrastructure, but, if at all humanly possible, we need to do it in a way that carries people with us as opposed to alienating people; that is the way to make the system work.

I am yet to be convinced, but I am willing to be convinced. Ultimately, it is not me that the noble Lord needs to convince but the Minister and her colleagues. For the reasons I have given, I have a degree of nervousness about these amendments.

Planning and Infrastructure Bill

Lord Berkeley Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 24th July 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Berkeley (Lab)]

My Lords, I am very pleased to support the amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Lucas. My interest in animal welfare and good-quality meat comes from the south-west and talking over many years with the butchers who supply good meat. The two problems which noble Lords have identified are: the distance of travel, which is a very serious animal welfare issue; and the fact that over the last 20 or 30 years the supermarkets have put pressure on government to close as many small abattoirs as possible, so that they can get a greater share of the market. Also, as we have discussed in your Lordships’ House before, you must have a vet to witness the abattoir’s work, yet there is a shortage in the competitive supply of vets. One company appears to have a very large share of the market. I wonder whether Ministers should not go a little further and look at the whole question of competition in this field and, most importantly, the distance of travel.

I live on the Isles of Scilly. We have some very nice farmers there and some very nice cattle—which taste extremely good too—but they have to go to the mainland. On a small ship going up and down in the waves, these animals are pretty unhappy. For years, the farmers there have been lobbying to have an abattoir on the islands. Finally, after years, the new Duke of Cornwall has agreed to provide some land on St Mary’s where an abattoir can be built. It will therefore be a much shorter journey from the off islands to the abattoir. All the issues that the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, has mentioned are still there, but it is a much shorter distance. I hope that that the Government will look at all these things and make sure that we have a competitive market for this which is also very animal friendly.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, there are 100 million animals killed for meat in the UK every month, which is quite a statistic. There are 75,000 people who work in abattoirs and associated institutions. The amendment from the noble Lord, Lord, Lucas, raises an important issue. Whether this is the right way to address it I am not quite sure because, as other speakers have said, we are talking about a systemic issue here. I often speak about our broken food system. At the heart of that broken food system is factory farming and the giant chicken and pig institutions which are associated with giant abattoirs, logically enough. We are approaching a land use framework, to be coming from the Government. Many noble Lords think that this does not get mentioned enough. If we think about land use and abattoirs, this all needs to fit together in a systemic way, whatever model you think should apply. Obviously, I have views on that.

I want to cross-reference what I was doing in your Lordships’ House about 12 hours ago. I was talking about the climate emergency and the impact of rising temperatures. I note that in 2022, the Government produced guidance that animals should not be transported except in temperature-controlled environments when the temperature—or the perceived temperature, taking account of humidity—is higher than 30 degrees Celsius. That might not historically have been much of an issue in the UK, but it is only going to continue and become a larger issue if you are moving animals. The longer the distance, the more you are unable to do it in the cool hours of the day.

We need a much more localised food system, which means small independent farmers and small independent abattoirs. Five small abattoirs closed in 2024 alone, and the figure is down to 49 from 64 in 2019. There is a real issue here, but it must be looked at systemically in the round, not just as abattoirs on their own. We have a huge animal welfare issue here. We also need to think about workforce. I found some statistics suggesting that the average age of a slaughterer is 63.