Planning and Infrastructure Bill

Lord Best Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 25th June 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Best (CB)]

My Lords, I declare my interest as a vice-president of the Town and Country Planning Association and of the Local Government Association, an honorary member of the Royal Town Planning Institute, and an honorary fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects.

My interest is in the Bill’s vital mission to get the homes and infrastructure built that this country needs so badly. We have a very real housing crisis, with increasing numbers of families placed in temporary accommodation at huge public expense, simply because there are not enough homes to go around. This objective will require proper resourcing of planning departments, and Part 2 of the Bill recognises this necessity.

A key question hanging over the ambition to build 1.5 million more and better homes is: who will the nation entrust to get this job done? For many years, the answer for most housebuilding has been, “We will let the volume housebuilders acquire the sites, come up with the plans, design and build the homes, and make their profits while we try to require them to allocate a modest proportion of their output for affordable housing”.

This reliance on the large housebuilders has not produced the quantity or quality of homes we need. It has seen development of expanses of greenfield land in preference to small sites and brownfield schemes that can regenerate whole neighbourhoods. It has put SME builders out of business—down from building 40% of new homes to just 10% since 2000. It has not created apprenticeships and a trained workforce, and there has been little innovation or use of modern methods of construction. It has led to so-called “fleecehold” sales to home buyers and to uniform, soulless design, and there has been little attempt to provide the green spaces and community facilities that are the making of any place. The housebuilders have worked at a pace that suits themselves—a build-out rate that ensures no reduction in house prices.

The housebuilders can reply that they are profit-making businesses with shareholders to satisfy and they cannot be expected to work for public benefit—for the common good. But surely, now is the time for a model that is driven by what is best for the place in question. This leads us to the really positive Part 4 of the Bill, which promotes new development corporations. This is the model that will be used for the eagerly awaited new generation of new towns, but which can operate everywhere else: arms-length to local authorities, but publicly accountable; and sometimes created by mayoral and other combined county authorities. Development corporations acquire sites ahead of planning consent and capture the increase in land value, if necessary using the CPO powers much improved by Part 5. Development corporations commission the necessary master plans and parcel out sites to a range of providers—to housebuilders, large and small, but also to housing associations for social housing; to providers of homes for later living; for student accommodation; for self-build and custom housebuilding; and for all the vital social infrastructure.

The Planning and Infrastructure Bill enables the use of this development corporation model for any major development, introducing an alternative to the failed business model of the oligopoly of volume housebuilders. Here is the breakthrough the Bill could achieve.

So, in commending Part 4, I ask the Minister whether the necessary backup—guidance, governance, finance—is being prepared by the Ministry for Housing, Communities and Local Government for the creation of many new development corporations for urban extensions, major regeneration projects and desirable new developments that will contrast with the arrangements that have let us down for the last 30 years or more.