Planning and Infrastructure Bill

Lord Inglewood Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 25th June 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Inglewood (CB)]

My Lords, I declare my interests in the register—in particular, that I am a farmer and landowner in Cumbria, president of Historic Buildings and Places, and until last autumn was for six years chairman of the Cumbria Local Enterprise Partnership. I have also been involved in rural, environmental and heritage organisations and matters for much of my life.

Forty years ago, to my own surprise—both then and in retrospect now—I chaired the Lake District planning board’s development control committee. At that time, I began to wonder whether local authority membership of itself was the right basis for the quasi-judicial function of determining planning applications, and I came to the conclusion that boards analogous to JPs might be better; hence, I welcome the idea of mandatory education for planning committees. Of course, local knowledge and views matter, but they are not the only consideration in determining applications, and planning officers on their own in the real world cannot always deflect the tsunami of local populism that sometimes accompanies controversial applications.

Part of the point of the planning system is to get it right without resorting to appeals. That is somewhat analogous to the belief that I have that perhaps the most important thing that I learned from reading for the Bar was to avoid litigation if you possibly can. Given the overriding requirements behind the Bill and the points made in this debate, there is a very good case for accountable development corporations and special regimes for national infrastructure. However, as the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, has said, the devil lies in the detail, and they must be transparent and accountable. In such cases, deliberations on all planning matters must be taken into account. Listed buildings remain listed, even if specific listed building consents may not be required. Changing the planning process should not affect the planning and evidential significance of heritage, nature or environmental considerations. Those matters are, in their own way, very important to our national economy and the character of the country in which we live, and are at the heart of contemporary ideas about “Place” and its generally recognised importance to the wider economy.

It is important that land use policy and its implementation is not hijacked by the public sector to promote its aspirations at the expense of the small man and local concerns and other considerations not directly measurable in economic terms. There is a temptation, which sometimes cannot be resisted, for the public sector to see the process of authorisation as a kind of bulldozer to get its own way and take forward its own agenda. I am sure that we can all think of instances where that may be happening.

While charging for planning applications may seem a bit out of kilter, in that the basis of land law and the planning system is the presumption that one can do what one wants with one’s own land, unless there is a good reason not to, which is defined inter alia by planning policies, in reality this purist approach hardly seems realistic in the world in which we live. But these charges should not be greater pro rata if the authority concerned is ineffective. Indeed, I had wondered whether perhaps, if you won a planning appeal, you should get the money back.

We have heard this evening very considerable scepticism expressed about the mechanisms of Part 3 of the Bill. I simply say that I echo them. Speaking from the perspective of a Cumbria farmer and landowner, I can say that the current arrangements are all over the place. As someone wanting to take forward these things, it is simply impossible to know what on earth you have to do. The parallel public and private regimes taken as a whole make no real sense, and much of the money talked about in this context does not seem to exist. Unless matters are sharpened up, much of this will be shown to be whatever is the proper collective word for paper tigers.

Planning is crucial. We need it in this country, because it is a form of estate management for the nation as a whole, based on the country’s disparate needs being balanced out between them. In that way, you avoid physical anarchy. Like all estate management, its implementation on the ground depends on money, which is why the implementation of much of what we are talking about this evening depends more or less entirely on the Government’s economic policy.

Clearly, the country is in a mess; if good policies prevail, that will be for the good, but the impact of some current policies will, I believe, inhibit growth, and they will have a damaging impact on what we are discussing. The state of the economy is crucial. How planning policies work out depends on landowners, developers and those running and carrying out the planning function working together. Levelling up was a response to a failure in this regard, in the north of England. There is still much more to be done. I say, “Good luck to them”, but I sense that they may need it.

Planning and Infrastructure Bill

Lord Inglewood Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 4th September 2025 Lords Chamber

I strongly endorse what the noble Lord, Lord Parkinson, said, because it would allow a planning authority—as is the reality today—to be rational. If someone wishes to change a plate of glass because it has been smashed, the planning authority would not pursue them and would have no motivation to do so. That is common sense. A move away from that would lead to unnecessary conflict and to people choosing not to abide by the law. That is bad governance and bad law. I am sure the Minister will want to listen carefully and think through the logic that the noble Lord, Lord Parkinson, wisely outlined to the Committee.

[Lord Inglewood (CB)]

My Lords, I will speak particularly to Amendment 97, to which I have put my name. I am an owner of a listed building, and I have been involved with a large number of others, both as an owner and a trustee, over a long period. I am also president of Historic Buildings & Places, which is one of the national amenity societies, and I ought to add a confession: I am a geek about old buildings, having become a life member of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings as a 21st birthday present.

I echo the general comments that have been made on this grouping more widely. The proposition behind Amendment 97 is relatively simple; it was laid out in some detail by the noble Lord, Lord Parkinson, so there is no advantage in my going over much of it again. Listed building consent is an integral and important part of the overall town and country planning code of this country—albeit its character is a bit different from the general rules about development, as the noble Lord speaking previously pointed out. In reality, its scope is wider and deeper than the general planning rules in some ways and relates to matters of historic and architectural significance, which are very important to place-making—which is one of the things at the centre of current thinking about the future spatial development of this country. Sometimes, these things are hardly noticeable to the layman; they may not necessarily be understood. It is the reality of the world in which we live that many of them are overlooked and go by default—sometimes, I regret to say, wilfully and sometimes not.

Against a background of that kind, charging a fee is likely to encourage more of the same—more turning a blind eye and more hoping that nobody will notice. We are talking about physical things here, and our response should be pragmatic and to accept this reality.

As was commented on by the noble Lord, Lord Parkinson, some may say that some listed building consents are integral to big, visible schemes. As he said, in those circumstances, regular planning consent—if I can call it that—is invariably required for the wider scheme of which they are an integral component. That is the way that the matter should be dealt with. I simply suggest that this amendment represents a realistic and pragmatic way to make the system work as well as it can, simply because charging a fee is unlikely to make the system as a whole work in the public interest.

[Lord Lansley (Con)]

My Lords, it has been an interesting debate. I will ask two questions of the Minister. I apologise for asking them at the end of the debate, when the time available to get a reply is modest, but I was prompted by some of the points that have been made. I declare an interest as the owner of a listed property, but I do not propose to talk about that much, as I thoroughly agree with my noble friend Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay, who explained the case very well.

The first question is on setting fees. The Minister may recall from previous debates on other Bills that I am keen on the capacity for applicants to enter into planning performance agreements with local planning authorities, and for those agreements to have not only the opportunity to pay additional fees to secure performance by the local planning authority but a rebate if the performance of the local authority does not meet the agreement. I am not entirely sure that that is presently legal. Can the Minister let me know, now or later, whether we need to do more to ensure that the regulations that this Bill will enable will stretch so far as to include that kind of provision to support planning performance agreements?

The second question is in pursuance of my noble friend Lady Scott’s Amendment 99ZA. She is asking on what basis the Secretary of State, in Clause 49, will ensure that the income from the surcharge does not exceed the relevant costs of the listed persons—these are mainly statutory consultees and the like. New Section 303ZZB(8), inserted by the clause, says:

“Regulations under subsection (1) may set the surcharge at a level that exceeds the costs of listed persons”.


So we appear to have a clause that says, “They shouldn’t exceed the costs; oh, but, by the way, they may exceed the costs”. What precisely is the Government’s intention?

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Why do I say all this about Clause 51? It is because I hope that I have demonstrated that there is a substantive argument about what the national scheme of delegation should say. It is not purely a technical issue. The delegated powers memorandum states that regulations about the national scheme of delegation should be made by the negative procedure. It seems evident that these are substantive issues that should be governed by the affirmative procedure—and making it the affirmative procedure is the purpose of Amendment 105 in my name. The Minister might well argue that there may be a number of changes to the national scheme of delegation over the years ahead. I agree, but they may well be relatively technical. I therefore put it to the Minister that, if she recognises any merit in my arguments, we might compromise on the thought that, as we do sometimes with legislation, the first use of these powers should be by an affirmative procedure, but not subsequently. Perhaps we might return to that, after a conversation, on Report.

[Lord Inglewood (CB)]

My Lords, I will briefly support my noble friend Lord Cameron of Dillington’s amendment. In the 1980s, I was chairman of the development and control committee of the then Lake District Special Planning Board, and I can see no reason why those kinds of organisations should not be treated exactly the same as the others on the inherent merits of what is being proposed and what the authority members wish to occur. I was the Secretary of State-appointed member of the Lake District Special Planning Board. It occurred to me then that that was rather analogous to being a Member of your Lordships’ House as a life Peer—but, of course, I would not understand that.

[Lord Fuller (Con)]

My Lords, I strongly support this set of amendments, particularly Amendment 135HZE, which I think my noble friend is just about to wrap up on.

Noble Lords will recall that I have been a councillor and sat on a local planning committee for 23 years; I was the leader for 17 years. It was one of my privileges to appoint the committee and choose the chairman. I always explained to my members that the purpose of planning was not an administrative function that existed as an end in itself—although this Bill sometimes treats it as if it were so—but to arbitrate between the private interests of the applicant and the public interest. I use the word “arbitrate” purposefully, because people who sit on a planning committee have a difficult job. They must weigh up so much conflicting information within an adversarial system and, ultimately, either the proposer or objector wins.

Much of this Bill is established under the false premise that local planning committees are blockers of development and that the ranks of officials will not rest until every square inch of our nation is concreted over. But this is nonsense. The premise is that officials bring none of their prejudices to bear, but that is simply not true. We have Natural England, which leaves no stone unturned in blocking development. We have the railways, which ballast every proposal with ridiculous costs, such as £5 million for a footbridge to cross between two platforms. We have the highways authorities, which tie themselves in knots under the misdirection that personal transport outside development boundaries is unsustainable. That is before all the other bad actors in many other quangos that increasingly advance their own narrow self-interests rather than the public interest.

I do not deny the importance of some of their representations, but the problem with these quangos is that they all claim a veto—it is their way or no way. It is from these vetoes that we have got the £100 million bat bridge, to which I expect my noble friend Lord Howard may refer. It is from these vetoes that we get this mitigating trade in natterjack newts or whatever they are, organisms that are rare in Europe but commonplace in every English village pond. And then of course there is the insanity of nutrient neutrality, as if building a bungalow in Bristol is going to somehow clean up the River Wensum.

Given the way planning works, in many cases it takes only one of these vetoes from just one of the statutory consultees to block the entire proposal. That is especially the case when officers advise members to refuse an otherwise acceptable proposal on the overly precautionary grounds that an adverse decision could be grounds for appeal or expensive judicial review. We need the planning committee to cut through the undergrowth, and to stop looking over their shoulder and being fearful of challenge.

I congratulate my noble friend Lord Banner, who is not in his place, on his report in which he made several recommendations. But those will count for nothing if there is nobody without the mandate, duty and courage to get those applications to committee. In my experience, it is the committees populated by the accountable councillors that do more to get Britain building than the faceless dead hand of the state quangos.

We need elected people who know a self-serving veto or spurious objection when they see one. We need people on the ground who know the importance of building homes, economies and places that enhance communities to arbitrate those competing interests. That is why this amendment is so welcome and necessary. It is absolutely right that the chair of the planning committee, working with the senior planner, should be able to revisit otherwise fatal objections to get that balance, to enable the local champions who populate those committees to take all the evidence into account, to listen carefully to objections, to balance the private and public interest and to get Britain building, and not pander to the self-serving quangos sometimes interested only in pursuing their own ideologies to the exclusion of all else.

Planning and Infrastructure Bill

Lord Inglewood Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 9th September 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Coffey (Con)]

My Lords, I look forward to spending 11-hour days with the noble Lord, Lord Carlile of Berriew, on important legislation that this House is considering.

I rise to speak to this because it is absolutely vital that we get going with the building of social housing. There are good examples of where we can be creative in considering this, but the underlying element of what has been put forward in speeches by noble Lords already is absolutely right. When a housing developer makes a commitment, this House, and this Parliament, have to strain every sinew to make sure that councils do not let them off the hook. It matters in terms of local communities and local plans. The whole essence of a large part of this Bill is that a lot of decisions are being removed from elected councillors by this Government. That is when confidence and trust in our local government starts to fade away: when promises made by developers—on housing and other issues, including health and other Section 106 issues—evaporate.

My noble friend Lord Markham has, in effect, set up a housing association in Ealing, being creative with how the financing of that can be done, to make sure of ongoing sustainable homes. The noble Baroness, Lady Thornhill, referred to the fact that there has been a net change of just 700 homes when it comes to social rent. My noble friend Lord Young of Cookham started to refer to the fact that registered social landlords were not taking up some of the homes that are being done. In the east of England, we have the social landlords Flagship pro-actively selling off social rent housing and not replacing it—certainly not locally—but potentially doing some aspects of that elsewhere, many miles away from where that social rented housing is being displaced.

On what my noble friend Lord Young of Cookham said about lifetime tenancies, the law was of course changed so that councils should consider shorter-term tenancies, proactively considering the composition and demographics in that local community. Very few councils took that up, and I understand why to some extent, but, as has been pointed out, these are homes that people want to have but they are also precious uses of space. Thinking of the next group, there is a good intention to have design for lifetime. Some other, perhaps cruder, economic policies have come through in the past that have not always been welcomed. But I suggest that the Minister looks back at policy from just a few years ago with the two-pronged “benefits to bricks” approach.

The Government today are spending at least at least £35 billion a year on paying rent through the benefits system. We constantly need to think about where resources are being deployed. While recognising that we desperately need more homes—and we are coming on to land banking later—let us make the most of every single home that we already have today, including social housing, and consider what we can do to hold on to them. Apart from that, I will always continue to defend the right to buy.

[Lord Inglewood (CB)]

My Lords, thus far in this debate, we have been thinking in terms of solving the problems that we are discussing by building more houses, but I would like to raise a point that I will describe in a little more detail in a moment: building more houses is, I think, quite the wrong way of approaching the problem.

I am talking, of course, about the national parks and areas of nationally important landscape. The noble Lord, Lord Young, referred to his time in local government 60 years ago. I cannot go quite so far back down memory lane, but I was involved in the Lake District Special Planning Board 40 years ago. The problem we had then is a problem that still exists—indeed, in a more exacerbated form—despite our efforts to try to address it. The problem was that people who lived and worked in this community were unable to find any accommodation as their parents, grandparents and great-grandparents had before them.

It is not simply a matter of social implications. The kind of people who were, and still are, finding it very hard to find accommodation in—or even, in many instances, quite close to—these kinds of important landscape areas are the very people who are essential for looking after it properly. There is a real problem. If we do not resolve the difficulty in some sensible way, there will be even more problems.

Let me illustrate this. In the hamlet of Chapel Stile, up Langdale—which, as many of your Lordships will know, is one of the most admired, visited and esteemed parts of Britain’s premier national park—approximately 80% of the housing stock is second homes. The one thing you must not do to resolve the problem of housing up Langdale is to build more and more houses, because that would completely destroy the very rationale for the place being so special.

Against this background, I think it important that this relatively niche problem—I use those words advisedly but not disparagingly—is looked at carefully, because it does not lend itself to many of the kinds of solutions that have been canvassed in the context of the problems elsewhere in the country. We do not need more housing stock in the Lake District. What we want is more of the housing stock that exists to be occupied and used as the basis for looking after the national park itself. That in turn is in the interests of everybody else who comes to it and enjoys it, and the rest of the country.

It is not a question of social housing or affordable homes. We have to be much more imaginative about the way we do it. We have to find a way of taking quite a bit of the existing housing stock out of the open market. In my view, you would probably have to use planning covenants to put it into a restricted local marketplace where local people could afford to buy homes, or lease them, and, in turn, commit their activities to looking after the area in question.

I have raised this point on a number of occasions over the years and have never got anywhere with it at all. I know perfectly well why: it will cost quite a bit of money. But these places matter. Widespread degradation through building is something that I do not think any of us condone. Some of your Lordships may have seen in the Sunday papers a description of what the Egyptian Government are proposing to do at Saint Catherine’s Monastery in Sinai, which, in my view, is totally outrageous and a monstrous way to treat a world heritage site.

Many bits of the rural economy feel very let down by housing policy, because it is not addressing the particular problems that they are facing. Many of the solutions that have been canvassed I have no trouble with at all, but they are essentially—not entirely, but essentially—for urban areas. There are different issues and problems in rural areas. As I said, many people there feel let down, and you can see from recent opinion polling that many of them are pretty disillusioned with the existing political classes.

Planning and Infrastructure Bill

Lord Inglewood Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 17th September 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, where it is troubling serious agriculture, yes, we should enforce.

[Lord Inglewood (CB)]

My Lords, on the grounds of “it takes one to know one”, it is worth noting that this is a debate that we are unlikely to have in the next Session of Parliament—old-style hereditary Peers’ contribution to the governance of this country.

I will talk briefly about invasive species. I declare an interest as a landowner in Cumbria. It has always seemed to me that the real problem in dealing with the ones that are pests, of which we can all think of a number—Himalayan balsam, Japanese knotweed and so on—is that those of us who want to see them rolled back have never managed to capture the hearts and minds of the country. It is no good just doing it yourself, as I think the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, said. I suggest to the Government that they should think in terms of trying to enrol the nation on this particular crusade.

I say this because my contributions towards our local red squirrel group may be endangered, although I hope they will not be, by reduction in support for my agricultural enterprises, because there is less money going round. There might be ways of incentivising those involved in land management, possibly with a little financial contribution as part of a wider package, to make some of these things happen. I will leave it at that, other than to say that if anybody wants to see an extreme example of a reservoir with a whole group of invasive species in one place, they should travel by train from Preston to Manchester and look out the window. They all seem to be there on the verge of the railway line.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Framlingham (Con)]

My Lords, I wish to make a brief intervention. In terms of infrastructure, nothing has had a more devastating effect on the countryside and nature than HS2—for no purpose at all, which is very sad. The point I wish to put to the Minister relates to compulsory purchase orders. I do not know whether she is aware that the farmers have been paid only 90% of the value of the farmland taken for HS2, which seems grotesquely unfair. I wonder whether she would take that on board and perhaps comment on it or think about it.

[Lord Inglewood (CB)]

My Lords, I rise briefly to support those who have argued that the levy must be spent exclusively on nature. That is what it is collected for. The Government, who administer these things more generally, have enormous resources at their disposal and they are ordaining that this is the way things will be done. As part of that, they should foot the bill for their own activities.

If I may, I will also turn briefly to Amendment 309, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Gascoigne. I have great sympathy with it, but it might be better to include a spatial measure, rather than a local authority boundary measure, behind the approach we adopt. If we have a development very close to a local authority boundary, it may be that the right place to spend the money is just over the boundary. Equally, I have suddenly discovered that I live in the county of Westmorland, when previously I had always lived in Cumberland. The distance from Alston to Barrow-in-Furness, which are in the same county, is over 100 miles, and I think that would throw up problems.

There is also a deeper, fundamental problem, to which I do not know the answer. Part of the emotional element of the levy is that the money is to be spent on nature and environmental improvements quite close by—that is the psychology of it. As the noble Baroness, Lady Coffey, said, in cases such as the Channel Tunnel, that is not really possible. Speaking as someone from the north of England, where we have plenty of projects which could benefit from money of this kind, if all the money raised is in the south of England and cannot be spent in the north, you would find a very considerable feeling of discontent. A lot of the problems, once you get away from the immediate locality of any particular project, may well be, at the most extreme, quite a long way away.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Fuller (Con)]

My Lords, I am greatly concerned that the Bill potentially freezes out the role for private sector providers, thus stopping the flow of investment into nature. That said, I was mildly reassured by the letter that came this morning. Nevertheless, I am anxious that the proposition is that Natural England will become a monopoly consolidator and provider of mitigation solutions—with the dead hand of the state. This Bill should define how private operators can work alongside Natural England to address the market for mitigation.

In an earlier grouping, I explained the distinction between permitting and licensing. In my view, licensing is the way to go for the EDPs, not least because it will prevent the derivatives—secondary markets that enrich speculators at the expense of delivering the outcome. We cannot afford to create a new milk quota disaster with the creation of a collateralised asset class that has everything to do with speculation and nothing to do with nature recovery. That is not an argument against private involvement; it is an argument for channelling and regulating what is a fast-developing industry.

I support Amendments 258 and 268 because they seek to put in place how we deal with private industry and how Natural England is required to engage with it. This Bill should set the terms of trade. How will those 80-year-tail liabilities be secured? What step-in rights will there be in the event of the provider going bankrupt? Will the obligations be characterised as in Section 106 or as a land charge at the Land Registry? The Section 106 route has criminal and prosecution routes in the event of non-compliance, but a land charge is an unenforceable civil matter subject to litigation. How we deal with these will be very important and needs to be in the Bill.

I spoke about these tail liabilities. I have some experience with this, as I declared earlier. I am a director of Norfolk Environmental Credits Ltd, the device through which the local councils in Norfolk manage environmental credits. We are subject to international accounting standards. We need to take into account our covenant strength. I do not believe that this has been thought through at all. We made about £5 million-worth of sales of credits to local developers, but the balance sheet value was nil because we had to discount that income over an 80-year tail. I see my noble friend Lord Mackinlay nodding. He is a tax man and understands these things.

The interplay between the P&L and the balance sheet is something that the Bill has not contemplated at all—and it must. Unless we include sensible benchmarking accounting standards to value the upfront contributions against those tail liabilities, we will never give confidence and clarity so that schemes can be consistently compared. None of this essential detail is contemplated by the Bill but it should be.

This is before we get to private industry having a role in the pricing, and the heroic assumption that Natural England, as is anticipated, will be able to deliver mitigation more efficiently than a competitive, healthy private sector. Given the monopolistic nature of the state-owned mechanism for charging, and the speed at which the large bureaucratic organisations operate, this completely unqualified assumption seems tenuous. There are obvious conflicts of interest and susceptibility to legal challenges through those conflicts. How is Natural England going to kitemark private proposals? What protections would private operators have against predatory pricing or the loading of legal contractor inspection costs on to innovative solutions, with the only opportunity for these private operators to appeal being against the organisation that is trying to eat their lunch?

We need the innovation of private providers so that we avoid muddled thinking. I am delighted to see the noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Kings Heath, in his place. He characterises as eco-zealots those who order the use of bat bridges, the eye-wateringly expensive bat tunnels—each of which was a colossal waste of money —or the sloppiness of the designation of land at Ebbsfleet as unfavourable when it was not unfavourable.

We need a streamlined process where developers can work with landowners to propose and have certified good schemes delivered in local markets at sensible prices—especially now that we contemplate that hundreds of these EDPs may be produced. While Natural England is focused on its own proposals, we need to give comfort to private operators that their applications will be dealt with promptly rather than them submitting the ideas and not having them taken seriously by Natural England. That is no way to proceed. We need to establish contract certainty, the legal basis and the enforceability of these projects, with the assurance that the mitigations will be delivered over the liability period.

Failure looks like packaging and collateralisation of these schemes into another subprime crisis. We must guard against that. The private sector has a role and can and should work in tandem with Natural England. But all this counts for nothing unless the terms of trade are set.

I have other things to say but, given the time, I will stop there. The Bill needs to state explicitly that the private sector has a role to play. But Natural England should have a statutory duty to actively assist competition in this space in a prompt and timely manner, even if it is at the expense of its own proposals.

[Lord Inglewood (CB)]

My Lords, as I listened to this debate, I thought that everybody was talking about it from the perspective of the person who does the work. The prime focus of what we are discussing should be the best outcome for nature. The most choice available to help nature is the route we should go down. Therefore, we should not exclude any possibility of all kinds of commercial arrangements that may surround this, some of which, particularly given the points drawn to our attention by the noble Lord, Lord Fuller, we may not yet even have thought of. We should keep every option open to ensure that the outcome for nature is ultimately the prime consideration.

[Lord Fuller (Con)]

I thank the noble Lord. He makes a point that I missed when I turned a page in my notes. Essentially, we are creating financial instruments with muddy wellingtons attached. We need to think about that balance as we contemplate how the Bill will work in practice, with those 80-year requirements to keep and maintain these projects contemplated by the EDP. It needs a change of thought.

Certainly, international accounting standards will be at the front of our mind. This is the sort of question that actuaries at life insurance companies are employed to handle. They know that they have a liability and what sum of money is needed up front to deal with it. That is not contemplated at all in Clause 59. It needs to be. That is the point I am trying to make. The state cannot do it itself—it needs a flow of private money coming into this space to benefit nature, but one that has its feet on the ground and where the numbers add up.

Planning and Infrastructure Bill

Lord Inglewood Excerpts

Report stage
Monday 27th October 2025 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Lord Inglewood]

84: After Clause 51, insert the following new Clause—
“Gardens Trust to be statutory consultee for planning proposals(1) The Gardens Trust must be considered for planning proposals as a statutory amenity society.(2) All procedures which apply to statutory amenity societies as planning proposal consultees shall apply to the Gardens Trust.(3) Powers conferred to the Secretary of State by the Town and Country Planning Act 1990 and the Planning and Compulsory Purchase Act 2004 may not be exercised to remove the Gardens Trust as a statutory consultee in regard to any planning application.”

[Lord Inglewood (CB)]

My Lords, in rising to move Amendment 84, I ought first to declare my interest. Most unusually, it has been my lot in life to have lived in a listed building, in the midst of a listed park, for all of it. I am also president of Historic Buildings & Places, which used to be known as the Ancient Monuments Society, and a member of the Gardens Trust. Just to give more context to my comments, I am a member of the Bar, a chartered surveyor, and a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries. I point out to Members that, according to many authorities, landscape is probably England’s greatest contribution to 18th-century European culture.

Your Lordships will recall considerable discussion in Committee about the education of planners. This is important because, in addition to what might be described as the core disciplines, there is a huge range of what you could say are very important and perhaps slightly esoteric, more peripheral matters which cannot really be considered part of the core knowledge or syllabus. I am thinking, for example, about listed buildings—we all know there is a crisis in the number of conservation officers in this country—and about manmade planned landscapes, battlefields, theatres, and so on.

The required expertise to deal properly with these things is not widely, easily and quickly available, either necessarily in local authorities or in other public bodies. We know that it is for this reason that a process of consultation with outside expert, specialised and respected organisations is embedded in the system to give access to often specialist, but very relevant, skill and knowledge.

The detailed system for doing this is not identical in each case, but that is not relevant to my argument. For my part, I am especially interested in—among other things in the context of this debate—the work of the Gardens Trust, previously the Garden History Society. Its focus is on manmade planned landscape, which includes public parks, but also the British versions of Versailles and, in a different direction, outstanding domestic gardens. These things can be quite extensive and are a crucial aspect of place, which is now becoming recognised as an important contributor to our general well-being and economic prosperity—something I became very aware of when I was a member of the Northern Powerhouse 11 for six years.

This is a specialist, discrete academic discipline, and the Gardens Trust is at its centre in this country. Many of the places it is concerned with are very fragile. After all, plants die and are easily lost. For example, if any of your Lordships wanted to go to look at Eastbury Park in Dorset—which was one of the great architect Vanbrugh’s most important commissions—they will find that when they get there and look over a farm gate, they will see a green field. It is all gone but it is still the site of it, and all the foundations and everything are there. As Thomas Browne, the 17th-century writer, aptly commented,

“green grass grows where Troy-town stood”.

I should add to what I said about my interest that my home has always been the focus of a listed park for over 300 years. However, due to abandonment and the planting of an epidemic of rhododendrons, supplemented by almost no family records because of disputes and problems with treason, almost all knowledge of everything has been lost. Despite inspections by English Heritage over the years and many other experts visiting the place, the knowledge of the place has more or less completely vanished.

Now, however, its full extent is becoming uncovered again, and it appears to be a large-scale, more or less intact, significant, albeit battered, very rare survival of a complete pre-Capability Brown park from about 1700-10. They are very rare, and it was completely lost. I mention this not to pat myself on the back or to tell noble Lords how perspicacious I may have been, but to make the point that important things do get easily lost and require genuine expertise to be identified and revived.

We all know that the theme of this legislation is growth—goodness knows, we urgently need it—and I support that. As part of this wider process, the Government have issued a consultation on the role of statutory consultees. Unhappily, that consultation appears to have been stained by the triumphalism of a notion of growth at all costs, everywhere, for anything, regardless of everything else—conveniently overlooking that in places such as Cumbria, where I come from, the environment is one of the most important aspects of promoting long-term growth, as I discovered when I chaired the Cumbria Local Enterprise Partnership. If this is destroyed, the goose that lays the golden egg ends up as Christmas dinner. It has happened in many places all round the world, to nobody’s benefit.

The Minister has said on a number of occasions that the value placed on the “non-growth” aspects of the planning system is in no way diminished by the proposed procedural and process changes under way, which seem to be essential and of which, in very general terms, I am a strong supporter. On occasions, though, something else other than growth is more important than growth; otherwise, what is the point of the town and country planning system? The involvement of amenity societies harnesses a great deal of real expertise for more or less no money and takes pressure off some of our overworked and often underresourced public agencies that are having difficulty already in fulfilling their roles. Let us not argue about that point, because it is self-evidently the case now.

The purpose of the amendment is to focus on this general but very real problem in the context of the wider reforms being proposed, specifically in respect of the Gardens Trust, of which I said I am a member, and I know it and support it. I very much hope the Minister can confirm that the importance ascribed to what I might describe—I hope, without any disparagement—as some of the essential fringe disciplines in planning will not be eroded further.

--- Later in debate ---

For the reasons I have set out—probably a bit too extensively, for which I apologise, but I needed to cover all the points in the debate—I hope that the noble Lord will be able to withdraw his amendment.

[Lord Inglewood (CB)]

My Lords, I am very pleased to think that my amendment has led to such a wide discussion that has shown more or less complete unanimity across the House about the importance of green space in place-making in this country. Where we can get unanimity like that, there is the potential to make progress.

I thank the Minister for her remarks on the Gardens Trust; as the saying goes, I shall think on them.

As I was sitting in my place, I thought that what we are all trying to do is to change policies and law. However, are we not perhaps creating a hydra that will make it, in general terms, more difficult for the planning process to work well? At the end of the day, planning is about physical specifics, not abstract generalities. The key to establishing whether this debate has been worth while will be seeing whether the country is a better place because of it. I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.

Amendment 84 withdrawn.

Planning and Infrastructure Bill

Lord Inglewood Excerpts

Report stage
Wednesday 29th October 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Cromwell (CB)]

My Lords, I first congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Deben, on getting a permission within a year—perhaps he could give us all a few tips on how to achieve that. I really want to support Amendment 119, but I am concerned that it is so general. It does not specify what the barriers are—we may know what they are from personal experience—or how to overcome them. I have a question about what its practical impact would be. If I can be persuaded that putting in the Bill that they must “have regard to” and “consider” the barriers will not simply be a tick-box exercise and one more thing for the planners to get over, I would be happy to support it. At the moment, however, while I entirely agree that there are issues for SMEs in this sector, it is difficult to see what real impact this amendment would have.

[Lord Inglewood (CB)]

My Lords, I support the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe, and, by extension, the noble Lord, Lord Deben. I was for six years the chairman of a local enterprise partnership. It is often overlooked that the prosperity of the parts of this country that are having greatest difficulties can be majorly improved by enabling SMEs to take forward their projects. As has been said, the rules are the rules for everyone. It is much easier for big enterprises, which have large head offices and all the rest of it, to deal with the very considerable amount of administrative and other paperwork that is increasingly a part of the planning process. That in turn makes it discriminatory. We should not allow that discrimination. The kind of impact that major projects have on a place is very often qualitatively different from the impact that smaller, much more minor and modest proposals will have.

The underlying point behind the amendment from the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe, is a very good one, because we are favouring the big boys over the small boys. I come from a part of England that is a long way from many centres of population; there is a very real concern that, increasingly, with the way the local economy is going—thanks to the activities of venture capital and large companies, for example—the profits that may be made from activities in these areas are being expatriated to other parts of the globe, or certainly to more prosperous parts of our country. It is an essential component of balancing the interests of the various parties engaged in these things that we look very carefully at the way in which the administration of the system is carried out, to make sure that the small man gets a fair crack of the whip. It is as simple as that.

As I have been listening to the debate on this and other parts of this Bill, I have remembered the words of Robert Burton in The Anatomy of Melancholy, a now almost unread book from the 17th century. He said: “Are not men mad to write such stuff who intend to make others so?”

[Lord Jamieson (Con)]

My Lords, in Committee we were sympathetic to the intentions of the amendment from the noble Lord, Lord Foster of Bath. The Government should consider this carefully. We have heard some powerful speeches on it that I will not repeat. I will go back on just one point that the noble Lord raised. A few weeks ago, the Government reassured the House from the Dispatch Box that cumulative impact assessments for gambling licensing would be considered when parliamentary time allows. We will hold them to account on this promise. Will the Minister give the House a timescale for it?

I support my noble friend Lady Neville-Rolfe’s amendments to support small and medium-sized businesses. As we have raised elsewhere, the planning process is overly bureaucratic and time consuming, and I share the sentiments of the noble Lord, Lord Inglewood, that 12 months is frequently a very short time. This places a significant financial and resource burden on applicants, which falls particularly hard on smaller businesses that do not have the resources and expertise of larger enterprises.

As we debated previously on Report, the cost per property of the planning process can be significantly higher for smaller developments. It is right that planning authorities should have regard to this, and I ask the Minister what the Government will do to ensure that this burden is lowered, particularly for SMEs. Supporting SMEs is one of the most effective ways to inject greater competition and diversity into the sector and, ultimately, to strengthen the wider economy. Therefore, we will support my noble friend’s amendments should she choose to test the opinion of the House.