Planning and Infrastructure Bill

Lord Lansley Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 25th June 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lansley (Con)]

My Lords, I draw attention to my registered interest as chair of the Cambridgeshire Development Forum and the Oxfordshire Development Forum. I emphasise that my views on these issues are entirely my own.

A number of us are taking forward many of the issues that we discussed during the passage of the Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill, including my noble friend Lord Young of Cookham. His point about the resourcing of planning authorities is really important. Something that the Government could do straight away, outside of the Bill, is enable the retention of level 7 apprenticeships for new planning officers, because the lack of those will make things difficult for local planning authorities.

In the time available, I will focus on one thing. As we discuss many issues in the Bill, I hope we can understand more about what the Government propose to use from the Levelling-up and Regeneration Act, how they are going to use it, and what they propose not to use. For example, the national development management policies are potentially extremely important in enabling local authorities to produce plans more quickly and efficiently. I hope that those local authorities going into the new plan-making process have early access to NDMPs, so that they are able to limit the extent to which they have to undertake unnecessary consultation.

This links to the debate we will have about a national scheme of delegation. On the face of it, the Government’s technical proposal, in so far as it substantially deviated from the original consultation with three options, went in the wrong direction. The national scheme of delegation should be, first, that planning officers should make decisions where applications are in line with an existing up-to-date local plan. That should be very straightforward. Secondly, they should make the decisions where the decision is, in effect, directly mandated by the national development management policies. We need to look at some of these additional planning issues before we get to the debates in Committee and on Report on the content of the Bill.

I hope that the provisions in the levelling-up Act in relation to neighbourhood plans and neighbourhood policy statements might be brought into force. In the absence of that, I hope that the Bill will use that. If the Government want more homes built in the places where people want them to be built, neighbourhood planning has shown itself to be an effective mechanism.

There are provisions relating to locally led urban development areas and locally led urban development corporations in the Levelling-up and Regeneration Act, and my noble friend on the Front Bench referred to them. The noble Lord, Lord Best, advocated very forcibly the use of development corporations, but did not say which kind. I think we need to know from the Government whether they will make locally led urban development areas and development corporations available for this purpose, whether they plan to use government-controlled development corporations, or whether they plan, in line with the provisions of the devolution White Paper, to focus on mayoral development corporations. It is not just whether we have development corporations and what powers they have; it is what kind of development corporations. This will make a big difference when we hear from the New Towns Taskforce, which I hope we will do before the Summer Recess.

The final thing I want to say is that we all agree. I share many of the objectives of this Bill and look forward to debating it, with a view to strengthening the achievement of those objectives. We want to be able to deliver effectively on development plans, but we need up-to-date local plans to make that happen. At the moment, 70 local authorities are going to go under the old NPPF rather than the new one, and that will lose us the potential and requirement for something like 15,000 homes being built a year.

It is important that, with all these changes, we know how the Government are going to give us more pace in putting all the planning reforms in place, alongside this Bill.