Planning and Infrastructure Bill

Lord Liddle Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 25th June 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Liddle (Lab)]

My Lords, this is a crucial Bill. It is a key enabler of this Government’s programme to get Britain building again, tackle the housing crisis, and build the infrastructure that levels up the country and enables it to grow while at the same time achieving our net-zero commitments.

Strangely, I rather liked what the noble Lord, Lord Lilley, said when he said that the “vetocracy” has to be overcome. As someone who, like the noble Lord, Lord Fuller, served for 20 years in local government, I strongly agree with him that the problem is not local councillors, who in my experience are quite keen on development, but rather the special interests, the inquiry system and the judicial review system that give far too much weight to delay and to the people who want to obstruct. It is the nonsense of the bat tunnel and the fact that we spent £1.X billion on the Lower Thames Crossing without achieving a single thing. Those are the things the Bill intends to overcome.

I have two particular points. I am a strong believer in the need for us to accept climate transition and move to net zero. I reinforce the points made by the noble Baroness, Lady Pidgeon, about the need to do more to facilitate electric cars in cities and towns. The Bill contains some useful measures on public charging points, but it neglects the key problem for the take-up of electric cars, which is the need to simplify the system whereby you can charge your car on the street from your own home if you do not have off-street parking. Something has to be put right there, and I have some ideas that we can discuss in Committee.

The other thing that I think is very important is the role of development corporations, and I back what the noble Lord, Lord Best, said at the start of this debate. When people think of development corporations, of course there is the wonderful brilliance of the then Michael Heseltine’s Docklands Development Corporation, and the noble Lord, Lord Heseltine, is one of the great sort of enablers of modern Britain. But I also think of the post-war generation of new towns. I have a special affection for Stevenage, because I knew Shirley Williams very well and she was devoted to Stevenage as a new town, and it would not have happened without the setting up of a development corporation. Milton Keynes is one of the most successful places in modern Britain, again because of a development corporation. I think the model worked because the development corporation had the ability to borrow, to buy land at existing use value, by compulsory purchase if necessary, to prepare that land for development and then to get the money back from the developers. That then allowed it to reinvest in further schemes.

The Bill contains some progress towards this model, but I think there is a significant problem in that the borrowing of the development corporations counts against the department’s expenditure limit, even though the money will be got back as a result of the land being developed and the developers paying for it. We have to overcome what I think is this significant block on reinvestment. It is a typical Treasury thing, frankly. It wants to keep control of borrowing, but in fact you could do it in other ways by having regular audits of how the development corporations are working. I hope that our Front Bench might look at this, and I particularly hope that my noble friend Lady Taylor of Stevenage, for whom I have great admiration, will look favourably on enabling development corporations to do the best job they can.