Planning and Infrastructure Bill

Lord Mawson Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 25th June 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Mawson (CB)]

My Lords, it is very difficult to talk about anything of substance in five minutes on a subject so central to this Government. But having talked with colleagues in the industry, I would like to make the following brief points. I declare my interests.

First, my colleagues are reassured by the sense of purpose and drive that the Government are demonstrating in this policy area. We need to help the Bill get on to the statute book soon, so that we can get building.

Secondly, the Bill needs to think more about building communities and place-making, not just about building more soulless housing estates. The Government are rightly committed to addressing a range of different problems: housing, health, crime, education and net zero. The lesson from the history of failed housing estates built in the 1960s and 1970s by the public sector, and the worrying signs from too much of what is being built today, is that if we build homes in the wrong way, we will not only fail to help solve these problems but make them worse.

We need to build places and strong, humane cultures and communities, not just homes. If noble Lords are in any doubt what this means for local residents, they should take five minutes and listen to Billy Connolly’s description on YouTube of what happened to him and his family when they were moved out of their home and community in the Gorbals in Glasgow and placed in a soulless housing estate on the edge of town. No one can describe the experience more clearly than Billy.

My colleagues and I are working on addressing precisely these issues in projects across the country with some of our major developers, and we are happy to share with the Minister and her colleagues our 360-degree approach to place-making, which is focused on buildings and culture—maybe she can let me know if there is interest.

We are all very concerned about what happens to bats and newts, but how concerned are we about the young mother I was with a few months ago on a multimillion-pound new housing estate in east London whose two year-old was already picking up needles in the play area? We all need to think very carefully together about how we do not repeat those mistakes in this next phase of development.

Thirdly, it is good news that planning officers will be given greater responsibility to determine smaller applications, reserved matter submissions and schemes on allocated sites through a new proposed national scheme of delegation. This should lead to greater consistency of approach across local planning authorities, plus certainty and timeliness of decisions. The mandatory training of planning committee members should, in theory, also lead to greater consistency and certainty for applications that do not fit into the above national scheme of delegation.

Having sat on a planning committee for many years, I know how flawed these present processes are, and I have watched too many local councillors play political games with these local processes. I think His Majesty’s Opposition need to think more clearly about the connections between democracy and delivery. There needs to be more clarity in their thinking about this matter.

Fourthly, the nature restoration fund, hopefully, will remove the restriction on 160,000 homes stalled by nutrient neutrality restrictions by allowing developers to pay into a nature restoration fund that delivers habitat improvements at a regional scale, rather than requiring site-specific ecological mitigation for every scheme. This should speed up the delivery of sites. There are, however, concerns about Natural England’s ability to deliver a robust scheme on a timely basis.

Fifthly, the proposal in the Bill to speed up the delivery of nationally significant infrastructure projects is also much welcomed and should provide greater clarity and certainty over the delivery of these projects.

Having said all this positive news, I think there remain some challenges for business colleagues in the industry. The introduction of new cross-boundary regional strategic planning could be positive, driving a more joined-up approach towards housing, economic and infrastructure growth across LPAs. However, there are significant concerns about the potential delays to new local plans and housing schemes because of this structural change. LPAs, which remain critically underresourced are undergoing significant change through forthcoming devolution and the abolition of the two-tier authority system, which, when tied in with the need to deliver these regional strategies soon, mean there may be an awful lot of resource tied up in delivering restructuring and not delivering local plans and housing schemes, which are needed in the short term.

I finish with a reality check: the current length of timeframes for securing planning permission will likely not shrink by a significant amount. Bidding on a site now does not realistically generate volume for the large housing businesses until 2028, given the timescales associated with securing planning permission, selling consented land, securing reserve matters, signing Section 106 agreements, site preparation and the build and sale of homes. By and large, the Bill is seen by many in the housing industry as very positive, with several of the changes proposed leading to quicker, more consistent and more certain outcomes. However, this has to be set against the wider context and systematic issues present, which may limit the positive impact these reforms will have.