Planning and Infrastructure Bill

Lord Rooker Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 25th June 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Rooker (Lab)]

My Lords, this is a Bill I strongly support, I want it to work, but I think it will be a waste of time. That sounds harsh, but it need not be. As I said in the King’s Speech debate last year, on 18 July, I have been involved in planning reform before as a Minister, more than once. My radical suggestion of a 30-month period of no regulation other than building control has clearly not been taken up—far too bold. But unless Ministers can remove the walls around departmental silos, the Bill will be waste of time.

New Labour was not perfect. But I was involved under new Labour, more than once, in clear major work across departments, outside the silos. It can be made to happen. Currently it is not happening. I have been at meetings with developers, industrial builders, and energy providers in the last months. The issue was getting action across departments: no give and take, examples of “all or nothing” from departments, and in some cases it has been nothing; jobs lost and companies lost—no one seems in overall control. No. 10 is the issue. We have a good Government, but they are a clumsy Government.

The Bill will not work if at the top it is awkward, all thumbs, butter-fingered, lumbering and stiff. Believe it or not, I think the Prime Minister should take a leaf out of the Arnold Weinstock management playbook, when he took GEC from a tiny company of £100 million to a manufacturing company of £11 billion, selling power plants to China and locomotives to the USA. He did not allow silos to exist in the subsidiaries. He cut out the chaff. He did not get sidetracked by consultants or third parties. It can work.

I support the Bill. I have read the briefs from at least 10 organisations: the National Trust, the Royal Town Planning Institute, Association of British Insurers, the Town and Country Planning Association, the National Association of Local Councils, the LGA, the County Councils Network, CPRE, the CLA and the NFU. All claim to support the Bill, “but”—there is always a “but”. Some of them contain good people I am happy to work with—tomorrow morning will be a good example—but, collectively, as third parties, aided by the two regulators, Natural England and the Environment Agency, they are the reason so little progress has been made over the years. That sums it up. Collectively, they have been the problem. They sidetrack the clumsy Government we have.

The Government need to embrace boldness as their friend, not their enemy. Once No. 10 is clearly in charge with a plan to stop and get rid of the silos, Ministers should be made to work across departments and just get on with it.