Planning and Infrastructure Bill

Lord Shipley Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 25th June 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Shipley (LD)]

My Lords, I remind the House that I am a vice-president of the Local Government Association. I understand the ambition of the Bill to speed up infrastructure delivery. Planning frameworks are complex and can be slow. But I remind Ministers that when the Audit Commission existed, it audited planning performance, publicised poorly performing councils and required improvements from them. I accept the need to enforce shorter timescales on decision-making.

It is wrong to suggest that the planning system is responsible for not building enough homes. As we have heard, there are well over a million homes with planning permission that are not built and councils approve nine out of 10 planning applications for housing. It is not the planning system that causes low house completions but the lack of money—now partially addressed in the spending review, although not entirely—together with the lack of construction workers and materials, added to land banking by major builders that sit on planning permissions while land values rise.

The Government still want to build 1.5 million homes by 2029. That means they must build 374,000 a year from 2027. If that were to be done, at what quality might it be done? I ask that because the Bill could be the means of future-proofing our housing stock, given our ageing population and that we have more people who live with a disability. Many new homes lack quality, and some very poor housing is being produced through permitted development conversions where profits are the driving force. We need to build more healthy homes that last.

My noble friend Lord Russell and others have talked about Part 3. I agree with his conclusions, and I wish that Ministers would stop talking about this being about newts—not in this Chamber, but more generally. It is actually about 5,251 rare and protected habitats that must not lose their current legal safeguards.

Planning reform will help to deliver infrastructure, but many large infrastructure projects in this country have suffered from bad project management and huge cost overruns. It is not just about planning. The Bill includes several positive measures, such as making it easier for councils to purchase vacant land for housebuilding, localising planning fees, and increasing planning capacity. Those measures should be supported, but the national scheme of delegation will centralise decision-making when there is no evidence that decision-making will be improved. The democratic role of councillors in decision-making, which has been central to the English planning system, is at risk. Any reforms must safeguard local oversight and transparency, otherwise there is a risk that the public will not be supportive.

Planning reform will succeed only if there are qualified planning staff to do the work. To build capacity, the number of level 7 chartered town planner apprenticeships must be increased—this at a time when spending on planning has been reducing. According to the excellent brief from the Royal Town Planning Institute, we have a shortage of over 2,000 planners in local authorities and not enough chief planning officers, because that role has been downgraded over the years.

The real reason why planning has been in difficulty is that there have not been enough staff to do the work necessary, and too few chief planning officers with the necessary clout to drive progress and outcomes. Chief planning officers should be statutory, as I have said during the passage of previous planning Bills. The RTPI is right to urge the inclusion of a clause defining the purpose of planning, alongside an audit of the whole planning system and how it interlocks. Its proposed national spatial framework would be a positive improvement.

At this stage of our debate on the Bill, we have to put competency and accountability at the heart of decision-making, but Clause 51 gives too much power to Whitehall. If, under Clause 50, you train councillors to be better, why do you need to take the power away from them and give it to Whitehall? Whitehall does not need to be involved in the size of planning committees or the powers of officers and councillors. Finally, as the RTPI has said, planning is not a blocker; it is an under-resourced enabler, and this Bill could put that problem right.