National Infrastructure Planning

Matthew Pennycook Excerpts

Monday 27th January 2025 Written Statements

[The Minister for Housing and Planning (Matthew Pennycook)]

Sustained economic growth is central to the Government’s plan for change. It is the only way to increase the prosperity of our country and improve the living standards of working people.

Building and upgrading the right economic infrastructure—whether that be electricity networks, public transport links, renewable energy projects, roads, or water supplies—is essential to achieving that growth and delivering the Government’s long-term missions. Yet when it comes to infrastructure delivery, Britain today performs poorly against comparator countries. That needs to change.

That is why the Government moved quickly last year to lift the ban on onshore wind and expand the scope of the nationally significant infrastructure projects regime, enabling laboratories, gigafactories and data centres to be directed into the process. Last week, the Prime Minister announced plans to speed up the conclusion of legal challenges against development consent orders, including committing to legislate to ensure that meritless claims are given only a single permission attempt to seek a judicial review.

Yesterday, the Government published two interlinked working papers: the first, from His Majesty’s Treasury, set out the Government’s plan for their 10-year infrastructure strategy, which will be published alongside the spending review in June; the second, from the Ministry for Housing, Communities and Local Government, detailed our legislative proposals to streamline the consenting of critical national infrastructure—proposals which, subject to further work and the views expressed in response to the working paper, will be taken forward through the Planning and Infrastructure Bill. Copies of these documents will be deposited in the Libraries of both Houses.

The proposals in the latter paper are intended to help deliver the commitment that the Government made in their plan for change to determine applications for at least 150 major infrastructure projects by the end of this Parliament. This target is more than the total number of decisions made under the NSIP regime since it was introduced in 2011, and nearly triple the 57 decisions made during the previous Parliament. Delivering this ambitious commitment will require decisive action on several fronts.

We are not, however, starting from scratch. The NSIP reform action plan, published in 2023, laid the foundations for a better, faster, greener, fairer, and more resilient NSIP regime. The action plan was broadly welcomed by infrastructure developers and communities, and the implementation of many of its proposals is already under way. These include enabling public bodies to recover costs for their services, and the provision of new services on the part of the Planning Inspectorate to enhance its advice to applicants and fast-track examinations.

We now want to move further and faster—which is why our working paper outlines legislative proposals to deliver two key objectives: clearer and stronger national policy; and faster decisions under the NSIP regime. With respect to national policy statements, the working paper confirms that the Government will implement recommendations from the National Infrastructure Commission to require that each NPS is updated at least every five years. This is essential given that some NPSs, such as those for waste water and hazardous waste, have not been updated for over 10 years.

The working paper also proposes a faster process for amending NPSs to reflect legislative changes, changes to current Government policy or relevant court decisions that have taken place between five-yearly updates. Both measures will ensure that national policy better reflects the Government’s priorities and provides stronger guidance to decision makers determining applications in line with the current national interest.

When it comes to ensuring faster and more consistent decisions under the NSIP regime, the paper outlines four proposals. First, we want to protect the consultation process while making it less burdensome. The time taken for applications to complete the pre-application stage has grown from 14.5 months in 2013 to 27.9 months in 2021, in part as a result of increased consultation and re-consultation on project proposals. Prescriptive statutory requirements and uncertainty about meeting them make developers cautious, resulting in gold-plating, which delays projects and confuses communities.

Our proposals seek to rebalance and improve the quality of consultation, with the aim of closing down issues and reducing the examination burden for all parties by:

clarifying the requirements around consultation;

introducing a new duty on all parties to identify and, where possible, narrow down any areas of disagreement during the pre-application stage;

revising requirements around the contents of consultation reports to reduce their length and make them more accessible; and

removing the requirement to consult ‘Category 3’ persons during the pre-application stage.

This also responds to the concerns raised by the NIC and stakeholders, and brings the statutory consultation requirements in the NSIP regime closer in line with other parts of the planning system.

Secondly, we want to further support the building of infrastructure after a development consent order is granted. The paper seeks views on how to ensure the system returns to the ‘one-stop shop’ it was originally intended to be, with more consents, licences, and permits granted in parallel with a DCO. We know that seeking these permissions post consent can delay construction by six to 18 months. Our paper invites contributions on whether this can be tackled through stronger guidance, or if an alternative model of seeking a ‘deemed consent’, replicating the approach of deemed marine licences, would have merit. We also outline proposals to streamline the process applicants need to follow to make factual corrections, or more substantive amendments to a DCO.

Thirdly, we consider ways to make the NSIP regime more flexible, so that it can accommodate the complexity and volume of projects expected over the coming years. Building on feedback received from infrastructure stakeholders in response to our NPPF consultation, we propose to amend the Planning Act 2008 to allow the Secretary of State, my right hon. Friend the Member for Ashton-under-Lyne (Angela Rayner), to consider on a case-by-case basis if a project would be better determined via an alternative consenting route. This will enable projects which would otherwise be unviable due to disproportionate planning requirements to be brought forward, while in turn ensuring that the capacity of the NSIP regime is reserved for those projects that truly merit it.

One of the original objectives behind the NSIP regime was to enable all major projects across different sectors to follow a uniform consenting process. This has broadly been achieved; providing greater certainty for applicants on what are often one-off, unique and once-in-a-generation schemes is why the regime is widely supported by industry.

However, given the volume and complexity of projects set to come forward over the course of this Parliament, our paper explores whether the NSIP regime is sufficiently flexible to deliver robust and swift decisions in all instances. The paper outlines three examples where rigidity of process may be holding back better consenting outcomes, and seeks views on how best to address these concerns. It invites views on whether the best means of introducing greater flexibility would be via a general ‘process modification power’ to be used on a discretionary case-by-case basis; or whether it would be more appropriate to make a series of specific changes to tackle known issues via amendments to the Planning Act 2008, changes to secondary legislation or improvements in guidance.

Fourthly, we outline plans to increase the reach of statutory guidance in the system, to enable greater clarity over expectations for those involved in the consenting process, and to support implementation of our changes, particularly those linked to consultation.

Finally, the working paper also sets out our proposals for amending and updating existing transport consenting regimes to support quicker delivery of transport projects that are consented via the Highways Act 1980 and the Transport and Works Act 1992.

We look forward to receiving views on the proposals set out in the working paper, and to working with all those with an interest in streamlining the delivery of major national infrastructure.

[HCWS390]