Planning and Infrastructure Bill (Third sitting)

Nesil Caliskan Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 29th April 2025 Public Bill Committees

[John Grady]

rose—

[Nesil Caliskan (Barking) (Lab)]

rose—

[Ellie Chowns]

I am happy to take as many interventions as hon. Members want to make, but I am concerned about the timing, Mrs Hobhouse.

[Ellie Chowns]

If Members feel that they have additional things to raise, they should feel free to speak.

[Nesil Caliskan]

I was rising to make my speech, Mrs Hobhouse, not to intervene; I apologise. It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship.

A crucial component of the ability to deliver homes across the country will be to deliver transport and other infrastructure projects. The measures in the Bill go some way towards speeding up the statutory processes of consultation in the delivery of infrastructure projects. As I outlined in my speech on Second Reading, the pre-consultation period for infrastructure projects is a major cause of delay for infrastructure being delivered. To echo the Minister’s remarks, the status quo in this country is simply not working to speed up the process.

As matters stand, applicants operate in what I describe as a hyper-risk-averse context. Delays caused to pre-application contribute not only to the length of time that it takes for infrastructure to be delivered, but to the cost. Other Members rightly identified the lower Thames crossing, which impacts my constituency; 2,000 pages and £800 million spent are figures that have served absolutely no one, and certainly not the taxpayer.

[Lewis Cocking]

Does the hon. Lady not agree that getting rid of the pre-planning application consultation completely will disenfranchise residents and constituents from engaging with the process? Sometimes that process can solve some of the issues down the line. I understand that it takes too long—I agree with and have strong sympathy for her points—but should we not be able to speed it up while allowing that engagement to take place?

[Nesil Caliskan]

I thank the hon. Member for his intervention, but I do not think that the change would prevent applicants from continuing to engage with residents and elected Members. All it would do is avoid putting additional onus on a process that is costing the taxpayer a huge amount of money.

I will go further. Having spoken to members of our community, I have heard over and over again that there is consultation fatigue with the endless stream of negotiations. Before we even get to a statutory consultation period, we have had many years of something that has been proposed with no statutory framework. This proposal has the good intention of a material change that will shorten the consultation period.

[Paul Holmes]

The hon. Lady is being generous in giving way as she makes an interesting and good speech based on her expertise in local government. I pay tribute to her for that. She outlined how there can be delays in pre-application. Does she not accept that that very length of time shows that there are issues to be resolved? Does she understand why some people are concerned that the proposals to remove that pre-application process place the onus on applicants to conduct the consultation, and without any safeguards? Potentially, residents and residents groups, constituents and local organisations, such as wildlife trusts will go without their genuine concerns being met by a system that now puts an onus on the people who want planning applications to go ahead.

[Nesil Caliskan]

I do not accept that, because the statutory consultation period will still be in place and thresholds will still have to be met. The reality is that, as things stand, the pre-consultation period has become a beast in itself, which I do not believe is serving our communities. Years and years of endless consultations, including pre-consultations and pre-application consultations, is not true engagement with communities. That part of the process has become a period in which the applicants just try to derisk their approach to crucial infrastructure in this country, which will see land unlocked so that homes can be built.

[Ellie Chowns]

I do not think that anybody wants “years and years” of contest, but is it impossible to retain the requirement for a degree of pre-application consultation—perhaps within a shorter timescale or with a more tightly drawn set of consultees—so that issues can be dealt with informally and in advance, to prevent more problems arising further down the line? To sweep everything away seems excessive.

[Nesil Caliskan]

Manifestly, we do not want years of delay before the delivery of infrastructure, but the truth is that that is exactly what is happening in this country. There are years and years of delay, in part because of the pre-application consultation period.

There is nothing preventing applicants and local authorities, or communities and organisations, from working pre-application on the sort of engagement that the hon. Member is referring to, but including it in the proposals in this way would heighten the legal risk for applicants, making them very resistant to submitting their application formally before going through every single possible step. As hon. Members have highlighted, there is a very long list of examples where the status quo has created a huge burden, made the processes incredibly long and cost the taxpayer a huge amount of money. I think I recall the Minister saying that the proposed amendment would save up to about 12 months and £1 billion, which could be the difference between an infrastructure project being viable or not being viable. Infrastructure projects being viable will mean the land value will increase, and the potential for land to be unlocked and millions of homes to be built across the country will be realised.

[Lee Pitcher (Doncaster East and the Isle of Axholme) (Lab)]

I am intervening on a different but still very much related point. What is also really important for me is that we remain attractive as a country to foreign investors and others who are looking to invest here, including in the infrastructure that enables our country to grow and creates jobs. It is important that investors want to come and invest here. The longer the process or the greater the burden, the less likely they are to invest here, and we will lose out to other places across the globe. Does my hon. Friend agree that we need to tackle that issue?

[Nesil Caliskan]

I am so glad that I gave way to my hon. Friend, because that was precisely the point I was going to make and he has made it incredibly well. If we are serious about building homes across the country and about seeing the growth that investment in infrastructure, not least in transport infrastructure, will deliver, we absolutely have to give industry certainty. We have to be able to say to the public, “This will happen with speed.” The amendment seeks to deliver that and it is absolutely in line with the aspiration to speed up the planning process in this country, which at the moment is holding back investment, and to unlock land for development and infrastructure investment.

[David Simmonds]

I have a lot of sympathy with the comments made by the hon. Members for Doncaster East and the Isle of Axholme and for North Herefordshire. I appreciate that the clause was tabled quite late, and the evidence that we heard last week was mixed. The National Infrastructure Commission gave us its views on the impact of pre-application consultation, and local authority representatives who are responsible for that section of the planning system’s decision making said that they have quite significant concerns.

The Opposition have sympathy with what the Government are trying to achieve, but it seems to me that, as the hon. Member for Taunton and Wellington outlined, we need to look at alternatives. It may be that a regime of deemed consent is a mechanism we could use to speed up elements of the process, or perhaps altering how we set out the requirements of pre-app consultation.

I know that you have extensive experience in local government, Mrs Hobhouse, and you will be aware that, as a matter of law, Parliament has set numerous obligations on local authorities in respect of the quasi-judicial process that they follow in planning, and numerous other obligations in respect of what they do for their communities. The pre-application process is a means drawing out, before a major application is made, how the impacts may play out.

I can draw a good recent example from personal experience. The Chancellor, at the Dispatch Box, said that Heathrow expansion, and airport expansion more generally, would be enabled because sustainable aviation fuel would reduce emissions. It is true that sustainable aviation fuel mandates reduce the overall lifetime emissions from a given quantity of aviation fuel, but they do not reduce the level of pollution at the tailpipe of the aircraft at all. So when we look at Heathrow airport, it does not matter whether the fuel burned there is sustainable aviation fuel or conventional aviation fuel; emissions within the locality, which are what give rise to the legal obligations on the local authority regarding air quality, remain the same. It is not a solution. When a developer proposes to create a solar farm, a battery storage area or a nuclear power station—or any kind of major infrastructure—the pre-application process gives the local authority an opportunity to begin to understand which of its legal obligations may be engaged by the application.

I am conscious of the experience that the hon. Member for Barking described, illustrating the need to streamline the process as much as possible, but clearly, as several hon. Members have said, the major risk of that is that a developer comes along and sets out an ambition for a development, and residents are consulted and their response is, “In general—in principle—that sounds okay, but what will the impact on us be? Do we understand that from what the developer is putting forward?”