Planning and Infrastructure Bill (First sitting)

Rachel Taylor Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 24th April 2025 Public Bill Committees

[Gideon Amos (Taunton and Wellington) (LD)]

I was a planning consultant until the general election, but not any more. I am a chartered town planner member of the Royal Town Planning Institute and a chartered architect member of the Royal Institute of British Architects. I am a vice president of the Town and Country Planning Association, but that is an honorary position, so I have no pecuniary interest.

[Rachel Taylor (North Warwickshire and Bedworth) (Lab)]

Until the election I was a commercial property solicitor acting for a number of residential and commercial property developers. I was also a North Warwickshire borough councillor until I resigned a couple of months ago.

--- Later in debate ---

[Rachel Taylor]

Q I was delighted recently to visit a National Grid substation at Hams Hall, in my North Warwickshire and Bedworth constituency. It is almost doubling in size to accommodate connections for High Speed 2, but people there also talked to me about the massive queue of projects that need connections if there is to be expansion right across the west midlands. Have you carried out an assessment of the backlog of connections? To what extent will these changes enable us to achieve our ambition of net zero by 2030?

Beatrice Filkin: I am very happy to take that question. We have had an ongoing process of reform to the approach to the connections queue with NESO and Government for quite a while now. We reached our conclusions last week and made a decision on how the reordering of the queue should work. As part of that, as Charlotte mentioned, we have been looking at how we move away from the idea that we had previously—a first come, first served application process—to looking at what we need as a country and which projects are most ready.

The decision we have taken on how that process will work now needs to be implemented by NESO. It will be implemented very rapidly over the next year, with the network operators, to give industry confidence and security that it can continue to invest to deliver clean power targets, as well as all the growth targets that we want.

One point that we did not touch on previously was that the demand connections are really important for the growth story. The queue connections reform deems all the connections that are already in the queue as needed, so they pass the first test. That is very important in making sure that we are prioritising access to our network, and that will enable growth in the country.

Charlotte Mitchell: Bringing forward the legislation at pace will enable us to move to the new system. It is important that measures in the Bill are brought forward quickly, so that we can move towards the new reordering and prioritisation.

[Rachel Taylor]

Q As a follow-up, also at Hams Hall, JLR has a battery assembly plant, and its representatives told me that it could probably power the whole of the industrial estate there, but that there was no chance that it would be able to get a grid connection. Is there an estimate of those sorts of things, which are feasible and possible but have not entered your radar because they have not applied?

Beatrice Filkin: One of the purposes of the queue reform is to make sure that the projects that we need and are ready earliest get earlier access to the network. At the moment, we have a lot of projects in the queue that are at an early stage of development, and are not so critically needed by the strategic plans that we are setting out. Projects such as connections for demand or for factories are already in the queue and are deemed as needed. They will therefore be prioritised for the queue, and we expect their connection dates to improve as a result of the connections reform process.

[Luke Murphy]

Q It was not that long ago that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine resulted in a massive income shock because our energy system is not that secure. Building on the Minister’s question earlier, what impact will the Bill have, in terms of expediting connections to the grid, on securing our energy supply in future? Can you also say a bit about what impact it will have on economic growth?

Dhara Vyas: I think that the Bill is going to be crucial. It was as true for the previous Government as it is for this Government that clean energy and investment in clean power is seen as the safest and surest way to ensure the UK’s energy security. There is a programme of work for investing in clean power, but there is absolutely nothing to be gained from all of that net investment unless we can move it around the country. That is why this part of the energy industry is so crucial.

In terms of the impact on bills, the reality is that, at one point, energy bills were four times what they were in 2019. We are now seeing bill debt of £3.8 billion and growing. It is also important to note, generally speaking, that households are under more pressure now than they have been for well over a decade. I think more than half of households who go to Citizens Advice have a negative budget. Households are really feeling the pressure, and the conversation about energy bills has not really been off the front pages for the last four years.

As for being able to expedite the investments in clean power and make sure we are reducing the amount we are spending on curtailment costs, that should mean that in the future, if we experience an energy shock again, we will not spend the £40 billion that was spent in 2022-23 to support people. That is why this is so important.