Planning and Infrastructure Bill

Rebecca Smith Excerpts

2nd reading
Monday 24th March 2025 Commons Chamber

[Gideon Amos]

I am absolutely delighted to be supporting thousands of new homes across my constituency. The population of my constituency has gone up almost 10% over the past 10 years and I have supported thousands of those new homes, as have my Liberal Democrat colleagues on the planning committee who voted through all those permissions. If occasionally a smaller development in the hon. Gentleman’s constituency is not right, I would expect him to oppose it, just as I would in my constituency. I believe Members across the House have done so.

By giving more powers to communities, a community-led approach could actually increase supply. It is time, for example, to give councils the power to end Right to Buy in their areas. They cannot fill the bath, in terms of providing council houses and social homes, if the plug is taken out and they are forced to sell them off as they have done over the preceding decades. Through proper planning, we also want communities in control of how many holiday lets are allowed in their area, so that homes are not swallowed up that could otherwise increase the supply of affordable housing. That is not in the Bill and should be.

Mandating renewable energy such as solar panels on roofs, as my hon. Friend the Member for Cheltenham (Max Wilkinson) articulately argued for, would put people and local communities in control of the bills coming from their pockets.

Growing our economy, sustaining nature and building new homes are not mutually exclusive. They can work together. There are so many examples of how they can work together. For example, decent gardens have more biodiversity than many rural areas. Community-led decisions very often bring the best results, with residents’ infrastructure needs addressed and development shaped around green spaces and sustainability. To unblock homes, the Government need to do two key things instead of taking aim at ordinary people: first, unlock the infrastructure we need, including GPs, transport, green spaces, green infrastructure and water connections; and, secondly, fund the social homes that have been so sorely lacking. Since social housing disappeared as a meaningful proportion of housing supply and social housing targets fell away, this country has never been able to keep pace with demand. Our target is 150,000 per year. I hope the Government will provide a target of their own for social homes; so far, nothing has been said on that either. Invest in those two things, as history has taught us, and the number of homes we could provide would be almost unlimited.

Meanwhile, in communities like my own—where the 2,000-home Orchard Grove development in the west of Taunton, which I support, is taking shape—the reality is that while many people want to see new GP surgeries, developments are held back by the fact that we often cannot get GPs to staff the surgeries where they are being built.

We want to see a Bill about communities leading in planning and development. Instead, the Bill is part of a growing trend that is taking powers away from local communities. It takes a big step in that direction by allowing the Secretary of State to override planning committees and enabling national schemes of delegation that allow Whitehall to dictate who makes decisions on a local council—another Henry VIII clause, giving Whitehall unlimited power to rewrite the standing orders and constitutions of councils up and down the country. That cannot possibly sit right with anybody who values our proud tradition of local government that is independent of central Government. Consultation is sidelined elsewhere, too. Sport England will no longer have a voice to protect playing fields, and people subject to compulsory purchase orders will no longer have the voice they had before.

If the Government believe that local is the problem and that planning committees are the blocker, let us take a quick look at the actual figures. Councils approve more than 85% of planning applications, with some studies putting that figure even higher—closer to 90%. Councillors of all parties are not blocking development; they are enabling 90% of permissions to go through.

[Rebecca Smith (South West Devon) (Con)]

Does the hon. Gentleman agree that the emphasis in the Bill on removing the powers of planning committees will, by default, lead the public to believe that planning committees throughout the years have actually been the problem? In reality, many planning committees have done their mandatory training and made the right decisions, and those decisions have been upheld by the Planning Inspectorate time and again. It should be put on the record for the public that planning committees, as a whole, are not the problem. There is a huge range of issues that we might need to deal with, but that is not one.

[Gideon Amos]

I come back to what the LGA said: the role councillors play in the planning system is the backbone of that system. That is the way it should remain. Taking decisions out of councillors’ hands is taking decisions out of the hands of local people.

Developing and shaping towns or neighbourhoods without the input of the councillors who have that level of trust and local knowledge will make those neighbourhoods and developments poorer and even more likely to fail. Frankly, removing people and their councillors from the system does not mean faster planning, but less democratic planning. It will mean that people are shut out and make them lose faith in the system even more; it will mean more legal challenges and more people who feel shut out from the system. The Bill risks making development not only slower, but worse.

There is, of course, another way. Instead of a Bill that shuts people out and shuts them up, silencing voices and failing people on the basic services and infrastructure their communities need, we should look to the great community-led developments of the past, and more recently, from Letchworth and Welwyn Garden Cities and Hampstead Garden Suburb, to local authority-led new towns such as Milton Keynes, right up to the award-winning schemes often built in partnership with the public and private sector up and down the country right now—developments where nature, people and the economy grow together, not in opposition to each other, as we see in the best places that we all know and enjoy visiting.

If we build with the economy and with those who want growth, and for nature by developing with nature and for people by developing with people, we will build the homes, jobs and services that our communities want to see, that our country deserves and that our environment and our planet so desperately need.

--- Later in debate ---

[Peter Lamb]

My hon. Friend must be reading ahead. The impact on escalating costs and viability as a result of the delays is hard to overstate. The capacity issues do not stem from laziness or as a covert form of development suppression; they stem from one issue and one issue only: the absence of sufficient numbers of planners in the public sector. The rates of pay at local authorities are massively out of kilter with the private sector. The consequence is that an increasingly small number of extremely hard-working people are left trying to keep the system afloat principally out of their public spiritedness. Yet, instead of receiving the thanks they deserve, all too often they have to deal with public rhetoric that regularly denigrates them and the work they do. I hope that I am not the first or the last in this Chamber to thank those public servants for their efforts on behalf of our communities and country.

Much needs to be done to reverse the decline in public sector planner numbers. While the Bill sets out many positive steps forward, I remain of the belief that few areas in the public sector would be better suited to, or would generate better economic returns from, the introduction of AI than planning. It could use decades’ worth of computerised training data to deal with simple applications automatically, freeing up expert human planners to deal with the cases that would genuinely benefit from a human eye.

As a former council leader, I am defensive of the record of local government in planning. However, despite my initial scepticism, I found much that is good in the new national planning policy framework and in the Planning and Infrastructure Bill, showing that this Government genuinely listen to voices across the sector.

[Rebecca Smith]

Given the hon. Member’s expertise as a former council leader, would he agree that the provision in the Bill that enables councils to set fees for planning could go further, particularly around the fees that could be charged for enforcement cases? He will know the amount of hours that planning officers spend tied up in their inboxes dealing with the enforcement of rogue individuals who seem to play cat and mouse with officials. Would he agree that a look at fees might be a sensible option?

Planning and Infrastructure Bill

Rebecca Smith Excerpts

Report stage
Monday 9th June 2025 Commons Chamber

[Mr Perkins]

I rise to set out the case for amendments 136 and 150 and new clause 62, in my name. I am very pleased to hear what the Minister has said so far. The Bill would tackle the long-standing conundrum of how to deliver the ambitious house building targets to which the Government are rightly committed, while protecting the environment and enhancing, not reducing, protections for nature. Before I turn to my amendments, I want to speak briefly about the extent to which the Bill achieves those aims.

I absolutely share the Government’s commitment to freeing up the planning system and ensuring that fewer people are unable to get on to the housing ladder and fewer children grow up in unsuitable, overcrowded and temporary accommodation. I see the impact of this country’s failure to build the homes it needs in my surgeries every single week, so I support the Government’s aims to speed up that process. I also agree that planning has too often been a barrier to those ambitions, and the Government are absolutely right to attempt to remove this blocker.

Freeing up unnecessary restrictions, however, must not mean allowing further nature degradation, nor does it have to. The Government have said that these ambitions will be achieved alongside nature recovery. Wildlife populations in England have fallen to around 67% of their 1970 level; as I said a few moments ago, Britain is now one of the “most nature-depleted” places on earth. Most of England’s rare and vulnerable habitats are in poor condition. Alongside building the homes and infrastructure that our society needs, we must rebuild our natural capital—the air, water, soils and biodiversity —on which our society depends.

[Rebecca Smith (South West Devon) (Con)]

It sounds as though the hon. Member, like me, has a deep passion for ensuring that we maintain nature, so does he agree that a simple measure would be to accept new clause 30, which would extend permitted development rights for ponds of up to 0.2 hectares, providing vital freshwater habitats for up to two thirds of all freshwater species, exactly as he has been saying?

[Mr Perkins]

I thank the hon. Member very much for that intervention, and I look forward to hearing her speech in support of her new clause. I do think that has merit and is worth considering, and I look forward to hearing her make her case in more detail.

The Environmental Audit Committee, which I chair, initiated an inquiry into housing growth and environmental sustainability to scrutinise the Government’s national planning policy proposals. Achieving growth and delivering for people, climate and nature together is a vital but challenging task. There are many provisions in this Bill that I welcome, and I thank the Minister for his efforts and his detailed engagement. I was grateful that he made time to meet me recently to discuss my proposed amendments.

Overall, I support the Government’s intention in part 3, and I think those parties that wish to simply scrap the approach entirely are wrong. It is right to introduce a more strategic approach to satisfying developers’ environmental obligations. If done well, the environmental delivery plans and the nature restoration levy proposed in part 3 could simplify and accelerate the process of meeting existing environmental requirements, where developments impact protected sites or protected species. Importantly, I see the merit of this strategic approach in delivering larger-scale and more effective nature conservation measures where development has unavoidable impacts on protected sites and protected species.

However, the strength of concern from knowledgeable stakeholders should give the Government serious pause for thought. The Office for Environmental Protection, which was mentioned earlier, published advice for the Government stating that the existing provisions in the Bill would amount to a regression in environmental law, so it is welcome that the Minister continues to be open-minded about making further amendments. I look forward to hearing about the engagement in another place, where I am certain that further amendments will be brought forward.

The Environmental Audit Committee has heard evidence that there must be stronger safeguards for the proposed nature restoration fund to genuinely deliver on its potential for nature. My objective in tabling amendments to this Bill is to engage constructively with the Government’s approach to part 3, and to strengthen it so that it delivers for nature and development at the same time.

To turn first to amendment 136, I very much welcome what the Minister had to say about scientific safeguards, and I look forward to what he comes forward with. This amendment would ensure that environmental delivery plans are used only where there is scientific evidence that they will work. In other words, there must be robust evidence that a particular negative effect on a protected site or protected species can be mitigated or compensated for at a strategic level, rather than on a site-by-site basis.

Although the strategic approaches that will be delivered by EDPs can work well for some habitats and species, such as nutrients or newts, they do not always work for others. This amendment would safeguard against the EDP approach being applied to inappropriate species or habitats. The Government have recognised this principle and have committed to a modular approach to expanding EDPs with new plans applying feature by feature, and existing protections remaining in place for those not yet covered. I support this approach, and I encourage the Government to enshrine this principle in legislation to give certainty that the scientific safeguards to which they have committed cannot be altered by any future Government without revisiting this legislation.

On amendment 150—