Question to the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government:

To ask the Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, how many national significant infrastructure planning decisions have been made (a) within and (b) outside the statutory time frame in this Parliament; how many applications have been made but not yet had a decision; and what estimate his Department has made of the number that would be needed to be approved each year to meet the Government's target.

The government made 21 decisions on Nationally Significant Infrastructure Projects (NSIPs) in the first year of this Parliament. This compares with the first year of the last Parliament in which only 15 decisions were made and represents the highest number of annual decisions made since the NSIP programme was introduced in 2011.

27 NSIP decisions have been made so far since the start of this Parliament. Of these, 13 were within the statutory timeframes and 14 were not. A number of those 14 decisions made outside of statutory timeframes exceeded the limit during the previous Parliament. This government swiftly made decisions on those projects in July 2024.

To date in this Parliament, 33 projects have submitted an application but have not yet had a decision. Through the Planning and Infrastructure Bill, we are seeking to reduce the average time it takes reach a decision on an NSIP project from its peak of 4.2 years under the previous government.

To achieve our Plan for Change milestone of fast-tracking 150 planning decisions, we will need an average of 32 decisions per year from July 2025. While we have not achieved this in our first year, we expect the rate of decisions to continue to accelerate alongside the already seen increase in projects entering the pipeline.