Question to the Department for Levelling Up, Housing & Communities:

To ask Her Majesty’s Government whether the Town and Country Planning Act 1990, or any other relevant legislation, confers on local planning authorities powers to enforce limits on the number of day and night movements of freight and passenger trains that they have set as a condition of granting planning approval to Network Rail.

Where development is proposed and requires a planning application, local planning authorities have broad powers to impose conditions and enforce where they consider that conditions have been breached. Conditions must meet the policy test in the National Planning Policy Framework which states that planning conditions should only be imposed where they are necessary, relevant to planning and to the development to be permitted, enforceable, precise and reasonable in all other respects. Whether enforcement action against breach of a condition is justified is a matter of their discretion for Local Planning Authorities.