Junior Account Manager at Coverdale Barclay, Edward Poynton, explores Labour’s tightrope walk of boosting economic growth while ensuring local communities are adequately consulted on what gets built.
The long-awaited Planning and Infrastructure Bill was announced on Tuesday 11th March and promises a number of major reforms to remove blockages in the planning system to bring forth the completion of the vast number of homes necessary to meet Labour’s target of 1.5m homes in this Parliament.
Labour has promised to be the party for housebuilders since long before the election in 2024, placing its planning promises at the forefront of its messaging. After the new NPPF, the Planning and Infrastructure Bill has been the most anticipated policy event to come out of the government for the planning industry.
While it will still need to get through Parliament and the details will need to be ironed out, a number of its proposals will be met with cautious optimism by some and frantic disapproval by others.
The empowerment of development corporations will be met with approval as an effective means of large-scale development with great successes such as at Stockport’s own Mayoral Development Corporation ready to be used as examples. Reforms that will see National Significant Infrastructure Projects (NSIP) such as windfarms and railway lines have more streamlined consultation requirements. This will hopefully make sure that a comedy of errors such as HS2 does not happen again.
Despite some skirmishing in the cabinet over the importance of Net Zero in the past few weeks, clean energy grid connections such as wind and solar power will be prioritised, speeding up power production and replacing the system of ‘first come, first served’ with ‘first ready, first connected’ – a shift designed to prevent projects that are shovel-ready from being delayed behind others stuck in bureaucratic or technical limbo.
The most controversial part of this Bill though will be the reform of the committee system in relation to planning applications. The reform will see national determination of which planning applications will be decided by officers with the expectation of sites of somewhere between 10 and 100 homes and below being decided only by officers, removing councillors and planning committees from the equation, as well as controls on how large planning committees can be.
Many developers will likely applaud this change as planning committees can be major blockers, rejecting applications which have otherwise been approved by planning officers for what could be considered arbitrary reasons. This in turn will speed up applications and empower SME housebuilders who cannot always afford the lengthy planning process and possible appeal.
Detractors of this policy though will view this as a further attack on local government and a greater centralisation of power in Westminster. This follows the standardisation of councils which has seen pauses on some local elections – a move that has already received much criticism. The Local Government Association (LGA), while supportive of some aspects of the Bill, said that “the democratic role of councillors in decision-making is the backbone of the English planning system, and this should not be diminished.”
This will continue to be a point of contention for many people as councillors are elected and, as the LGA puts it, “know their areas best and what they need”. If the top threshold of 100-home sites is chosen, many edge of village and town developments will come under this number and will be decided by officers. Communities may be irrevocably changed without any input from their elected representatives which will be of concern to many across England.
The Planning and Infrastructure Bill is one of the most significant bills to move through Parliament so far under this government and will have far reaching consequences on whether Labour can achieve one its major promises. We will be monitoring as the bill passes through the Houses of Commons and Lords and will be interested to see what form it will take by the time it is given Royal Assent.
Read MHCLG’s press release announcing the Bill here.
Read the full Planning and Infrastructure Bill here.
