The Planning and Infrastructure Bill has passed its second reading in the House of Lords after several hours of debate.
Second reading is the first opportunity for members of the Lords to debate the key principles and main purpose of the Bill, and to flag up any concerns or specific areas where they think amendments are needed.
Opinions on the Bill
The Bill is facing growing concerns about its provision for nature:
Before the Bill passed its third reading in the House of Commons, MPs rejected an amendment that would have required Environmental Delivery Plans (EDPs) to set out a timetable for conservation measures. On day one of the report stage, Chris Hinchliff, Labour MP for North East Hertfordshire, proposed amendment 69 on EDPs, which would "require Environmental Delivery Plans to set out a timetable for, and thereafter report on, conservation measures, and require improvement of the conservation status of specified features before development takes place in areas where Natural England considers development could cause significant environmental damage".
The amendment sought to address concerns by the Office for Environmental Protection in May, which said several aspects of the Bill "undermine its potential to deliver the intended win-win outcomes". Concerns were also raised by several peers during the debate about EDPs.
Liberal Democrat, Earl Russell, said the nature restoration levy proposals are an "alarming step backwards for nature protection".
"The bill proposes that developers can pay into a nature restoration fund instead of fulfilling existing legal obligations to protect wildlife and habitats. This bypasses the fundamental mitigation hierarchy: the principle that impacts should first be avoided, then mitigated and compensated for only as a last resort".
"There is no requirement for developers to even attempt to avoid harm before resorting to paying the offset fee. This is a profound weakening of our environmental law".
He advocated for all sites with nature protections to be removed from these provisions, noting that many "are simply impossible to recreate and move elsewhere".
For Baroness Grender, Liberal Democrat, the success of EDPs and a nature restoration levy is "highly dependent on substantial up-front funding".
"We have very serious concerns, for the committee stage, about Natural England’s capacity and resources to monitor and enforce this fund effectively".
She argued that the Bill "fails to adequately strengthen protection for irreplaceable habitats such as our precious chalk streams" and is a missed opportunity for mandating nature-friendly development in new housing, including minimum biodiversity measures such as swift boxes, bat boxes and green roofs, including solar.
Lord Hunt of Kings Heath, Labour, said he could see the proposals of EDPs working for a given area where there might be multiple housing developers, but he set out concerns about the extent to which they will work for major infrastructure developments. Referring to Catherine Howard, the Head of Planning at Herbert Smith Freehills Kramer, who said there is a risk that developers would "need to twin-track the EDP process with going through the traditional habitats assessment" regime because an EDP was not in place in time for the consent application, Hunt said this "is going to be hopeless for developers".
Further concerns about the Bill were set out during the debate, with Lord Fuller, Conservative, stating that the "the Bill is defective because it does not remind us that the purpose of planning is to arbitrate between the private and the public interest".
Though he welcomed moves intended to shorten the length of time it takes to produce a local plan, he argued that the Bill "perpetrates the myth that councils and councillors are a block on progress", which is "wrong".
"Local councillors should not be the scapegoats for wider failures in the rest of the regulatory public sector... Training councillors and emasculating planning committees alone will not deliver millions of homes; that is just wishful thinking".
Fuller was addressing a measure in the Bill that would require committee members to undertake training. Other measures include:
Baroness Pinnock, a Liberal Democrat, agreed with mandatory training being provided for local planning committee members but, like Fuller, said there is "no evidence that planning committees are the blockers".
"Some 80% of planning applications are already approved, one way or another; some 90% are already delegated to officers’ decision-making. Of those referred to the Planning Inspectorate by developers, less than 3% are overturned on appeal. The planning system works – it just needs more investment".
"The real blockers to housing development are the major housebuilders, which acquire planning consent and then wait for an upturn in the market or even play the system with constant applications to alter aspects of the original planning permission. The evidence is clear. The government could easily reach their target of 1.5 million new homes in this Parliament if the 1.2 million currently with planning permission were built. Reform of this part of the process is desperately needed. That is what needs to change".
Concluding the debate, Baroness Taylor of Stevenage, Labour, said the ambition of the Bill is "really transformative", but did reference the concerns about the changes to planning committees that they are not currently operating as effectively as they could be.
She insisted that the government is not taking local decision-making out of local hands, but that it wants to engage the public and councillors more at the stage of the local plan "here they can really have an influence on place shaping and can influence what they want to see in their communities".
What happens next?
After second reading the Bill will now go to committee stage, where detailed line by line examination and discussion of amendments takes place.
