King's Speech 2024 - Planning and Infrastructure Bill

Wednesday, 17 July 2024 11:30

Planning and Infrastructure Bill “My Ministers will get Britain building, including through planning reform, as they seek to accelerate the delivery of high quality infrastructure and housing” The current planning regime acts as a major brake on economic growth. The Planning and Infrastructure Bill will play a key role in addressing this constraint, unlocking more housing and infrastructure across the country and supporting sustained economic growth. The planning...Request free trial

Planning and Infrastructure Bill

“My Ministers will get Britain building, including through planning reform, as they seek to accelerate the delivery of high quality infrastructure and housing”

The current planning regime acts as a major brake on economic growth. The Planning and Infrastructure Bill will play a key role in addressing this constraint, unlocking more housing and infrastructure across the country and supporting sustained economic growth. The planning system must be an enabler of growth – enabling democratic engagement with how, not if, homes and infrastructure are built.

Reforming the planning system is key to unlocking our country's economic growth – enabling us to deliver both the housing and critical infrastructure that communities need. The Bill will speed up and streamline the planning process to build more homes of all tenures and accelerate the delivery of major infrastructure projects in alignment with our industrial, energy, and transport strategies.

What does the Bill do?

The Bill will make improvements to the planning system at a local level, modernising planning committees and increasing local planning authorities' capacity to deliver an improved service.

The Planning and Infrastructure Bill will accelerate housebuilding and infrastructure delivery by:

streamlining the delivery process for critical infrastructure including accelerating upgrades to the national grid and boosting renewable energy, which will benefit local communities, unlock delivery of our 2030 clean power mission and net zero obligations, and secure domestic energy security. We will simplify the consenting process for major infrastructure projects and enable relevant, new and improved National Policy Statements to come forward, establishing a review process that provides the opportunity for them to be updated every five years, giving increased certainty to developers and communities.

further reforming compulsory purchase compensation rules to ensure that compensation paid to landowners is fair but not excessive where important social and physical infrastructure and affordable housing are being delivered. The reforms will help unlock more sites for development, enabling more effective land assembly, and in doing so speeding up housebuilding and delivering more affordable housing, supporting the public interest.

improving local planning decision making by modernising planning committees.

increasing local planning authorities' capacity, to improve performance and decision making, providing a more predictable service to developers and investors.

using development to fund nature recovery where currently both are stalled, unlocking a win-win outcome for the economy and for nature, because we know we can do better than the status quo. Our commitment to the environment is unwavering, which is why the Government will work with nature delivery organisations, stakeholders and the sector over the summer to determine the best way forward. We will only act in legislation where we can confirm to Parliament that the steps we are taking will deliver positive environmental outcomes. Where we can demonstrate this, the Bill will deliver any necessary changes.

Territorial extent and application

The majority of the Bill is expected to extend and apply to England and Wales. Some measures may also extend and apply to Scotland.

Key facts

Timescales for planning decision-making are growing: only 9 per cent of Local Planning Authorities (LPAs) are determining more than 70 per cent of non-major applications within 8 weeks. Only 1 per cent of LPAs determine more than 60 per cent of major applications within the statutory 13-week period. This Bill will look to help reverse this trend, boosting capacity at a local level and speeding up decision-making, which will in turn help to accelerate a future pipeline of housing delivery.

In 2022/23, the national development management service (local planning services) cost £794 million to operate with an estimated funding shortfall of £262 million per annum. This legislation will increase local planning authorities' capacity to deliver an improved service.

The Nationally Significant Infrastructure Project regime established an early reputation for delivering fair and timely consents – providing a one stop shop for planning consent on major infrastructure projects. Decision making timelines have slowed in recent years however, with the average Development Consent Order taking 4.2 years, up from 2.6 across 2012/2021. Legal challenges have also increased since 2021 (4 successful out of 15 legal challenges), prompting actors to increase the scope and volume of their environmental impact assessments to tens of thousands of pages.

The demand for major infrastructure is high, the National Infrastructure Commission state that failure to accelerate infrastructure delivery plans in the next 5 years, could constrain economic growth and threaten climate targets. Meeting the UK's infrastructure needs will require a change in Government decisions over the next 10-15 years, alongside considerations on the environment and community impacts.

There has been an unprecedented increase in developers withholding agreements to connect to the grid, with far more generation in the queue than we will need to power the country by 2050. 85 per cent of projects have later connection dates than requested, often into the late-2030s.

Energy UK say that: “It's excellent to see the new Government prioritise planning reforms as a key enabler for economic growth and enhancing our energy security.”