Commencement and transitional provision

Amendments made: 120, page 148, line 31, leave out “7” and insert

“(Examination of applications for development consent)”.

This amendment provides that the new clause inserted by Amendment NC69 comes into force by regulations.

Amendment 121, page 150, line 24, leave out “section 49 comes” and insert

“sections 48 and 49 come”.—(Matthew Pennycook.)

This amendment provides that section 48 (which enables regulations to be made imposing a surcharge on planning fees) comes into force two months after Royal Assent.

Third Reading

King’s and Prince of Wales’s consent signified.

I beg to move, That the Bill be now read the Third time.

It has been a real privilege to take this crucial piece of legislation through the House—“groundbreaking legislation”, as the Shadow Minister, Paul Holmes, described it earlier. I thank everyone who has played a role in getting the Bill to this stage. I thank my right hon. Friend the Deputy prime minister for her unwavering support throughout the Bill’s passage; I thank the Department’s Bill team, led by Alex Bush, for their prodigious efforts over many months; I thank my consistently excellent private office, including its head, Grace Doody, and my brilliant private secretary Gabe Allason; I thank the Clerks, Chairs and parliamentary counsel for facilitating the Bill’s progress; I thank the witnesses who gave evidence to the Committee; and I thank the hon. Members on both sides of the House who provided valuable input and challenge, today and at earlier stages.

This landmark Bill will get Britain building again, unleash economic growth, and deliver on the promise of national renewal. It is critical in helping the Government to achieve their ambitious plan for change milestone of building 1.5 million safe and decent homes in England during the current Parliament, to making planning decisions on at least 150 major economic infrastructure projects, and to supporting the clean power 2030 target and transforming Britain into a clean energy superpower.

As the House will know, the Bill will deliver five key objectives. First, it will deliver a faster and more certain consenting process for nationally significant infrastructure projects. This is a crucial part of the Bill. Upgrading our country’s economic infrastructure—electricity networks, clean energy sources and public transport links—is essential to basic services and a growing economy. The Bill makes a number of changes. It will ensure that national policy statements are kept up to date by providing for a reflective Amendment process so that the Government can quickly make minor policy changes or factor in legal impacts.

Secondly, the Bill adopts a more strategic approach to nature recovery that will unlock a win-win for development and the environment. As we discussed at length yesterday, the status quo is not working. It is not working for development, and—let me be clear—that is because constraints such as nutrient neutrality are stifling development and disincentivising planning applications across the country, which is having an impact on house builders, particularly small and medium-sized house builders. We need to remove those constraints. The status quo is also not working for the environment: all too often, the site-by-site process of assessment and meeting obligations is not driving nature recovery. Instead of retaining that suboptimal status quo, we want to take forward a new strategic approach across wider geographies, ensuring that Natural England presents plans that go beyond offsetting harm to driving nature recovery as well as unlocking development.

Thirdly, the Bill will improve certainty and decision making in the planning system. There has been widespread support for the measures on mandatory training for local councillors and on fee localisation. Local planning authorities, which we know have been hard-pressed in recent years, will be able to set their own fees and ensure that more of the burdens that they face in processing applications can be covered by those fees. The House has welcomed that.

We have taken the decision to introduce a national scheme of delegation. I appreciate that that is controversial, but we think it is an absolutely necessary means of introducing more certainty and clarity into the decision-making process. We have launched a technical consultation on the measure, and I urge hon. Members from across the House to engage with the detail of that consultation. I think that when they do so, they will understand that a category of planning applications should be delegated to expert local planning officers. However, with the agreement of the relevant chair of the committee and the lead planning officer in the authority, it will always be possible for the most serious and controversial applications to come before elected members, just as it should be the case that they take decisions on the most significant applications.

Fourthly, we are unlocking land and securing public value for large-scale investment. Today we have debated changes to development corporations, which will play an essential role in driving the delivery of more large-scale communities across this country, and we have discussed CPO powers. We want to see those CPO powers, including the very important CPO reforms passed by the previous Government, which I am sad to hear the Conservatives regret they passed—the shadow Secretary of State said very clearly from the Dispatch Box that it was a mistake. We think those powers are useful, and we want to see their application taken forward. The Bill makes targeted changes to those powers to ensure that they can be used by parish and county councils and, when it comes to nature recovery and the production of environmental delivery plans, by Natural England in certain circumstances.

Fifthly, the Bill introduces effective new mechanisms for cross-boundary strategic planning. We must do planning on a larger than local scale if we are to get the best outcomes, and the Bill introduces new spatial development strategies. These are not big local plans; they are higher-level strategies for different sub-regions of the country to come together and decide, in co-operation, the most appropriate places for housing growth and the best way for infrastructure to be delivered across those areas. In response to feedback, we made a series of targeted changes in Committee: we are removing the statutory pre-consultation requirements from the NSIP regime, which we know are driving perverse outcomes, and we have introduced targeted improvements to the nature restoration fund and a new funding mechanism for statutory consultees.

When it comes to delivering new homes and critical infrastructure, the status quo is patently failing the country and the British people. We can and must do things differently, and this Bill will enable us to do so. It is transformative. It will fundamentally change how we build things in this country and, in doing so, help us to tackle the housing crisis and raise living standards in every part of the country. This Labour Government were elected on the promise of change, and we are determined to deliver it. Through the measures introduced by this Bill, we will do just that. I wish Baroness Taylor and Lord Khan all the best with progressing the Bill in the other place, and I commend it to the House.

I call the Shadow Secretary of State.

May I thank the Minister for all his hard work? He is an incredibly decent and polite man. He may be misguided at times, but we cannot agree on everything. I thank him and his team for all their work, and I thank my Shadow ministerial team who did a fantastic job of subjecting the Bill to line-by-line scrutiny, the other Front-Bench teams, the Committee and the Clerks. I also thank hon. and right hon. Members from across the House for their contributions.

We are told that this Bill is about accelerating house building, unleashing growth and meeting a national target of 1.5 million homes in England alone in this Parliament. On the face of it, those aims are worthy, but what price are we prepared to pay for the Deputy prime minister’s ambition? Make no mistake: what is being proposed could fundamentally and irrevocably alter the character of our towns, our villages, and the green and pleasant land that makes Britain what it is.

This is not an attack on new homes—I am unashamedly pro-business and pro-development. Unlike the Secretary of State, the Minister and half the Cabinet, I have never objected to a housing development in my Constituency. Let me be clear: we need homes. We need homes for first-time buyers, for young families, for key workers and for the next generation, but we need the right homes in the right places, shaped by the right principles. Instead, we are being offered a top-down model driven by arbitrary targets and central diktat. The result is soulless settlements, identikit developments and rows of uninspiring concrete boxes that bear no relation to the history, the heritage or the hopes of the communities they are built in.

Crucially, in the Government’s “centralising zeal”—as the excellent shadow Minister, my hon. Friend Paul Holmes, calls it—local voices are being sidelined. Local councillors, and those who live in, love and understand their communities best, are being cut out of the process, with their role reduced and their judgment overlooked. The individual has been subordinated to being a cog in the machine. The Bill in its current form is not just flawed, but dangerous. It risks eroding trust in the planning system and widening the gulf between the Government and the governed.

The Bill must be considered in conjunction with the changes to the national planning policy framework. The Government’s approach of shifting housing targets from urban areas to rural areas is cynical and economically illiterate. While I welcome the restoration of mandatory targets in principle, raising targets by up to 400% in rural areas while simultaneously reducing them by over 11% in London, 30% in Birmingham and Newcastle, and over 50% in Coventry is unfair and wrong-headed. Their grey belt policy—presented as a few disused garage forecourts and wasteland in green belts—is a con. What they have actually done is remove important protections that prevent villages from merging into nearby villages and towns.

Of course, there is also the matter of the environment. Anyone who cares about our natural world knows that once a habitat is destroyed, a woodland torn up or a biodiverse landscape bulldozed, no cheque can bring it back. There is zero confidence on this side of the House that Natural England can successfully mitigate the significant environmental harms that will ensue through the environmental delivery plans. That is why we propose that they be delivered locally through local or strategic plans.

The truth is that we cannot concrete our way to community, we cannot meet our housing needs by overriding the very people we are building for, and we cannot call it progress if the Bill leaves our countryside degraded and our communities disempowered.

I thank my hon. Friend for his Intervention, and the failures of the London Mayor to build more houses are well documented. What is perhaps not a surprise is that Reform would take the further step of supporting the London Mayor in the pursuit of Labour votes.

We have grave concerns about the enhanced compulsory purchase order powers for councils, mayors and even Natural England, without hope value or market value. This undermines one of the most important principles of our economy: property rights. Not only is this unfair, but it will face legal challenge after legal challenge in the courts.

During the passage of the Bill, we attempted to work with the Government to make sensible changes to make it fit for purpose, but to no avail. Let us not be seduced by false choices. We do not have to choose between development and democracy, between homes and heritage, or between ambition and accountability. We can build and we must build, but we must do so in a way that listens, respects and safeguards.

I urge the Government, yes, to be ambitious, but also to think again. They should rethink the Bill, and restore the local voice and reinstate environmental protections. Let us chart a path to progress that honours our need for homes, our obligation to communities and to the environment, and our duty to future generations. In its current form, we cannot support this Bill.

I call the Liberal Democrat spokesperson.

It has been an honour and a privilege to represent the Liberal Democrats at the pleasure of my right hon. Friend Ed Davey on the Planning and Infrastructure Bill in Committee and at all stages of the Bill. I thank my staff team for their work and my colleagues on the Liberal Democrat Benches for their spirited amendments across all topics; in fact, we put forward 78 amendments in Committee, which I can only imagine was an absolute joy for the Minister and his officials to respond to.

I pay tribute to Members across the House for their work on this Bill. It has stimulated amendments from all corners of the House, as well as great debate, including my hon. Friend Andrew George working with Peter Prinsley on their Amendment on rural housing exception sites, to give just one example of the cross-party approach from different corners of the House towards improving the Bill.

On Second Reading, where the Liberal Democrats were the only party—except Plaid Cymru—to vote against the Bill because of our principled concerns about it, we set out to address our concerns about people’s rights, communities and fairness, and the effects the Bill will have on nature. We sought to address all those topics with our amendments.

First, on rights for people and individuals, as the Chair of the Select Committee, Florence Eshalomi, pointed out yesterday, what greater right could there be than the right to a decent, affordable home to bring up one’s family? We championed our proposal for 150,000 social homes a year to be built as a key target for this Government, and continue to encourage them through all means, including votes in this place, to move towards a target for building social homes, rather than simply a target for building millions of homes; without that, the target will be led by private market housing, which, on its own, is no solution to the problems we face.

We sought to address communities and fairness by seeking to remove the power that the Government will grant themselves, and all future Governments, to interfere in the running of councils and to give decisions to employees and planning consultants over and above the heads of the councillors who employ them, and who are meant to be accountable for those decisions. For the first time, decisions could be made by council officers and consultants, and, though every single elected councillor of that authority may disagree, those decisions will stand in their name, and councillors will not have the power to do anything to change them. That cannot be right.

It will undermine communities’ trust in politics and our planning system—a system in which people engage more at a local level than perhaps any other aspect of local government. The more people see the centralisation of planning powers, the standard method and guidance written by Whitehall, the appeals process dominated by Whitehall, and now even their own councillors not allowed to make decisions, the more we will damage communities’ trust in politics and their belief in the planning system and the system of local democracy, which is so important to our country. That is the principal reason that we object so strongly to the removal of powers from councillors in the Bill.

We support a number of the measures in the Bill; there are many good measures. In passing, I pay tribute to the Minister for his work on bringing back strategic planning, on which he has worked for a number of years. However, we are gravely concerned about its effect on nature. The National Trust has called the Bill a “licence to kill nature”. It is right, of course, to bring in a system for phosphates, for instance, which could be mitigated at a strategic level through environmental delivery plans, but it is wrong to completely remove from that process the principle of “first do no harm” on the site on which we are developing. We should enshrine the mitigation hierarchy in this new system in the Bill, so that, first, we seek to avoid harm to the site, then to mitigate it and, finally, to offset it, but only where that is absolutely necessary. Our new Clause 1 would have put that protection of nature into this new system.

I am grateful to my hon. Friend who has done so much work to champion national landscapes and the need for them to have a seat at the planning table. In my own national landscape, the mellow and beautiful Blackdown hills of Somerset also deserve a seat at the planning table. We do not believe that cutting out consultees, consultation and voices such as Sport England from the planning process is the way to deliver more homes or better communities. We need to bring in voices such as those who support our national landscapes, and we would dearly like to put forward amendments to achieve that.

On the rights of people to genuinely affordable homes, the rights of communities to fairness in the process, and rights to nature, we do not believe that the Government have gone far enough and we cannot support the Bill as it stands.

Fear not, Madam Deputy Speaker, I shall keep my comments very, very brief. I cannot let this Planning and Infrastructure Bill go without saying that it was an opportunity to create the homes that we need, to support our communities, to support our farmers and farming, to support the environment, and to ensure that good development is supported by good infrastructure. I have sat in this Chamber for two days listening to amendments and debating amendments, including my own on battery energy storage systems. Time and again, the Government have just rejected them. What we have ended up with is legislation that drives a coach and horses through accountability. It seeks to steamroll over local people and to concrete over our precious green belt. It gives local people no rights, no voice and no say over how their communities are shaped for the future. On that basis, I will be voting against the Bill on Third Reading.

I, too, will keep my remarks brief, but I wish to put it on the record that Devon, which is rightly celebrated across Britain for its rugged coastline, its rolling farmland, its spectacular moorlands and its ancient woodlands, is subject to the diggers of developers who are encouraged by this Government. Although we all need houses and we all need the protection that they afford, this Bill, if enacted, will only damage nature. Nature in Devon is part of who we are and we face a nature crossroads. The Devon Local Nature Partnership tells us that the loss and decline of Devon’s wildlife has accelerated rapidly over the past 50 years. The wooded valleys of the Blackdown hills and the wildflower meadows of East Devon are priceless, but once they are gone, they cannot be brought back.

Yesterday in the Tea Room, we were talking about the darkening clouds of the international system and how this Government are having to deal with such grave matters of state. Somebody then pointed out that, never mind grappling with wars and conflict, we cannot even create a system where a £44 swift brick is put in a new house to encourage nature in our rural areas.

Healthy natural systems underpin our economy and our communities, but unless we restore nature, we will have nothing left. Building homes does not need to come at the cost of nature. We must build in the right places with nature embedded at the heart of planning.

Question put, That the Bill be now read the Third time.

The House divided: Ayes 306, Noes 174.

Question accordingly agreed to.

Bill read the Third time and passed.