Oral evidence related to the Planning and Infrastructure Bill will continue to heard by the Housing, Communities and Local Government Select Committee on Tuesday, with General Committee debates scheduled tomorrow and Thursday.
Last week, the bill went through its first and second sittings with the Public Bill Committee, following an announcement by deputy prime minister and housing secretary Angela Rayner that planning reforms would ‘slash a year off infrastructure delivery’.
The deputy PM said amendments to the bill would see ‘burdensome statutory consultation requirements unique to major infrastructure projects’ scrapped, which would ‘boost the government’s efforts to build 1.5 million homes by making it easier to deliver the roads, reservoirs and energy generation needed so we can restore the dream of homeownership to families across the country.’
Rayner added:
“Critical national infrastructure is key to Britain’s future and security – so we can’t afford to have projects held up by tiresome requirements and uncertainty, caused by a system that is not working for communities or developers and holding back our true potential.
“We are strengthening the Planning and Infrastructure Bill to make sure we can lead the world again with new roads, railways, and energy infrastructure as part of the Plan for Change, whilst ensuring local people still have a say in our journey to get Britain building.”
Wider reforms in the bill will ‘streamline and speed up planning decisions, remove blockers to major infrastructure and housing delivery,’ the government said in its announcement, adding:
“These changes build on the recent OBR forecast confirming the government’s planning overhaul, through an updated National Planning Policy Framework, will drive UK housebuilding to its highest level in over 40 years and boost the economy by £6.8 billion by 2029/30.”
During the second sitting of the Public Bill Committee, Matthew Pennycook, the minister of state for housing and planning, reiterated that the bill would support housebuilding. In response to Liberal Democrat MP Olly Glover, who asked if the bill did enough to mandate more affordable housing, the minister told the committee:
“We are trying to, through all of our reforms, deliver the biggest increase in social and affordable house building in a generation…we have already allocated £800 million to the affordable homes programme since coming into office. We have also pulled forward £2 billion as a down payment. A significant proportion of the homes coming through those funding routes are social rented homes—almost half...”
The minister also explained how spatial development strategies, included in the bill as a key mechanism to support development, would contribute to housebuilding targets:
“Where I think spatial development strategies can add to what we see coming through is that these will not be big local plans – let us be very clear. They need to be pretty high-level documents that make decisions about where housing growth and infrastructure provision is best sited and delivered on a sub-regional basis. That will allow groups of local authorities to take a far more sophisticated approach to, for example, bringing forward large-scale new communities in strategic locations that allow them to meet housing targets in a more sophisticated way.”
The government has previously said that the strategies, or SDS, will be produced by mayors or, in some cases, local authorities. The aim of the SDS is to identify the most sustainable areas to build across multiple local planning authorities and ensure ‘a clear join-up between development needs and infrastructure requirements’.
The committees will continue to hear evidence and debate amendments to the bill this week.
