Touted as the 'seismic reform' needed to get builders on-site faster, this week's Planning and Infrastructure Bill outlines the Government's plans to streamline planning, cut bureaucracy, and fast-track major developments, including nationally significant infrastructure like roads, railways, and wind farms.
The Bill comes alongside wider planning reforms such as the new National Planning Framework and plays a central role in Labour’s plans to deliver 1.5m new homes.
Provisions in the Bill include:
- Reforms to development corporations and compulsory purchase which allow for a more muscular approach to urban regeneration by reducing hope value and making it easier for authorities to acquire land at fairer prices and accelerate the delivery of new towns and regeneration projects.
- A national scheme of delegation to reduce the impact of planning committees on decisions – aimed at streamlining the process and reducing delays caused by local political considerations.
- The introduction of a Nature Restoration Fund, removing the complexity of biodiversity net gain by allowing developers to contribute to a central fund instead of having to meet requirements on-site, this should simplify the process and reduce the need to make individual arrangements.
- The return of strategic development plans, marks a major shift back to large-scale, coordinated planning. Previously scrapped under the Conservatives, these plans now align with Labour’s devolution agenda and aim to simplify complex planning structures.
In areas like the Oxford-Cambridge growth corridor, where planning involves 10 district authorities, eight unitary authorities, two county councils, and a combined authority, strategic plans could reduce policy layers, consolidating them into just three or four. This has the potential to streamline decision-making and improve coordination.
However, much of the implementation relies on secondary legislation, so the detail will be key to the Bill’s success. There is also the ongoing challenge of significant discretion in decision-making, which remains a major source of delays and frustration. Regardless of the reforms introduced, if policy and guidance continue to be widely open to interpretation and therefore contested, the same bottlenecks will persist.
