Don't wreck the Planning Bill!

As someone I forget once said, "back the builders, not the blockers."

POD! On The Abundance Agenda podcast this week, I get mad about some frustrating amendments to the Planning Bill (also see below!), and Martin ponders what happens if a council declares a ‘climate emergency’ and… then doesn’t do anything about it.

Plus we speak to Tom Copley, Deputy Mayor of London for Housing and Residential Development about how a new fund could help London build more homes, why Sadiq Khan changed his mind on the green belt, and whether London can meet its targets. (Plus some nerdy train chat, of course.)

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It was all going so well.

The Planning and Infrastructure Bill had been sailing through Parliament. Last month, it completed third reading in the House of Commons, and it has now been kicked up to the House of Lords for consideration.

In theory, once it passes it will be the government’s biggest achievement so far. The Bill will rewrite the planning laws to make it easier to build new things in Britain, whether that’s homes, energy infrastructure or data centres.

And to achieve this goal, the Bill is a buffet of technical tweaks to different aspects of planning – stripping out or reducing burdensome regulation, and changing the ways in which decisions are made to speed the process up.

For example, one element is a change to how Nationally Significant Infrastructure Projects – big stuff, like railways and tunnels – are handled, to reduce the number of consultations that can drag projects to a crawl, and to limit the opportunities for NIMBYs to initiate judicial reviews.

Similarly, for smaller projects, planning at a local level will be reformed with the creation of “spatial development strategies” that will ease the approval process, and council bureaucrats will make more routine decisions – leaving only larger or more controversial developments for elected councillors argue about in meetings.

My favourite aspect of the Bill though is the creation of a “Nature Restoration Fund”. This is a mechanism that will mean that instead of having individual projects mitigate their own environmental impact, they will pay into the fund, which will spend the cash far more effectively on a national scale.

It’s a provision that could prevent disasters like HS2’s infamous £100m “bat tunnel” – as instead of needing to spend eye-watering sums on specifically protecting the bats near that specific section of the railway line it will be possible to, for example, fund “network mitigations” – like opening a bat sanctuary elsewhere in the country instead.

I could go on – there’s also stuff in the Bill about speeding up compulsory purchases for infrastructure, and empowering Development Corporations as delivery bodies to get stuff built faster.

So all this is to say is that the Planning and Infrastructure Bill is extremely good news if, like me, you agree that Britain’s chronic inability to build is at the heart of many of our most vexing problems, like the housing crisis and the still-not-fast-enough rollout of renewable energy infrastructure.

At least, it should be. But now there’s a risk it won’t fulfil its promise.

Last week as the Bill chugged through the Lords, the government itself proposed a number of amendments that will – maddeningly – water down the proposed law.

And in my view, this has the potential to undermine what the Bill is trying to achieve.

But the good news is that there’s still time to save it.

Enter the wreckers

So what exactly happened? The rationale for the proposed changes appears to be that the government wants to placate a bunch of noisy “nature” groups, like the RSPB, Wildlife Trusts and the National Trust, who describe the Bill that completed passage through the Commons as a “licence to kill nature”.

So rather than pick a fight, it appears the government is attempting to find a compromise on how the new Bill will work.

The exact specifics of the amendments get pretty technical, but they concern Environmental Delivery Plans (EDPs) – a new thing the Bill is creating, which will set out how developers on projects must mitigate the impact of their build on nature. (You can see the proposed amendments here, submitted by government minister Baroness Taylor.)

And essentially, what the new amendments do is add in what the Wildlife Trust describes as new “safeguards” that strengthen the legal test for whether developments are meeting their EDPs.

This might sound innocuous – but it somewhat undermines what the Bill is attempting to do. This is because the enhanced legal “safeguards” will make it easier to, for example, take housing and infrastructure projects to judicial review – slowing things down again.

Then – slightly maddeningly – the changes will further empower Natural England as the decision-maker on whether “network conservation measures”¹ (things like paying for a bat sanctuary elsewhere) are sufficient, or whether developers will have to do something on site (like build an absurdly expensive bat tunnel).

And don’t get me wrong, I care a lot about nature, but I think rowing back like this is a pretty insane thing to do. Because if you imagine a continuum running from “too much environmental red tape so nothing gets built” to “developer free-for-all that doesn’t care for nature”, the Bill itself ratchets the planning system significantly further towards development, but these amendments then move it back several notches in the wrong direction.

Westminster skullduggery

I hope that I am, to an extent, being hysterical here. But judging by the reaction from the YIMBY-types I know, they are, er, not massively happy about the amendments to say the least.

But there are a few people on the pro-building side who aren’t talking about it in quite such apocalyptic terms.

For example, Dan Tomlinson, the Chipping Barnet MP who has made his name as an advocate of building has reacted more calmly, pointing out that the amendments appear to be “much more targeted” than an earlier set of similar amendments tabled in the Commons by Chris Hinchcliff, an MP who used to work for anti-development group, the Campaign To Protect Rural England.

And I suppose even if the amendments are a case of two steps forward, one step back, you could make the case that it is, well, it’s still one step forward on balance.² And that might be the best the government can do for party management reasons.

After all, Labour’s enormous Parliamentary Party now includes MPs representing everywhere from poor neighbourhoods in dense cities, to posh villages in the shires. Opinion in the party is clearly mixed. After all, the aforementioned Chris Hinchcliff was a Labour MP himself until just the other day, when he was suspended from the party for, er, proposing those previous amendments to the Planning Bill (as well as rebelling on welfare).

And even inside the government, it’s clear that not everyone is a radicalised YIMBY ultra like me. I mean, I’m not claiming this as real reporting (this is just scurrilous speculation) but what I’ve heard from Westminster-types is scepticism that Housing Minister Matthew Pennycook is willing to pick fights with NIMBYs and nature groups.³

But even if this is the case, if I were advising Downing Street, and looking at the Planning and Infrastructure Bill – I really wouldn’t think this is the time to compromise. As if you’re going to spend political capital on anything – it should be this.

Go big or you can’t go home

The Planning and Infrastructure Bill is an important piece of legislation. It’s one of the keys that will unlock growth. If it becomes easier to build, housing will become cheaper and we can build the infrastructure we need to be a functioning country.

And, of course, the big bet the government is placing is that it can pass reforms like planning now – so that by the time of the next election, people will be starting to feel the positive consequences of growth.

However, I don’t think doing it half-heartedly will work. It’s like going on a diet, and discovering that running is hard – so compromising by rewarding yourself with a slice of cake every time you get back from the gym.

So my fear is that compromising on these amendments will mean that planning ends up like the recent Welfare Bill. In that case, regardless of your views on the policy specifics,⁴ the premise was that the changes would ultimately save public money. But having gone through a bruising Parliamentary process, projected savings have been cut in half – meaning that though there will eventually be something in the statute books that we call the Welfare Bill, it won’t actually do what was intended.

Similarly, we’ve seen a version of what might happen play out in America, where a Democratic Congress created a $42bn programme to roll out rural broadband – but because unlocking the cash required jumping through an almost comical number of regulatory hurdles, it ended up helping virtually no one – resulting in no political upside for Joe Biden or Kamala Harris.⁵

So it is important that, if the government wants to reform planning, that the measures it enacts actually work and achieve the desired outcome.

And given the centrality of planning to so many of Britain’s problems, I really think the government should reconsider these amendments and hold its nerve. The government is already doing lots of good things, but the pace of change is still too slow. A half-hearted Planning Bill won’t make the difference that we need it to.

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Now listen to me talk more about the Planning and Infrastructure Bill on The Abundance Agenda.

1. I’ve just spent about an hour trying to work out the origin of this phrase – it’s not in the Bill. and appears to have been coined in the amendments.

2. It’d probably be more accurate to say maybe three or four steps forward, one step back, but that’s not how the saying goes.

3. Similarly, his boss Angela Rayner, has in addition to doing lots of good stuff, has also made some bizarre announcements that will risk slowing down building, like plans to fine developers with a “delayed home penalty” if they fail to build approved homes quickly enough. Though this might sound appealing, it only really makes sense if you buy into the myth of “land banking” – and forget that lots of delays to building are not the faults of developers but are a problem with, well, the disaster of a planning system that the Planning Bill is supposed to be trying to fix.

4. I am definitely very uncomfortable with the cuts here too.

5. Admittedly they also had… other… problems.