Planning and Infrastructure Bill

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 17th September 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I shall speak chiefly to the amendments in the Green group’s name in this diverse but very important group. I will briefly mention Amendment 345, already powerfully and poetically spoken to.

In the discussion, we heard so many sad stories of the trees we have lost. As a Save Sheffield Trees campaigner, it made me think of two magnificent specimens in Sheffield: the Chelsea Road Elm and the Vernon Road Oak in Dore, where communities had to make enormous efforts—including risking life and limb and arrest—to save those trees. The amendment would create a mechanism to make sure that those efforts could be put towards more constructive activities, rather than defending what is already there.

I shall speak chiefly to Amendment 346 in my name, which calls on local authorities to report on land contamination, raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, in both groups. My amendment raises Zane’s law. I have essentially tabled it before, to the Building Safety Act and the Levelling-up and Regeneration Act, when they were passing through the House. The whole campaign for Zane’s law has developed significantly since then. This is a probing amendment, because a lot has happened since we last discussed this, when the Minister was then sitting beside me on the opposition Benches and expressing interest in the issue.

It also offers the Government a suggestion for at least a partial way forward. This is a very urgent issue, which has been acknowledged. Recently, in July, the Mayor of London backed a Zane’s law, pushed very much by London Assembly Member, Zack Polanski. Just a few days ago, a motion moved by the Fire Brigades Union at the TUC conference, also backed by the NEU, Unison, Unite and the CWU, called for a Zane’s law.

There have been many new noble Lords since the last time we discussed this in this House. Zane’s law is named after the seven year-old Zane Gbangbola, who died in February 2014 during flooding of the River Thames at Chertsey in Surrey. Zane’s parents, Kye and Nicole, know that he was killed by toxic hydrogen cyanide gas from a former waste dump. His father was left paralysed by that gas. That is not what the inquest says, but everyone knows that is the fact. Indeed, I note that Zane’s parents recently had a meeting with the Prime Minister to discuss the Truth About Zane campaign and to see what could be done to finally get the record set straight.

This is about an issue that directly affects many people. In June, I held a Zane’s law summit here in Parliament, acknowledging that current UK regulations on contaminated land are grossly inadequate and a threat to the safety of many, particularly given climate breakdown, rising sea levels, increasing rainfall and flooding. That summit heard from campaigners around the country on very significant issues. The case of Zane is about a historic landfill which was closed off many decades ago. There are ongoing, immediate landfill issues which are not being properly dealt with, and which Zane’s law would deal with more broadly.

I have to acknowledge and give all credit to the Government that the then Environment Secretary, Steve Reed, came to the summit, where he said that the Government knew that there needed to be more transparency about contaminated land and that they would publish a new state of contaminated land report in spring next year. One thing I am looking for from the Minister today is a report on how that is going—a reassurance that progress is being made. The Secretary of State said at that meeting that the department is developing a land remediation pathfinders scheme to provide financial support to councils to remediate land that is contaminated. With this amendment, I hope to hear from the Minister about what progress is being made. Of course, we have seen a change of personnel in her department since then, but I would like to hear what is happening.

I also want to raise a further issue, which has been raised with me. I will understand if the Minister wants to write to me about it. As the pressure and the campaign for Zane’s law grow, I am hearing reports that landowners might be selling what they know to be contaminated land, even if it is not properly identified and fully understood, and trying to basically dump it before further action is taken. Does any agency or institution have a duty to record, report or interact when there are such disposals or purchases? We know that there is a big issue coming; how can we ensure that innocent buyers and communities do not get dumped with land like this?

I come now to Amendment 346A, tabled by my noble friend Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb, which fits more closely in this group, dealing as it does with trees. As the noble Baroness, Lady Grender, said, we are going backwards in terms of biodiversity and on issues around trees and so on. According to the State of the UK’s Woods and Trees 2025 report, roughly 40% of our ancient woodlands, the UK’s most biodiverse temperate habitat, are being damaged by plantation forestry, making their restoration a priority to meet the Government’s 2030 nature recovery targets. Here is a truly shocking figure: in 2023, 6 hectares of damaged ancient woodlands were restored, but the target for the year was 5,000 hectares—so six hectares versus 5,000 hectares.

Crucially, this amendment would create a duty for the appropriate forestry authority—in many cases, this will of course be the Forestry Commission—undertaking any planning or development function relating to forestry land, or taking any part in any exercise in such functions, to prioritise achieving the targets under Sections 1 to 3 of the Environment Act 2021 and targets in the environmental improvement plan, as well as following, of course, their duties under the Climate Change Act 2008. This would ensure that the Forestry Commission took all reasonable steps to contribute to the legally binding targets for nature recovery and climate mitigation and adaptation.

I think that I have previously debated this issue with the Minister. The Forestry Commission’s current legal remit is outdated. Its primary duty, as established in the Forestry Act 1919, is to promote timber production, so that is the job it is being given. There is only a vague conservation duty, which was added in 1985, a very long time ago. That 1985-added duty lacks clarity and enforceability and does not align with the UK’s environmental targets. We need to do this simply to protect nature and to act on the climate. If the forestry estate is open to renewable development through the Bill—and eventually the Act—it is vital that its decisions do not undermine irreplaceable habitats. Updating the Forestry Commission’s remit is timely, necessary and, as we know, widely supported by the public and the conservation sector.

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, I have the last amendment in this group. I very much support my noble friend Lady Coffey on her ponds amendment. We are short of ponds in the landscape, generally, and they should not be hard to create. I like the idea of wild belt, but I am not convinced that we can compel anyone to create a natural environment in this country. We lack the natural systems that would maintain a natural environment. Anything in this country has to be managed, but to have places set aside for nature and properly managed seems a much better concept than a green belt. It is much easier for people to enjoy and much easier to look after.

My amendment says that we should recognise that construction and demolition activities cause disruption to nature, much as we recognise that wildlife can cause disruption to growing crops. The Government have recognised this in relation to wind farms; they accept the damage to wildlife that wind farms cause. What we do causes damage to nature. If I was to put on my house a bird box and a bat box, there would not be a single month in the year when I could repaint my house without some risk of disturbing wildlife. We need to take a realistic attitude to this, which I hope is what my amendment does.

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[Baroness Young of Old Scone (Lab)]

My Lords, very briefly, I support this amendment. If we pass legislation, it is important that we actually commence it. As the noble Baroness so ably presented, this is a real gap and it is has become even more imperative as we seek to up the level of development. I hope that the Minister will recognise the need and agree to press forward with bringing this schedule into operation.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

Given that my noble friend Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb signed this amendment, I just briefly reinforce what the noble Baronesses have already said. The noble Baroness, Lady Young of Old Scone, made the point about laws being passed and then nothing happening. That is a problem both for industry—in this case, developers—and for local councils, which are left in a state of uncertainty, not knowing where they are going with this. People start to prepare, read up and think about it. I should perhaps declare my position as a vice-president of the Local Government Association at this point.

There is also an issue of trust with the Government—something that we discuss often in your Lordships’ House. A classic example of this is the bottle deposit scheme that we are all still waiting for after it was announced so long ago. Many people out there still believe that, when a Government announce something, it will happen—it is already on the way. Probably more people believe that, once a law is passed, that will happen. When it does not happen, there is then a real problem with trust in the Government.

I can trace my knowledge about sustainable urban drainage schemes to 2006, when the first Green was elected to Islington Council. I can remember her talking excitedly about how crucial it was to deal with local flooding issues as well as environmental issues. I had not yet learned the phrase “slow the flow”, but that is of course very much what urban drainage is about. I also recall visiting, some years ago now, Cherry Hinton Brook near Cambridge—I bring up chalk streams again, just for one final time. I talked to local people concerned about a proposed development there, what was happening with the sustainable urban drainage scheme and how it would potentially be managed. What is crucial about Schedule 3 is that it provides a framework for construction but also for oversight of management because, very often, sustainable urban drainage schemes cannot just sit there; they have to be managed throughout their lifespan for many decades. If we do not have everything set out here—the required technical analysis, the inspections and the responsibilities —as it is in Schedule 3, then we will be stuck with schemes that have been built but are not being looked after.

[Baroness Coffey (Con)]

My Lords, I strongly support this amendment. To lift the curtain a little bit on life in government, it is one of my disappointments that we did not get this enacted. I perhaps have to dob people in: it was the Ministry for Housing. We had finally got there with Plan for Water, where it was adopted as a policy. We managed to get it in there and we did the review—it was all beautiful. I am pleased that the Government did the standards; they published that in July. It just needs this final push. Now that Steve Reed has moved from Defra to the Ministry for Housing, I hope that he will take full advantage of being enlightened about the benefits of ensuring that we have proper connections and sustainable drainage and, candidly, that we can get on with it and the Government take advantage of this primary legislation to ensure that it happens.

Planning and Infrastructure Bill

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Committee stage
Monday 15th September 2025 Lords Chamber

Building in homes for nature in the housing that we build would be a very concrete way of ensuring some future for our much-loved wildlife. As the noble Lord, Lord Randall, said, this is something that the public would really understand. If the Government are going to move forward with the Bill without further amendments to Part 3 in the main, then, to reassure the public that they are putting nature first, building homes for nature at the same time as building these homes, and accepting these amendments, would be the way to go.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I give the Green group’s strongest possible support for all the amendments in this group. I am pleased to say that my noble friend Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb is recovering well from her operation last week.

If there is one amendment that my noble friend will regret not being here for, it is Amendment 212 on swift bricks. She is very passionate about swifts, and is it any wonder? These amazing creatures, with their top speed of 110 kilometres per hour, travelling 5,500 kilometres each way for their migrations, are long-distance athletes. They are making that journey, and then finding nowhere to raise their young. That is the reality of what we, by our actions, have created. Of course, they are now red-listed.

The noble Lord, Lord Randall, has already set this out very clearly and carefully, and the other noble Baronesses have already said a lot. I just note that, when we debated a very similar amendment to what is now the Levelling-up and Regeneration Act, the noble Baroness, Lady Taylor of Stevenage, then on the Opposition Benches, said that she was “delighted” to see the amendment from the noble Lord, Lord Goldsmith, that it was

“justified because of the unique nature of these precious birds’ nesting habits ”.—[Official Report, 6/9/23; col. 541.]

and that it had the Labour Party’s full support. Can we get to there, please? This is such a small measure. Why not? It is such a tiny action and a small cost. Yet, if you are a swift, this is not a small thing. This is a matter of life or extinction.

The other amendments are on other things we need to do, but there is a lot of discussion that the situation of swifts is unique. I fully back the hedgehog highways, the gaps in fences and other simple things, but swift bricks are just so simple.

Amendment 225, which was clearly introduced by the noble Baroness, is on bird-safe buildings. The British Trust for Ornithology has done a great deal of work on this, estimating that 100 million birds crash into the windows of buildings in the UK each year. One-third die as a result. That is a huge toll that is almost invisible. Back in 2022, the BTO did some research looking at local planning rules and essentially, there is no protection in any of our major cities and communities.

I will take noble Lords back to a case study that illustrates what happens on a day-to-day basis. It happened in a single day, so it really made an impact. Back in 2023 in Chicago, as a result of citizen science efforts, all the sad carcasses of more than 1,000 birds that had flown into one building in the US were collected. You may recall the pictures; a huge array of bird bodies was laid out. As was set out then, some very simple measures would have stopped that happening—the measures this amendment calls for.

Amendment 227GA is in my name and has considerable similarities to the amendment introduced by the noble Baroness, Lady Parminter, but perhaps goes a little further. It says that, within 18 months of this Act coming into force—I am allowing more time because this is much broader than what we need for swifts—regulations under the Building Act should be brought in to protect, and to ensure

“opportunities for living and feeding space for nature, mammals, birds, reptiles and insects”.

I also talk about the need for resources for plants.

The inspiration for this is probably not unique, but fairly unusual. It comes from an exhibition now on—I urge noble Lords to go and see it—at the Design Museum. It is called “More than Human” and is the first major exhibition of a growing movement of more than human design: a new generation of designers who understand that humans can flourish only alongside other activities and systems. It is part of the future observatory, the Design Museum’s national research programme for the green transition.

Let me give one example. There is a piece of artwork by Andres Jaque, “Transspecies Rosette”. It is a piece of a façade of a building made of cork, which is ideal for mosses, grasses, bacteria and mould. Normally, the façade of a building is designed to be impermeable—to stop anything growing and to keep everything out. What if we turned that around, and started to think about what a different kind of society would look like? I will very briefly mention “Sculpture for Octopuses” by Shimabuku, who experimented to see what colours octopuses liked and made artwork as a result.

I will conclude with a recollection from my youth. In 1988 I was a young journalist, and some Australians were marking the bicentenary of the start of the genocide of the Aboriginal people and the massive destruction of the environment of Australia that followed. The Australian parliament building was opened, but it was bogong moth migration season, and almost immediately the building filled up with bogong moths. No one had thought about this. They had brought in British western design traditions, plonked them down in Australia, and that was the result. So many decades later, the bogong moth, which the Aboriginal communities had feasted on over centuries—they had eaten them but also protected them—is now on the IUCN red list. It is gravely endangered. Something that, only decades ago, existed in great numbers is now threatened with extinction. We have to stop making buildings that have that kind of impact.

[Lord Berkeley of Knighton (CB)]

My Lords, I will be even swifter than the noble Lord, Lord Randall. There are some good ideas in these amendments. If we can protect bats in the belfry and great crested newts in the pond, why can we not do the same for swifts? They are such wonderful birds.

I am also interested in Amendment 225, because I have witnessed, very distressingly, quite a few birds smashing into windows and glass on my small farm in mid-Wales. To see these beautiful creatures lying on the ground, either stunned or dead, is very upsetting. Any efforts we could make to protect our dwindling bird population from crashing into buildings is to be supported.

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One of the advantages for housing developers of delaying housebuilding after they have got permission is that they can use up the housing allocation in the local plan to the extent that a local authority no longer has what is required, which is a five-year supply of housing sites. By getting permissions but not building, housing developers can by law then move on to greenfield sites because there is no five-year supply and use them first because there are more profitable and easier to build, while leaving those other sites, sometimes brownfield sites, waiting even longer to be developed. There is a lot of game-playing by housing developers on this issue. That is why I have tabled Amendment 219 to provide some leverage for local authorities to get houses built, which is the policy of this Government and the previous one. If there are levers to make sure that developers that have housing permission for more than 100 units—medium sites and beyond—that will help us get houses built, instead of having 1.2 million homes with permission that have failed to be built.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, as the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, said, my noble friend Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb signed Amendment 219. It would introduce a new clause so that where there is permission for a development of 100 homes or more and it is not used, it is use it or lose it, and within the applicable period there is a justifiable case for compulsory purchase of the land. I do not think anyone in your Lordships’ House is going to disagree that we have a housing crisis and a broken housing system. I point noble Lords to a recent “Big Read” in the Financial Times titled “Making British homes affordable again”, which focused on a number of issues, including the role of financial deregulation in the massive escalation of home prices.

Here, we are talking about the plan where the land is identified and everyone agrees this is the way forward, and then we run into the private housebuilders, where the legal obligation of the managers is to make money. They have no legal obligation to build homes: the law says to make as much money as you possibly can.

I would be very tempted to use the term land banking to describe managers who just sit on land and wait until they can make more money. That means that homes are not built, and they are needed in places where people want to live. The amendment does not force anything but allows the possibility of a CPO, to take this forward to get those homes built. Surely, that is what some communities are desperately aching for.

[Lord Roborough (Con)]

My Lords, I rise to speak to this important group of amendments about planning consents and compulsory purchase. I will speak briefly in support of Amendment 217, so convincingly introduced by the noble Lord, Lord Cromwell. It seeks to ensure that acquiring authorities and those acting on their behalf adhere to the normal code of conveyancing practice—the same principles that would apply in a transaction between a willing buyer and a willing seller. This is a sensible and pragmatic proposal. Compulsory purchase is, by its nature, an intrusive power and must always be exercised with care, transparency and fairness. Ensuring that conveyancing practice aligns with what would be expected in an open market transaction will help to build trust and minimise disputes between landowners and acquiring authorities. It is essential that landowners do not continue to be disadvantaged and mistreated through the CPO process, as the noble Lord described.

Amendment 219 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, proposes a new clause that would make land subject to automatic consideration for compulsory purchase under the Housing Act 1985 where permission for a development of 100 homes or more has not been acted on within the relevant period. She touches on an interesting and widely debated issue: the problem of land banking—if I may use that term—and delays in delivering housing once planning permission has been granted. Her amendment raises the question of how we might create stronger incentives to build out permissions in a timely manner, particularly where housing need is acute.

Before considering supporting this amendment, we would need to understand how widespread this practice, as the noble Baroness describes, really is. The figure of 1.2 million homes consented but unbuilt is bandied around. However, how many of these developments are unviable due to the Section 106 costs, community infrastructure levies and biodiversity net gain costs that are put on them? How many of these homes are stalled in negotiations around the details of implementing those consents? How many are stalled due to other issues outside developer or landowner control? I am not convinced that land banking is necessarily such a widespread issue as she contends, but I am very willing to listen to evidence. I would be grateful to the Minister for any information she can share with us.

It is worth bearing in mind that housebuilders are businesses: they have obligations to their staff and their shareholders, and they need to have a build programme that ensures they know they can employ their staff over a multi-year period and develop profits which allow returns to shareholders. The shareholders are often pension funds and other such institutional investors in this country. The principle of housebuilders making profits is important. Where a developer does have more short-term supply ready to build on its balance sheet, in most cases it will be because it is building out sites in markets that can absorb only a certain number of units each year without undermining prices to the detriment of the local community. Housebuilders also generally have a 15% return on capital employment commitment to their shareholders. That means that if they are holding land off the market, they need to be very confident that they are making more than 15% per annum doing that, otherwise they are letting their shareholders down. The financial incentives for land banking are not clear.

I would be most interested to hear if the Minister can identify what land banking is really happening in this country, where developers or landowners are holding on to consented land that could be built on right now without impacting on local housing prices. I very much look forward to her reply.

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[Lord Roborough (Con)]

My Lords, I rise to move my Amendment 227H and address the proposition that Clauses 53 to 92 of Part 3 should not stand part of the Bill, as well as a number of other amendments, notably Amendments 334, 346DD and 346DE in my name, which are intended to provide an effective, simple and cost-effective way of addressing the issues that Part 3 professes to simplify.

I am very grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb—I wish her a speedy recovery—the noble Earl, Lord Russell, and the noble Baroness, Lady Young of Old Scone, for their support to the clause stand part propositions. This is a broad church, and our reasons and solutions are likely to differ, and I look forward to their contributions. I am also grateful to the Minister for stepping in to help her colleagues with her deep Defra expertise, and for making time the other day to meet before this Committee sitting.

I have asked for the amendments to be grouped in this way to allow a debate on the limitations of Part 3 and on better ways of addressing the challenges it is seeking to tackle. I will endeavour not to repeat arguments that I have made previously, but a common thread of argument runs through all the amendments in this group, and it seems only reasonable that we should debate them together in this way.

At Second Reading I expressed deep scepticism about the approach to be taken to simplify environmental objections to planning processes in Part 3 of the Bill. I quoted environmental NGOs, rural lobbying groups and even development bodies that were united in their opposition to or concern about Part 3. I am most grateful to the Government for their amendments to strengthen environmental protections in this part. However, I am concerned that they are missing the point. The purpose of my amendments at this stage is to probe the necessity of such dramatic changes to environmental protection in the planning process. I would very much like to have a comprehensive answer from the Minister to the question of what exactly is wrong with the current environmental protections that cannot be addressed by tweaks to our current regime?

I do not wish to open up a complete Second Reading speech about everything that is wrong with Part 3 and why. I simply highlight that the effect of Part 3 is to create another process for dealing with environmental issues alongside existing processes. That will lead to confusion and muddle. The body tasked to implement this part is widely believed not to have the resources to do so effectively in a timely manner, and in fact often seems to be part of the problem. Existing protections for the environment through the planning process, such as the mitigation hierarchy and the use of private markets for biodiversity net gain, are functioning well and improving every day. The implementation of EDPs—environmental delivery plans—is likely to ride roughshod over the interests of farmers and land managers, be more costly than the current system, deliver uncertain outcomes and remove localism.

We know that up to 160,000 houses are being blocked by Natural England advice on nutrient neutrality. This House chose to defeat our amendments to what became the Levelling-up and Regeneration Act that would have removed this blockage. These regulations are not designed for or well suited to our country, and the sooner we make them fit for purpose, the better. Amendments 346DD and 346DE are a reformulation of the amendment we proposed to that Act. This means that those 160,000 houses could be unblocked by the Secretary of State from the commencement of this Bill, faster than any EDP can deliver. It would be simple and free.

Amendment 334 would require the JNCC to review the habitats regulations and the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981 and to publish a report on consolidating them. This would be with a view to the Government bringing forward legislation to replace them with domestic legislation that is fit for purpose in this country. This need not be a lengthy process and is a medium-term solution to the issues we have been left with in our planning system from adopting one-size-fits-all EU regulations. I would be interested to hear from the Minister whether the dynamic alignment with Europe that her Government appear to have adopted would pose problems for our legislating to protect our own environment.

We know that what appear to be poor decisions have been taken on a number of occasions: the £100 million bat tunnel for HS2 and the protection of the Ebbsfleet site as an SSSI. As we dig into these issues, we find that all too often it is questionable work that leads to these poor decisions, not the system itself. My noble friend Lord Howard of Rising tabled Amendment 346DB, debated in an earlier group, which would remove protections for bat species that do not need them in our country. Had that been in effect, it would have meant no bat tunnel under HS2, as well as reducing the cost and increasing the speed of many if not all refurbishment and construction projects across our country. I know that my noble friend has taken on board the criticisms of some noble Lords and is working on a more nuanced amendment for Report.

I am not suggesting that these amendments are the only solutions to the planning issues being experienced in protecting the environment, and I know that they will not necessarily win everyone’s approval. I have also put my name to Amendments 242A, 185F and 185G in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Young of Old Scone, which provide a constructive alternative approach that could also offer a better solution than Part 3 of the Bill. I know that those will be debated later in Committee.

Amendments 302 and 303 may not fit particularly well in this group, but they are tidying amendments which would make it clear that, under the auspices of EDPs, only the direct actions of those EDPs to address those features allow those features to be disregarded. I am very grateful again to the noble Baroness, Lady Young of Old Scone, for her support on these amendments.

We on these Benches are trying to provide a constructive alternative to Part 3. These are, by their nature, probing amendments. We are not intending to destroy Part 3 but simply questioning whether it is the right answer and whether more direct and simple action within the existing system is not better. I hope I have made the case that judicious use of the scalpel, through these and other amendments, can revise current environmental protection without weakening it and immediately get Britain building, rather than relying on yet another team of government employees with an open-ended chequebook. I very much look forward to other contributions to this debate and the Minister’s response. We are trying to unblock the planning system and reduce cost and complexity. I will need to be convinced that Part 3 is necessary not to bring similar amendments back on Report. I beg to move.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, as the noble Lord, Lord Roborough, said, my noble friend Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb signed all the clause stand part elements in this group, which essentially aim to delete Part 3. Unlike the noble Lord, we in the Green group think that Part 3 is not as bad as it was, but we would still be better off without it. That is the view of many NGOs, campaign groups and experts who have been in contact with me. Indeed, although there is a bit of competition at the moment, the mailbag I have had on this issue is one of the bigger mailbags that I have encountered.

My noble friend majored on this in her Second Reading speech and asked why the Government had it in for bats, newts and frogs. It appeared that perhaps some members of the Government were scared by some of them as small children and were bearing the scars. It is encouraging to see that we have seen some back-pedalling in their apparent attitude to harmless small mammals and amphibians, but none the less there are still grave concerns about Part 3. We have already debated this in a number of groups, and it is a pity that we are getting to this so late and in such an incoherent manner, given the importance in this hugely nature-depleted country of the issues covered by Part 3.

I will not run through all the amendments, but I want to highlight the response of the Office for Environmental Protection, which published an analysis of the Government’s amendments. It states that,

“even after the material amendments the government proposes, the Bill would, in some respects, lower environmental protections on the face of the law.”

I will raise four big issues and I hope that we might hear some reassurance from the Minister. We have had some reassurances in statements from the Government, but that is not the same as on the Floor of the House. The first issue is the safeguarding of the mitigation hierarchy, ensuring that the developer has taken reasonable steps to appropriately apply it, including by seeking to avoid harm whenever possible to our most important biodiversity assets. We are still nowhere near where we need to be on that.

Secondly, there is the overall improvement test so that conservation measures must significantly and measurably outweigh the negative impacts. We are talking about biodiversity net gain, but we are also talking about the conservation status of identified features, given the absence of European protected species legal tests. Thirdly, this is all about environmental delivery plans, and there needs to be an implementation schedule to provide the guarantees that the conservation measures will deliver the benefits, prior to the damage being done. Once valuable biodiversity is lost, it is gone, and promises to fix something up later, I am afraid, just do not crack it.

Finally, something I feel very passionate about is the irreplaceable habitats. I have stood at the foot of oak trees that were many hundreds of years old and thought about all the species and biodiversity that are dependent on them. There is no way of replacing that once it is lost and we have lost so much that we cannot afford to lose more. I am afraid that the Green position remains that we are nowhere near where we should be, and we are still heading in the wrong direction. I look forward to hearing the rest of the debate; I can see many noble Lords have stayed late with the intention of delivering a forceful message, I am confident. I look forward to the Minister’s response.

Planning and Infrastructure Bill

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 11th September 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Whitaker (Lab)]

My Lords, I am pleased to open the sixth day of Committee on this hugely important Bill with a set of amendments which may appear rather niche to some, but which I suggest are fundamental to our national values.

I speak to Amendments 145, 173, 174, 175 and 176 in my name and those of the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Manchester, who regrets he cannot be here, and the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett of Manor Castle, for Amendment 145, together with the noble Lord, Lord Bourne of Aberystwyth, and the noble Baroness, Lady Bakewell of Hardington Mandeville, who have joined me for the others. I am very grateful for their support. I am also very grateful to Friends, Families and Travellers for its advice, and to the Public Bill Office for its heroic efforts to get our requirements within the scope of this Bill.

All these amendments address a gap in our understanding of the population of the United Kingdom: the centuries-old existence of a small number of fellow citizens, some Gypsies and Travellers, whose traditional way of life and culture is to live in their communities on caravan sites. The fact that they may reside in a different pattern from the majority does not lessen the validity of their citizenship, as the law has attested. Their rentals of caravans and associated amenities on a site as their permanent residence thus means that they should be entitled to standards of provision just as much as those who live in bricks and mortar on a street. But the omission of general acknowledgment of their way of life has meant that there is a significant shortage of sites and that the conditions that they are obliged to live in can easily be—and are—markedly inferior, insecure, dangerous, polluted and the cause of multiple disadvantage, to say nothing of the damage all this does to social cohesion.

These amendments are the way to close that gap. Amendment 145 would make it clear that Gypsy and Traveller sites must be considered within the strategically important housing sites identified in spatial development strategies. Amendment 173 would firm up the current obligation on local authorities to assess the accommodation needs of Gypsies and Travellers so that plans and planning strategies, including the all-important new spatial development strategies, never omit the need for sites again. Thus, local authorities could not ignore the excellent guidance so far produced by this Government and must observe any further guidance. It is of particular importance to put an end to the inconsistent approaches and methodologies of assessment of need which have resulted in such marked inequality of provision. Amendment 174 would clarify the role of government in revising or developing guidance, so that Parliament has a proper opportunity to debate what is best.

Amendment 175 would create a similar framework for local authorities to ensure that they meet the assessed need for sites in their area in their role in planning, development and infrastructure. Here it is essential that needs for both private and socially rented pitches, transit as well as permanent, are taken account of.

Finally, Amendment 176 addresses the failure to date of many local authorities to meet the assessed need for Gypsy and Traveller sites by giving the Secretary of State the power to make them do it when they are carrying out their functions in relation to planning, development and infrastructure.

In conclusion, these amendments together would at last recognise the validity of that small Gypsy and Traveller population that follow their traditional way of life as full citizens. They would go far to eliminate the neighbourhood friction that comes of their having to live on unauthorised sites. Perhaps most poignantly of all, they would enable proper education for the children who suffer so markedly and in so many ways from the insecurity of constantly being evicted. It would remove a very long-standing injustice to adopt these amendments. I very much hope that my noble friend will do that, or devise amendments that would achieve the same end.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Whitaker, who has long been the House’s champion in these areas and provides us with great leadership. I was pleased to attach my name to Amendment 145, also supported by the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Manchester and the noble Baroness, Lady Bakewell. I would have attached my name to all the others if there had been time.

I will put the context of this issue. Noble Lords who follow the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography will know that, at the weekend, the biography it focused on was a woman called Elizabeth Canning who was one of the most celebrated criminal cases of the 18th century. She was a maidservant who disappeared for a month and said that she had been kidnapped. A woman identified at that time as an “Egyptian”—what we would now describe as a Gypsy—was then convicted of being responsible for that. if you read the account now, it is very obvious that this was simply a case of 18th-century prejudice.

I reference that case because it focuses on how long Gypsies in particular, but also Traveller people generally, have been part of our communities and lives, and how long the prejudice has gone on. In the 21st century, these amendments seek to make sure that we end some of that prejudice, at least in the structure of our law. We cannot always in your Lordships’ House address people’s attitudes, but we can address the law and make sure that there is provision for the housing needs that are so crucial.

The noble Baroness, Lady Whitaker, has set out most of the technical points. I will make one additional point. This aims to ensure that we have a level of accommodation needs provision for Gypsy, Roma and Traveller people across the country that is to the same standards. Some noble Lords might suggest that I am often talking about the need for local devolution and decision-making, but we also want a basic level of standard across the country, which these amendments would provide. That does not mean that a local authority could not do better than the basic standard; this is saying that there have to be standards and there has to be provision. That has to be the crucial starting point.

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[Viscount Trenchard (Con)]

My Lords, I support my noble friends Lord Blencathra and Lord Bellingham—who will I think speak later in this group—and other noble Lords in their Amendment 146. I agree with everything that has been said.

Your Lordships may wonder why I am also so keen to support Amendment 147, in the name of the right reverend Prelate, the Bishop of Norwich, my noble friend Lord Caithness and the noble Baroness, Lady Parminter, who has just spoken most effectively. I declare an interest as the owner of a short stretch of the River Rib in Hertfordshire. I hope the Minister will not suggest that the right reverend Prelate’s Amendment 147 is not necessary and will instead consider the arguments for special protection for chalk streams, as was accepted by the Government and supported by your Lordships’ House in the Levelling-up and Regeneration Act. Two years ago, during the passage of that Act, I introduced an amendment designed to support a chalk stream recovery package and provide protection for our beautiful chalk streams as a specific, unique and precious natural resource.

I was delighted at that time that the noble Baroness, Lady Taylor of Stevenage, put her name to my amendment and spoke in support of it. I hope the Minister will not mind if I quote what she said:

“I am lucky enough to have spent my life living in the wonderful county of Hertfordshire. For those of you who are not aware, Hertfordshire contains over 20% of the world’s unique and special, natural and precious chalk streams.”

She continued:

“If our chalk streams were buildings, they would be UNESCO heritage sites. Let us protect them as though they were”.—[Official Report, 18/7/25; col. 2269.]


Like the noble Baroness, I was brought up in and live in Hertfordshire, and I was delighted that she appreciated the special and distinct needs of chalk streams, which have disproportionately suffered from pollution and excess abstraction. My noble friend Lord Caithness also supported my amendment. We successfully persuaded my then noble friend, the noble Lord, Lord Benyon, to introduce a government amendment which broadly achieved the same purpose.

Can the Minister now confirm whether the Government intend to set explicit outcomes regarding the protection of chalk streams as specified in the Levelling-up and Regeneration Act? The previous Government had endorsed the “one big wish” put forward by the catchment-based approach initiative, CaBA, for statutory protection and priority status for chalk streams. Can she also say whether the Government intend to build on and maintain priority status for chalk streams? I think that she has supported the perseverance of CaBA, led by Charles Rangeley-Wilson.

The CaBA chalk stream strategy is very clear that a special status is needed for these globally rare and locally precious treasures, but progress on the strategy has been disappointing, although there has been a petition, “Don’t Abandon the Chalk Stream”, which secured enough signatures to require a government response, and the Petitions Committee of another place has requested an updated response to that petition.

The noble Baroness, Lady Parminter, explained very well just now why chalk streams need special protection, so I will not repeat the points that she so ably made, but I will say that to take specific account of chalk streams in spatial development strategies would allow local authorities to provide a safety net to protect them from the indirect impacts of development where other regimes have failed to do so. Taking chalk streams into account should facilitate the action so desperately needed to curb additional demand for water and make sure that appropriate wastewater infrastructure is in place before development occurs.

The Rivers Trust is right in calling for chalk streams to be defined as irreplaceable habitats. This would minimise direct harm from development and encourage enhancement of chalk streams through the biodiversity net gain regime. The Minister supported these arguments in the Levelling-up and Regeneration Act. I look forward to hearing whether she still supports them in this Bill before your Lordships now.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I will concentrate chiefly on Amendment 150 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Grender, to which I have attached my name, but I shall briefly comment on Amendment 148, very comprehensively introduced by the noble Baroness, Lady Parminter. Indeed, we have majored on chalk streams and I suspect we will hear a lot more about them. I am just going to cross-reference a contribution I made earlier this week about the River Itchen and the amount of plastics and fibreglass fibres that have just been discovered in new research in that chalk stream. This amendment addresses permissible activities. We do not know where those fibres in the River Itchen are coming from, but we desperately need to think about what activities we can afford to allow and what the planning permission can be beside those chalk streams. The extraction of water is the obvious issue here, but we also have to think about pollution and we really have to apply the precautionary principle to these crucial environments.

Amendment 150 says that a spatial development strategy must take account of local wildlife sites, which is crucial in this terribly nature-depleted country. There are, by a very precise count, 43,992 local wildlife sites, of which we know the status of only 15%. That is what the Wildlife Trusts say. SSSIs have greater legal protection. We know that very often does not work, but these local wildlife sites too often fall under the radar and are not sufficiently considered. They are often stepping stones for wildlife to get from one place to another crucial environment, or parts of corridors that enable wildlife communities to mix, to get genetic diversity, among other crucial factors, so it is crucial that the spatial development strategy totally takes these into account.

I think this also cross-references Amendment 152ZA, to which I shall speak briefly. I am strongly in favour of this amendment and commend the noble Baroness, Lady Hodgson of Abinger, for bringing it. I am sure that she is going to introduce it shortly, but it is about the welfare of animals being considered in spatial development strategies. We think about such things as light pollution, noise pollution, the cutting off of corridors and the isolating of populations. These things that human developments are doing do not sufficiently consider the welfare of animals, and they very much relate to local wildlife sites as well.

[Baroness Hodgson of Abinger (Con)]

My Lords, I shall speak to Amendments 152ZA and 216A. I hope that noble Lords will not think I am in any way discourteous, but I think that there has been a transposition of numbers on Amendment 216ZA. I cannot find any such amendment in the Marshalled List. I think what was meant was Amendment 261A. I am not surprised if anybody has become confused, with the amount of amendments, so I will speak to both.

The purpose of these two amendments is to ensure that the welfare of all sentient animals, both wild and domesticated, is systematically considered within the new planning frameworks established by the Bill. Amendment 152ZA addresses this for spatial development strategies and Amendment 261A addresses it for environmental delivery plans. We all understand the Government’s objectives within the Bill to streamline the planning system, deliver the necessary infrastructure and build more homes. Of course, these are vital aims. However, the Bill contains a significant omission that these amendments are designed to address. It is entirely silent on the welfare of the individual sentient animals living within the environments we seek to develop. This is not simply my opinion; it is also the view of the Animal Sentience Committee, the independent expert body established to advise on whether government policy pays proper regard to the welfare of sentient animals.

In its letter to Ministers this June, the committee expressed significant concern about the Bill. The committee warned that under the current proposals, existing animals—not just species of high conservation concern, but common species such as rabbits, voles or wrens—face severe negative impacts. They

“may be killed directly … by plant machinery … killed indirectly … if their burrows or food sources are destroyed … or displaced to highly uncertain futures”.

Furthermore, planning decisions will have a long-term impact on millions of wild and companion animals. The committee warned that the Bill appears to conceptualise “biodiversity” or “the environment” as abstract entities without recognising that these are populated by individual animals capable of experiencing pain, distress and suffering. Wild animal welfare is aligned with but distinct from species conservation.

Rather than protecting species at the population level, it is about improving well-being at the individual level. In fact, it is interesting that the Government grouped these amendments with others on the protection of rivers and chalk streams today, rather emphasising the committee’s concern that all “biodiversity” or “the environment” is being considered as one homogeneous group. Conscious of the time allotted to the Bill, I did not request to degroup on this occasion, but I assure the Minister that I will do so at the next stage if the Government do not give due consideration. The Animal Sentience Committee’s concerns have been echoed by NGOs such as the Wild Animal Welfare Committee and the UK Centre for Animal Law.

My amendments are designed to implement the recommendations of the Animal Sentience Committee in a constructive and proportionate manner. They are intended not to block development but to ensure that how we build is done responsibly and humanely. Amendment 152ZA would require that spatial development strategies consider animal welfare. It does not mandate specific outcomes and it provides flexibilities for planning authorities. In practice, it could mean such things as considering the impact of development on known wildlife movement corridors and roosting or breeding sites at the concept plan stage; specifying bird-safe lighting and glazing standards for tall or waterside buildings; or the creation of refuge areas with appropriate food and shelter for animals displaced during construction.

Amendment 261A would require that the environmental development plans drawn up by Natural England pay due regard to the welfare of all animals. This is about practical steps at the delivery stage, such as ensuring thorough preconstruction checks for hedgehogs or ground-nesting birds, avoiding key breeding seasons or requiring the humane relocation of animals where harm is unavoidable.

If Ministers are unwilling to consider legislative options on this, I hope they will give serious thought to what non-legislative policy commitments they could make in order to address the concerns of the Animal Sentience Committee. This could include, for example, making a commitment that the Secretary of State will include due regard for animal welfare as a prescribed matter for spatial development strategies or mentioning animal welfare in the regulations that they will establish for Natural England’s duties when preparing an environmental delivery plan. They could also issue voluntary guidelines on wild animal welfare-friendly approaches to planning, infrastructure, development and building. This could build on guidance that has been issued elsewhere—for example, the Chartered Institute of Ecology and Environmental Management’s Good Practice Guidance for Habitats and Species, but with a specific focus on welfare.

However, I hope that the Government have a sincere commitment to animal welfare and will therefore feel able to accept these amendments.

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[Baroness Hodgson of Abinger (Con)]

My Lords, Amendment 215 is in my name, but I also support Amendment 157 and echo many of the words of the noble Baroness, Lady Grender. Amendment 215 would insert a new clause after Clause 106 that would provide existing villages with protection equivalent to that currently provided to towns under the National Planning Policy Framework. We have already discussed the importance of design and the impact that the built environment can have on health, productivity and sense of community cohesion, and that we need to put the right house in the right place. This clause is, in part, an extension of these arguments, in that it also looks to preserve the special character of individual villages, and of historic villages in particular. Be it medieval cottages or Victorian buildings, historic architecture reflects an era and the influences that shaped a village.

The UK is known for being a green and pleasant land, with villages and communities that are embedded in the landscape, hewn over centuries of rural life and livelihoods. Many people prefer to live and work in smaller communities closer to nature, often with a strong sense of being rooted in a community. Yet you need only read the debate in the other place to see many Members sharing examples of where some of their villages are no longer recognisable, having grown exponentially, often with housing insensitively tacked on. Members spoke of fields with as many houses as a developer can cram in, with no reference to local styles or consideration of infrastructure, rather than villages being developed organically in a way that existing residents feel comfortable with. Too often, this challenges the rural identity of an area and sounds a death knell for the green belt.

There are key elements that contribute to a village’s identity: architecture; cultural traditions and community narratives; and local pride, with traditions and festivals often reinforcing historical awareness as well as supporting heritage tourism. According to a report by the National Lottery Heritage Fund, heritage-led regeneration projects in UK villages have led to a 20% increase in local business activity, demonstrating the economic benefits of maintaining historical identity. Meanwhile, Historic England argues:

“Understanding the significance of places is vital”.


The risk that the Bill poses is of opening up development so much that we lose these gems or, in the worst-case scenario, that they become swallowed up in a styleless, depressing urban sprawl.

There is a significant threat to the authenticity and continuity of historical narratives that define UK villages and their identity. The Government have reported that between 2000 and 2017, more than 1,000 listed buildings were lost due to redevelopment. How could that have happened? It seems to happen all too easily. I argue that we should afford villages the same protection as towns under the NPPF, to ensure that they can retain their character and charm. This amendment would enable that and I hope it will gain the support of the Committee.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Baronesses, Lady Grender and Lady Hodgson. At this point, I wish to thank the hard-working Whips’ Office, which, in this combination of amendments, has done an excellent job of tying together two things. I acknowledge just how much of a difficult job we have been giving it with Bills at the moment, with our alphabet soups. I think we should acknowledge that and say thank you.

Amendment 157, in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Grender, might have been written after my visit to Belper in the Amber Valley in Derbyshire in about 2012. This was a visit focused on trying to protect the green-belt patch of land between Belper and an adjoining village. The plan was to build across the lot and join up that village and Belper together. It was also for speculative development, as the noble Baroness said, and there was a lot of frustration about that. Then we went to lunch. We were sitting in the café and above us there was a lovely woodcut, a historic piece of art, of an old mill in town when it was in operation. I said to the local party, “What’s happening with that mill?”, and they said, “Oh, it’s derelict and we worry about it being burned down”. We were going to build on the green belt and destroy the village environment, and there was that obvious place where we could have been putting housing, right in the centre of town, where all the facilities were, where there was public transport, et cetera.

I am afraid that the Government often do not seem to understand the point of the green belt, and I think that is clear in the invention of the term “grey belt”. Yes, green belt can be to protect beautiful green spaces, nature, farming land, et cetera, but it is also to prevent communities—towns, cities and villages—sprawling and linking up together. The whole idea of “grey belt” really avoids understanding that.

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[Baroness Young of Old Scone (Lab)]

My Lords, I support Amendment 164 from the noble Baroness, Lady Parminter, who has laid out the case very clearly. Local planning authorities are vital if the Government and we as a nation are going to achieve the legally binding targets and programmes for climate, environment and biodiversity listed in the amendment. We are likely to have this debate on multiple occasions over the next few months and years. Of course, we have already gone through this process of debating why major bodies—new bodies in legislation or bodies whose legislation is being changed—should have the opportunity of a statutory duty to promote these issues.

We had some success in this House in giving such a duty to the Crown Estate. Indeed, the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, played a sterling role there, and although it was not actually adopted in the legislation, it was included in the guidance to the Crown Estate. The noble Lord, Lord Krebs, had he been in his place, would have been reminding the Committee that he, of course, has a Private Member’s Bill that would do the job in a sort of bulk-buy fashion and give a whole list of the key implementation public authorities a similar duty in one fell swoop. It would be absolutely the right way forward if that private legislation were adopted by the Government and put forward as a government Bill, because that is the most efficient way of doing it. Otherwise, noble Lords are going to have to listen to the likes of me, the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, and the noble Baroness, Lady Parminter, bang on about this sequentially as each body comes forward, until such time as we have debated the whole lot.

So, I commend this amendment and issue a stern address to the Government that accepting the Krebs Private Member’s Bill would be a splendid shortcut to the right destination.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the noble Baronesses, Lady Parminter and Lady Young, and to thank the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, for supporting this amendment. It is something of the usual crew, and “Green Member gets up to support climate and biodiversity action” is, I know, not terribly original, but I just want to make a couple of specific points. One is that there was a climate reporting duty on local authorities until 2010, brought in by a previous Labour Government. This amendment is seeking to reinstate something that Labour Governments brought in.

Repeated calls have come from the Climate Change Committee, businesses and the independent net zero review for a statutory local duty on climate, which is what this amendment aims to introduce. The noble Baroness, Lady Parminter, referred memorably to the “NERC Act”, a phrase I had not heard before; I think I will call it the Natural Environment and Rural Communities Act, because it is perhaps a bit clearer. It links with the Environment Act 2021, and research on the implementation of it is clear—it exists but it is all terribly obscure, and people are not catching up with it. This amendment introduces something very clear and simple.

As the noble Baroness, Lady Young, said, this is a debate that we keep having, so let us bring in a climate duty. Your Lordships’ House has had some real success over the years in having impact on Bills. I can go back to the pensions dashboards Bill, which will predate quite a number of people sitting in this Chamber. It was the first Committee stage I ever worked on, and we were trying to get climate measurements into the pensions dashboard. We really need to get to the point where your Lordships’ House does not have to keep doing this Bill after Bill. I know the noble Lord is concerned about the rate of progress, but if the Government put this in at the start, we would save a lot of time in your Lordships’ House.

I want to make one other crucial point. Local authorities have clear statutory duties, including a growth duty under the Deregulation Act 2015. There is a real imbalance between the fact that they have this growth duty but not a duty to look after the environment, climate and nature. Whatever I may think about growth, if you do not have a healthy environment, if communities are being battered by heatwaves, floods and droughts and you are not doing the climate mitigation you need to do, then you are not going to get the growth. These two things have to fit together.

We are all well aware that different parties with different views are coming into local authorities now, but this is a communal responsibility. Loss of biodiversity does not stop at county or district boundaries; climate change does not stop there either. All local authorities must have the duty, so that everyone is looked after. We cannot allow some people a free ride.

[Lord Deben (Con)]

My Lords, this is a crucial amendment, not least for the reasons the noble Baroness, Lady Young, put forward. We are going to go on about this until we have an overall demand that this is how we think about matters. We have to recognise that unless we make all our decisions in the context of recovering our biodiversity and protecting our nation and the world against climate change, we are going to make a mess of the decisions we make. That is absolutely central.

I know the Government will be inclined to say it is already there—it is in the guidance, and it is all very proper—but I am afraid that there are many in local authorities who do not see this as the priority it ought to be. I really must ask the Minister to think seriously about the fact that every local authority at least must know that it has to think about things through this lens, because it is the most important lens for all of us.

I live in, and used to represent, a very agricultural constituency, and anyone who has seen the effect of the drought on all our farms at the moment will realise just how desperate the effect of climate change is, particularly for farmers who, only 18 months ago, could not get their crops out because of the water and could not plant because it was still too wet to do so.

People do not understand the impact of climate change today—it is amazing. I am upset and concerned that the good common view of all major political parties is beginning to be eroded. Only by working together are we going to solve these problems. It is no good just saying, “Oh well, we can put it off. We can’t do it by this or that time”. I congratulate the Government on sticking to the fact that we have to do this very quickly indeed. The trouble is that the timetable is not in our hands. We have allowed the timetable to be led by the fact that nature is now reacting to what we have done, and doing so in an increasingly extreme way.

I hope that the Government will take these amendments seriously and consider an overall view of this in a whole lot of other areas, so that we do not have to have this discussion on a permanent basis. Frankly, it ought to be the given for everything we do that we look at in the light of the fact of climate change. If there are Members of the Committee who have still not seen this, I remind them that it is necessary for growth. If we do not do this, we will not be a country in which people will invest, and we will not have new jobs or the kind of society, nature and climate that will be suitable not only for our children and grandchildren but for us. At my age, I can still say that we have to do this, otherwise the climate in which I will go on living will be increasingly unhappy for me, and for my children and grandchildren. Please accept this amendment.

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[Lord Addington (LD)]

Clearly, my noble friend has heard me often enough.

The best playing fields are in nice, urban environments where people can get to them. Effectively, you have a greenfield site, often owned by a cash-strapped local authority or an independent school that has been increasingly under pressure to improve exam results rather than develop the whole picture. The playing field owners say, “Wouldn’t it be better if we had a slightly better new gym court and got rid of the field?” or “Nobody else is playing on the playing field because we haven’t maintained it”; they sell it off and get rid of it. Who cares? The people who play the sport do and the people you want to play the sport should.

What is sport? It is the ultimate community activity with health benefits, and public playing fields are essential for those in grass-roots sport to be able to address this. Go to any successful sports club, especially for sports such as football, rugby, and cricket, and it will have started on a public playing field. That is where you start. Even with these property-owning sports—rugby and cricket are the classic examples—where you are encouraged to take over, manage and own your own ground, you start somewhere else and develop on from it. You can expand your playing numbers by taking on smaller pitches for your junior teams by using them. It is an integrated part of it. If you do not have that capacity, the nature of the club will be threatened. So we have something which adds to it, but it is potentially a cash cow for some other groups and is sitting there in the right place, very tempting for any housing plan.

The body that has been protecting such places, Sport England, is no longer a consultee. That is what it is thinking and feeling. If we are wrong about that, I would be very grateful to hear it when whichever Minister replies, and your Lordships will not be hearing from me again. If that is not the case, there is something to be answered here.

My amendment would put in another duty; of course, it is Committee and this is just the first go, but I hope that the Government will tell me here if there is another solution to this—if they cannot tell me exactly at this stage, I will make myself available for any meetings to make sure that I know and can tell the rest of the House. If something positive is going to happen there, I will be more than grateful to go away and spread the word. If the Government are not going to do something like this and will just leave it to a general duty, they are basically guaranteeing losses, and possibly catastrophic losses. Unless you understand this and your current drive is for something else, you will ignore it, because we all do. What is your primary objective? We go there. I hope that the Government will tell me something positive and supportive with regard to this group.

We should also remember that you are supporting voluntary groups which do this at very little cost to the state at the moment. That culture of gathering together, paying for the use of the pitch and running up has to have a little space to grow. If we remove that, we will stifle the whole thing.

The noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, has another amendment down here; I think we all know enough not to say exactly what her amendments mean, but the idea of play also comes in and tags on there. Such play is not as formalised or structured, but it is also important.

I hope that whichever Minister replies will be able to tell us that something solid will address this, not a general air or duty of “Oh yes, of course they will deal with it”, because we all know that things like that get ignored. We need something solid that will make sure there is a protection at least compatible with what is going on now. If we do not, we will have to go back to this, at least once, and possibly it will have to be decided by a decision of the whole House. I hope we do not need to do that, but I am quite prepared to do it. I beg to move.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Addington. Just to reassure him, I did not dream up Amendment 179; it was originally presented in the other place, and I am taking it forward with the support of Play England. I hope that what it means will be very clear.

I was happy to attach my name to Amendment 165, which the noble Lord, Lord Addington, just presented. In a sense, the first amendment we have had here is a subset of the broader amendment. Amendment 165 is about formal play, if you like, such as organised games and structured activities; my amendment covers those but also looks more broadly at unstructured play and interaction where young people in particular have the chance to mix.

The proposed new clause introduces a play-sufficiency duty to ensure that every local planning authority

“must, so far as reasonably practicable, assess, secure, enhance, and protect”—

“protect” is particularly important—

“sufficient opportunities for children’s play when exercising any of its planning functions”.

Far too often, play is seen as something frivolous and childish, to be fitted around the edges of cramming for exams; rigid, structured arrangements. Yet we know that play is essential for physical and mental health. It is vital for the development of minds and bodies. It offers a space for the flowering of social skills and the development, crucially, of independence: the ability to assess risks, to take risks and to deal with the consequences, particularly in an unstructured environment. Yet this is being squeezed out of children’s lives in urban and other environments. The noble Lord, Lord Addington, talked about playing fields being sold off. We have also seen a huge number of closures of swimming pools, which has real public safety implications.

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[Lord Wilson of Sedgefield (Lab)]

I have laid out quite specifically what we intend on doing and how much money we are going to spend. I know we have lost playing fields. That was not under this Government but under the previous Government. Local government was affected by major cuts in funding. So, yes, we have a plan, and we mean to implement it. We are going to spend £1.5 billion on neighbourhood boards. They will have the right to give enhanced provision of public areas for play, et cetera, so I think there is a lot that we are doing. If the noble Lord wants to meet in the near future, I am sure we can organise something so that we can discuss this and explain it further.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

I asked whether the Minister would be prepared to have a meeting with me and other interested Peers and campaigners on Amendment 179.

[Lord Wilson of Sedgefield (Lab)]

I am sure we can sort something out.

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[Lord Fuller (Con)]

I thank the noble Baroness for her comments and congratulate her on taking through the legislation. At the outset, when she was taking the legislation through your Lordships’ House, she would have contemplated that CIL was going to carry the lion’s share of the cost of infrastructure. Sadly, that never turned out to be the case. To a certain extent, the areas that have had CIL have ended up in a worst-of-all-worlds situation, where they have some CIL but they also have Section 106. That is a disappointment. It has not reached the promise that we all wanted for it, because everything has become so much more expensive. As I alluded to earlier, the developers give up with CIL and just want to build the school themselves. In fact, they are probably best placed to build the school while they are onsite, mobilised and with the construction equipment all around them. With the benefit of hindsight, perhaps forcing the council to build the school when they do not have some of that brownfield risk would have been an improvement.

I am getting off the point. In short, I support the amendment, but it needs to be embellished on Report.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Banner, described Amendment 184 as compelling, and I entirely agree with him. In the interests of time, that is all I will say on that amendment.

I will briefly speak to Amendment 218, taking us back some time to the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, who has already introduced the idea of a review of land value capture. I am going to brandish a historical figure in defence of this suggestion. It may surprise the Benches to my right, because I am going to start by saying that I agree with Winston Churchill. That is not a phrase that I bring out very often, but I do in this context. In 1909, he said that

“the landlord who happens to own a plot of land on the outskirts or at the centre of one of our great cities … sits still and does nothing. Roads are made, streets are made, railway services are improved, electric light turns night into day, electric trams glide swiftly to and fro, water is brought from reservoirs a hundred miles off in the mountains—and all while the landlord sits still … To not one of those improvements does the land monopolist, as a land monopolist, contribute, and yet by every one of them the value of his land is sensibly enhanced”.

That was identified more than a century ago, but it exactly addresses the issue that still exists and that we have not come to deal with.

[Baroness Thornhill (LD)]

He was a Liberal then.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

Okay—I am not going to get that far into the history.

I declare an interest in that land value tax is a long-term Green Party policy and one that I am very happy to talk about at length, but I am not going to do that because it is not what this amendment would do. However, it is worth thinking about the fact that the problem with how we tax land goes back a very long way. There was a royal commission on the housing of the working classes set up in 1885; it was the first time that an inquiry had referred to land value taxation—it was called site value rating then—and it said that this would be a better way to solve a housing crisis. These are issues that we have been wrestling with and failing to solve for a very long time.

My final point is that this amendment by itself would not deal with the crunching, terrible elephant-in-the-room issue of council tax, but it would start to provide the Government with a way to open up these issues. This is all regarded as too politically difficult, too challenging and too complicated to explain—I know what it is like to try to explain land value tax in 15 seconds, because it is a challenge. We are now 35 years on from when council tax was created. It was an emergency crunch measure created by the Treasury after the political disaster of the poll tax. It is a deeply regressive tax. Someone living in a home worth £100,000 pays an effective tax rate five times as high as someone in a £1 million property. The average net council tax is only 2.7 times higher for the top 10% of properties than for the bottom 10%. This is something that we have to address. This amendment would not address all, or even the bulk, of it, but it would start to inch us into a space where we could tackle some issues that desperately need to be tackled.

[Lord Jamieson (Con)]

My Lords, we have already debated some complex topics in Committee and the issue of land value capture certainly continues in that vein.

Planning and Infrastructure Bill

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 9th September 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Parminter (LD)]

My Lords, I support all three amendments that the noble Baroness, Lady Hodgson of Abinger, has brought forward. But for brevity, I am going to address my remarks to only one of them. The Private Member’s Bill she referred to when talking about her Amendment 117 was brought to the House by a Liberal Democrat Member, Max Wilkinson.

I particularly want to address the issue of rainwater harvesting. As the noble Baroness rightly said, there is an ecological issue already with us; there is insufficient water because of the changes in our weather patterns from climate change. But if the Government are not prepared to listen to those reasons, then surely from an economic point of view this amendment makes perfect sense.

First, we are already facing housing developments not being built because of water shortages, and secondly, if the Government want to get the large number of new data centres introduced, they are going to need a heck of a lot more water. It has been estimated that the large data centres use the equivalent of 50,000 homes- worth of water a day. Unless we use every single means at our disposal to utilise water properly, we are not going to be able to build the homes or the data centres that we want, so we need to look at measures such as this right now.

Some noble Lords might say that the public would not like the idea of using rainwater harvesting in their own homes. However, a recent survey by Public First asked 4,000 UK residents that question, and there was overwhelming support for the use of rainwater harvesting, both outside in people’s gardens and inside their homes for flushing the loo or using the washing machine—as the noble Baroness has said.

It is not just the noble Baroness, me and others who are making the case for rainwater harvesting. In Jon Cunliffe’s recent independent review of the future of the water industry, he made a specific recommendation about the need for rainwater harvesting to be addressed urgently. During the repeat of the Statement on the Independent Water Commission in this House on 23 July, I asked the Minister—the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman of Ullock—whether the Government would not wait for the proposed water Bill to pick up Jon Cunliffe’s recommendation but rather look at opportunities like the Planning and Infrastructure Bill to bring forward changes to building regulations so that rainwater harvesting could be mandated on new homes.

The Minister, somewhat surprisingly, immediately thought that this was a good idea—I do not often get such positive responses from the Front Bench opposite—and promised to take the matter forward and discuss it with the Minister for Water. I hope that, when the Minister responds to these amendments, she can show the House that those discussions have taken place, that the Government are taking the issue of rainwater harvesting seriously and that there will be a mandate to change building regulations.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the noble Baronesses, Lady Hodgson and Lady Parminter, and to offer support for Amendment 115, to which I attach my name, and for the general intention of Amendments 116 and 117. In the interests of time, I will restrict myself to Amendment 115.

I do not often take your Lordships’ House back to my Australian origins, but as this amendment has come up, I really have to. I am going back about 35 years to a place called Quirindi in north-west New South Wales. Somewhere out on the internet there is a photo of me sitting on a horse in a field, or paddock as we would say, that is dead flat and dead dry, without a blade of grass on it—that is Quirindi.

As an agricultural science student, I remember the farmer explaining how to live there. He took me out the back to the water tank, which was a very large tank that caught the water off the farmhouse roof. There was no town water in Australian farming, so that entire operation and household depended on the water that they caught off the roof. I still remember the farmer rapping on the side of the tin tank and saying, “That’s where the water is; we’re in trouble”.

Noble Lords might think, “Oh, that’s Australia—that’s far away; that’s a very distant place”. Quirindi has an annual average rainfall of 684 millimetres a year. There are parts of south-east England that have an annual rainfall of 700 millimetres a year, which is essentially the same amount. There is also the impact of the climate emergency and the fact that we are seeing more weather extremes and more drying out.

There is something Britain can learn from the Australian practices that have been enforced over history and that can be imported here for a win-win benefit. No one loses from the proposal in Amendment 115. As I think has already been mentioned, we in the UK use about 150 litres of water a day per capita. That compares with France, which uses 128; Germany, which uses 122; and Spain, which uses 120. This is expensively treated drinking water that we are using for all kinds of practices that we do not need to use drinking water for.

I am going to quote Mark Lloyd, the chief executive of the Rivers Trust:

“We also need to finally implement the use of rainwater rather than drinking water where we can, such as car washing, gardening, washing pets, filling paddling pools, and flushing the loo. Other water-stressed countries have used this approach for decades and we need to join that party.”


I really stress the “party” element. I do not think we have mentioned the issue of flooding yet. Many of us have been speaking about the need for land management to slow the flow. What could be a better way to slow the flow than to catch that water so that it is not flooding out into our drains, water treatment plants, rivers and seas and so that we can have it available for use?

Often, when we talk about water use, there is a lot of finger-waving: “People should switch the tap off when they’re brushing their teeth and people should have shorter showers”. But what we really need is a system change that makes doing the right thing the easiest, cheapest, simplest and most natural thing to do. That is exactly what this proposal is putting forward. So this is a win-win all round: for householders, cutting their bills; for preventing flooding; for protecting the environment; and for saving energy—we do not think about this much, but moving water around and treating water uses a great deal of energy. I looked up the stats, and we do not seem to have any good stats in the UK, but globally, the United Nations says that 8% of energy use goes towards treating and moving water. That is such a waste when you have water falling on your roof that you can use right there in place. Pumping it out to a reservoir, treating it and pumping it back in—all that uses energy. This is a common-sense measure; why on earth not?

[Lord Cromwell (CB)]

My Lords, I assure the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, that many good things come from Australia, and she is one of them. The tapping on the tank she describes is exactly what I have been doing in Leicestershire in recent weeks. I have some experience of water harvesting, both from domestic roofs and from commercial buildings, and actually it is not very difficult, because roofs are all designed to channel water into pipes, and it is simply a matter of intercepting that water and using it.

I do have a couple of practical concerns. The first is that, as anybody who has done this will know, even a modest rain shower will give you an awful lot of water. As a result, any housing development or business premises is going to find itself with a very large need for water storage somewhere on that site, either underground or above ground. My second concern is how that water is recycled. I am not squeamish about drinking or using non-mains water. I raised a family on water drawn from an underground stream, not on the mains at all. But water left standing in a tank will grow bad and grow algae very quickly. If that is the solution, we need to find out how to treat it.

Furthermore, there is a real issue that I run into: the water companies and Ofwat will not even contemplate the danger of mingling water collected by a third party with mains water—in a header tank, in your pipes or anywhere else—because they are liable for the quality of that water. So, if you mingle it with rainwater, they will not allow you to draw mains water. The golden thread here is to find a system where rainwater is the norm and the mains is the back-up, but we are a long way from that at the moment and will be until the regulatory and practical storage issues are solved. To be clear, I thoroughly support this amendment—the spirit of it—but the practicalities of it need to be worked out effectively into the design of water systems supplying domestic and commercial premises.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Earl of Lytton (CB)]

My Lords, I declare an interest, as I have nine water butts all collecting rainwater when it rains. However, further to what the noble Lord, Lord Cromwell, said, there are some issues. For instance, what falls on roofs does not necessarily arrive in a clean form; particularly in some urban areas and in others, it may be contaminated by things such as bird droppings, which would be quite a serious issue.

The noble Lord, Lord Cromwell, refers rightly to the problem of having dual plumbing systems in houses. There is a serious issue to do with potential cross-contamination and, therefore, who is responsible. But on the generality of what the noble Baroness, Lady Hodgson of Abinger, has put forward, supported by the noble Baronesses, Lady Bennett and Lady Parminter, it is right that we need to conserve water, so we do not use expensively treated water from the mains supply. It is absolutely daft to be using that for washing the car or watering the roses. The roses do not care how much bacteriological contamination there is in it—they love it. From that point of view, the more the merrier. The vehicle does not mind what you wash it with either, most of the time.

I learned a great deal from my late sister, the elder of my two sisters, who died earlier this year, that I did not learn from being a chartered surveyor. She was a very senior hydrogeologist, and her point about rainwater harvesting is that you have to be careful about the infiltration that is necessary and naturally occurring. When rainwater falls on a hard surface, it runs off to a drain. What then? Does it disappear off down through some massive Thames pipeline to somewhere beyond Barking, or does it go into the soil and replenish an aquifer? If it has all been put into the loo and is going off as foul water, you lose that to the infiltration process. The more that we build, the more hard surfaces that we have and the more we pipe it away, the more we have to be concerned about infiltration.

Previously in Committee, noble Baronesses raised the point about flooding. Of course, infiltration is part and parcel of that. If you have all the run-off arriving at the same point down a modern piping system that conveys water away very quickly, you will end up with trouble. If you can detain water in some way by storage and infiltration, you stand a better chance, little by little, of dealing with some of those problems. But it is a fine balance as to what is happening, and it certainly requires a lot of further investigation.

The other amendment that attracted my attention was the one on ground source heat pump installation. I absolutely take the point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Hodgson. All I would say is that, if a heat pump requires three-fifths of what you might call the energy demand to provide heating, that means that three-fifths of whatever the alternative will be—oil or gas—is put on to the grid.

The chief problem with the grid is that it does not have the distribution capacity—I am not sure that it has the generation capacity in total, but other noble Lords are much more knowledgeable about that than I am. This raises a particular problem with housing development. I recall not so long ago going to visit a small housing development in north Dorset. The developer there had to provide energy for cooking and heating via an LPG bulk storage tank, which noble Lords will know is a very expensive way of funding your energy. That was done because the tank was provided free of charge, provided that the LPG was purchased from the particular supplier, and the reason for that was because there was not sufficient capacity in the local grid to power these things from an electrical standpoint.

That ties in, to some extent, with the other point that the noble Baroness raised, about solar power. Yes, I agree that that ought to be part and parcel of it, but maybe there is a link to be made between solar power and the efficiency thereof and the ground source heat pump. Now, I know nothing about the wattage that is needed for a ground heat source pump, but again I say that there is a trade-off, a balance between that 60% of what would otherwise be the carbon load being transferred on to either the grid or a solar panel system.

I know that in places such as Austria, there are now things that they refer to as balcony panels or balcony sheets. These are flexible sheets of material composed entirely of solar PV material. People put them up and they can power small appliances. Other people tell me that solar panels in certain configurations have become so cheap that they can now be used as a fencing panel, because it is a cheaper way of doing it. Now, I do not know what the rate of deterioration and attrition is of these panels, and that is obviously a fairly important consideration, because they contain things which are not readily recyclable and therefore there is that problem of end-of-life disposal, but I think that perhaps the noble Baroness could encourage the Minister to think about and work on getting this balance right, so that at least we cut some of the consumption—maybe not all of it, but some of it—of these expensively produced and increasingly scarce resources. To that extent, I very much support these amendments.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

I ask the noble Earl, and indeed the noble Lord, Lord Cromwell, perhaps rhetorically, whether they are aware of the One Million Cisterns project in Brazil, which aimed to deliver what it said on the tin and indeed has done so and was expanded subsequently. This is in the semi-arid area of Brazil, home to 18 million people. Brazil, of course, has a lot less infrastructure and is much economically poorer than the UK, yet it has been able to deliver a programme that has won United Nations awards and had all sorts of impacts. I hope the noble Lords will acknowledge that since other countries have achieved this, maybe it is not an unreasonable expectation for us to achieve it too.

[Lord Cromwell (CB)]

I should just quickly say that we can learn a lot from Brazil as well as Australia. I am in favour of the amendment; I would just add that I did not realise that water butts were a declarable interest, and if they are, I had better declare that I too have some.

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[Baroness Pinnock (LD)]

My Lords, I too will miss the noble Lord, Lord Khan, on the Government Front Bench. He always managed to respond to any questions I had with a smile. I even forgave him for living in Lancashire. We wish him well from these Benches and I hope the Minister will pass those messages on for us. We look forward to the noble Lord, Lord Wilson, also responding with a smile.

Amendment 120 in my name seeks to ensure transparency in decision-making in the planning process. The integrity of the process is vital. From my own experience, I know that objectors to a planning application can readily feel that, if they do not get their way, it is because shady deals have been done. Transparency helps to cure any such allegations.

Unfortunately, there is a recent example of a senior national politician who became far too closely involved with a developer and made hasty decisions based on pressure from the developer regarding funding and costs. The example that I have in mind is that, in 2020, the Housing Secretary, at that time Robert Jenrick MP, accepted that he approved a £1 billion housing development in the east of London unlawfully. The 1,500-home development on the Isle of Dogs was approved on 14 January, the day before the community infrastructure levy charges placed on the developments were increased. The timing of the decision

“meant Conservative Party donor Richard Desmond avoided paying around £40m”.

Mr Jenrick eventually accepted that his decision was indeed unlawful after the Government’s own planning inspector

“advised against the scheme saying it needed to deliver more affordable housing in what is London’s poorest borough”.

The inspector described the 44-storey high buildings as harming the character of the area, but, despite the clear direction from the planning inspector,

“Mr Jenrick rejected that advice and approved planning permission for the project”.


Obviously, planning permission was later rescinded following the legal challenge made by the local council. I have quoted largely from the BBC report of that event.

It is clear from this example alone that safeguards are needed. Amendment 120 in my name and that of the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, would require local planning authorities to maintain and publish a register of planning applications where the applicant has donated to the relevant Secretary of State within the preceding 10 years. This proposal aims to increase transparency regarding potential conflicts of interest in the planning process.

The amendment will mandate local planning authorities to create and publish a public register. The register will list planning applications that have been determined by the Secretary of State for Housing and Planning—or whatever the name is at any point—and the applications included would be those from applicants who have made donations to that Secretary of State within the past 10 years. That is not much of an ask, but it is yet another safeguard in the planning process. Whenever applications reach the Secretary of State, it means that they are very controversial and have been called in following referral to the planning inspector.

The planning system absolutely depends on public trust if people are to believe that the process is a fair one. Given that, I look forward to the Minister welcoming greater transparency and a very simple process to throw light on some of these more controversial decisions. I beg to move.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, and to commend the noble Baroness for introducing a practical, sensible and necessary amendment to the Bill. Before I get to that, I want to join the chorus and give my very sincere thanks to the noble Lord, Lord Khan, who, like others, we in the Green group have found was very approachable and extremely hard-working, and he will certainly be very much missed—I want to put that on the record.

This amendment aims to ensure that a planning authority maintains a register of applications in its area where the Secretary of State has made a determination over it and where a political donation has been associated with it. As the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, said, this might be called the Jenrick amendment. I will just leave that there—I will not go back over that ground.

I will make a very serious point. The noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, spoke about this as safeguarding the planning process. I think this is about something more important and central than that. This is about safe- guarding, or at least making a step towards restoring, trust in the political process. That is far more important and crucial. I do not think there is anyone in this Chamber who would disagree that we have a huge problem with trust in politics.

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[Baroness Young of Old Scone (Lab)]

My Lords, I am really privileged to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Fookes, who I admire greatly from afar—and she is absolutely spot on on this occasion as well. Several noble Lords have laid out the benefits and value of nature-rich green spaces close to where people live, so I will not go through those.

I want to focus particularly on Amendments 138B and 206 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Willis. I commend her erudite book on green spaces and health, which is an excellent evidence-based exposition of the whole case for green spaces and health—including mental health—improvement. In the interests of transparency, I particularly commend it since she sent me a free copy.

Apart from all the evidence the noble Baroness’s work provides on health and mental health benefits, I will also give an example from the work of the Woodland Trust, which I was privileged to chair until very recently, on what it is calling “tree equity”. The trust has mapped the prevalence of woods and trees and discovered, in line with other relationships between green open space and deprivation, that the poorest communities have the least wood and tree cover. That means that deprived populations are deprived in not only a socioeconomic but an environmental sense. The Woodland Trust is now engaging with local authorities, developers and others in those most tree-deprived areas to focus on the creation of green wooded spaces to enhance health, mental health and well-being and improve the environment for these deprived communities.

The model comes from an American example that covers the whole of the United States and was developed by the Woodland Trust’s equivalent in the States—good things do come out of the United States. Chicago, an early example of where this was promoted with some vengeance, showed unexpected benefits beyond mental health and well-being. There were reduced crime rates and enhanced community engagement, and the whole project of creating more green open spaces also created community leaders of the future, who learned their skills as community leaders in tree-planting schemes and community green space and then, strangely enough, went on to champion other community action on a whole range of issues. This is about community cohesion and the development of leadership, as well creating these very important green open spaces. I commend to noble Lords the Woodland Trust’s website on “tree equity”—although I hate the term as it is very clinical for something that is very important.

Although it is a bit better than it was, at the moment the creation of green spaces associated with developments depends wholly on the commitment of local authorities and developers. Some developers and local authorities are good at doing this and some are not. Guidance and the NPPF only encourage this, and as the noble Baroness, Lady Miller of Chilthorne Domer, pointed out, the NPPF is very vague in defining what standards are to be achieved, both on proximity to where people live and the quality of the green open spaces. I have seen development proposals where planting a few trees along avenues is the best they can muster.

As has already been pointed out, we need a much more fundamental approach. Master planning needs to be the space in which it happens, but encouragement and requirement needs to be built into spatial strategies, local plans and the responsibility of development corporations through statute, not simply by exhortation, as happens in the NPPF. The Minister will probably tell me—she told me this morning she was going to say this—that the NPPF is a requirement laid on local authorities and developers, but if you look at the terms of the NPPF, the reality is that it is an exhortation rather than anything that can be measured in performance.

I hope the Minister can tell us whether the Government are satisfied with developer and local authority performance on green space delivery, and, if they are not, whether she will seriously consider accepting these amendments so that a statutory requirement is included in the Bill.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to join this rich debate, in which the House is blooming with eloquence as we focus on the value of green and blue to all our futures, to our health and well-being and of course to the planet. I particularly commend the noble Baroness, Lady Willis, for adding blue spaces, which are what we need to focus on. I want to cross-reference Amendment 115, which we started with. We are used to the 20th-century approach: “There’s some water: we’ve got to flush it away, get rid of it, manage it”, as though water is a problem. Of course, water is crucial to our life and well-being, and we need to treasure it, value it and hold it around us, rather than treat it as a waste product, as far too often happens.

--- Later in debate ---

I hope that these are compelling arguments for why these amendments should be considered by the Committee. I hope that they gain a fair wind and advance to be included in the Bill.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lords, Lord Best and Lord Moynihan, who have very much set out the case for other amendments in this group. It is worth focusing on how we need to debate, consider and act on the parlous state of health in the UK and the significant contribution and terrible impact on people’s health that the built environment, the state of our housing and streets, and the way in which people are forced to live, is having. It is not the way that I would do it but, if nothing else, we should consider the economic impacts of that ill health.

I will focus on the three amendments in this group that I have tabled. They are fairly diverse; two of them are specific and one is a much more general purpose on adverts, as the noble Lord, Lord Best, previewed. Amendment 124 is about the display of advertisements. It would amend Section 220(1) of the Town and Country Planning Act 1990. Currently, it allows the regulation of public advertisements for amenity or public safety reasons. The amendment would add environmental impact and public health as reasons for which advertising can be regulated. Noble Lords should think about how, when they were coming into the House today or when they are going home tonight, they are bombarded with advertisements for gambling companies, junk food and polluting substances. The odds are that there are a lot of them, and this is having a negative impact on public health. Many Members of your Lordships’ House are focusing on how out-of-control gambling is a public health issue in our country.

I pay tribute to the campaign group Adfree Cities, the inspiration for the amendment, which wants a complete ban on all outdoor corporate advertising. As one of its campaigners said, these ads are in a public space without any consultation about what is being shown on them. They cause light pollution—often these days they are digital—and they are for things that people cannot afford or do not need. The fact is that advertising is designed to make you miserable and suggests that you should spend some money to fix that misery.

This is not just the dreaming up of some new idea. To go back to 2006, São Paulo, the largest city in the southern hemisphere, banned all outdoor advertising. Under its clean city law, more than 15,000 billboards were removed, along with 300,000 store signs considered too large. Grenoble in 2014 said that it was not going to have digital advertising and that it would take advertising off its streets altogether. Amsterdam banned adverts for petrol and diesel cars and air travel, something that we have seen happen increasingly with local governments—with Bristol City Council, and Norwich is exploring it, as well as Sheffield and Edinburgh. That is protecting people and the public spaces that they have to be in.

In thinking about the public health impacts of this, Dr Nathan Critchlow from the Institute for Social Marketing and Health at the University of Stirling said:

“There is consistent evidence that exposure to marketing for unhealthy commodities—for example advertising for alcohol or food and drinks high in fat, salt, or sugar—is associated with consumption, including among … young people”.


This is being pushed to people and their health is suffering as a result. Many people will be familiar with the ban from Transport for London on unhealthy food advertising, which a study found prevented almost 100,000 obesity cases.

We can think of the positives instead of just the negatives. What if, in those spaces, we had community arts. One thing that our cities, towns and villages lack is more community arts, such as murals and local projects —or indeed, let us have some more trees. Would not that be nice?

It is worth saying that this is very much a public health issue. Adfree Cities found that four in five outdoor billboard advertisements are in the poorest half of England and Wales. They are actually increasing inequality, so we need something different there.

Amendment 132 deals with something very different. Noble Lords are used to debating purpose clauses. Very often, when we start to debate a Bill, someone puts an amendment down for a purpose clause. This amendment is about all planning functions. What is the purpose of planning? What are we trying to achieve? We have a lot of piecemeal provision in different legislation and different places, but why not say, as an overarching principle, what planning is for?

This is an amendment that I picked up from my honourable friend Ellie Chowns in the other place, and it was backed by the other Green MPs there. This is our attempt at suggesting a way of saying what planning is for. I am very happy to debate the detail, but it is to

“manage the development and use of land in the long-term public interest”.

To spell that out a bit more, it

“addresses the long-term common good and wellbeing of current and future generations”.

The phrase “future generations” is one that many noble Lords will possibly recall from a Private Member’s Bill that the noble Lord, Lord Bird, brought forward some Sessions back—I have forgotten how many—copying the model of the future generations Act in Wales, which says that we cannot just govern for the moment. We know that our democratic system has a real problem with short-term thinking, and this would be a way of introducing the idea that we have to think about our impacts on future generations. It ultimately draws on the very well-known law of seven generations. That comes from the great law of the Iroquois, also known as the Haudenosaunee, which says that you should make every decision on the basis of what impact it will have in seven generations’ time. It is about thinking about the future and leaving this place better than we found it.

The amendment refers to the Climate Change Act and the Environment Act 2021. I can predict that the Minister will say that the Government are bound by these Acts, but the amendment explicitly lays down that planning considerations have to take account of those Acts. It also says that the processes have to be “open, accessible and efficient”.

Finally, I come to Amendment 227, which brings me to ground on which noble Lords will have heard me speak many times. I will cross-reference amendments that I, the noble Baroness, Lady Boycott, and others brought to the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill addressing concerns about the poisons and threats to health contained in school uniforms. This is an amendment to look explicitly at the threats to health from new buildings.

Noble Lords are probably aware that PFAS, the forever chemicals, are in many substances that are part of the fabric of buildings. There is an increasing understanding that there is a build-up of these chemicals—there is a reason why they are called “forever chemicals”—because we are all being exposed to them from our clothing and in our buildings and food. They are building up and up, and our bodies cannot get rid of them and our environment cannot get rid of them.

Again, this is a very simple review amendment. I cannot write an amendment that deals with all these issues for the Government now, but we are on a poisoned planet and we are living in poisoned buildings and this identifies some of the issues—the PFAS, the plastics—and it also very explicitly draws attention to something that many campaigners reach out to me regularly about: artificial turf. We were talking in an earlier group about how we need more green spaces, more natural environments, healthy soils. The absolute opposite of that is taking a piece of ground and covering it in plastic, because that is what artificial turf is.

--- Later in debate ---

The Government are committed to protecting human health and the environment. We are not complacent. Nevertheless, the regulations, risk assessment and control frameworks that we have in place offer safeguards from toxic chemicals in buildings. For all these reasons, I hope that noble Lords are reassured and will not press their amendments.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

I specifically address the issue of artificial turf, about which there is rising public concern. Perhaps the Minister could write to me later about whether the Government are taking a look at that, given the level of public concern.

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

I will.

Planning and Infrastructure Bill

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 9th September 2025 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle]

125: After Clause 51, insert the following new Clause—
“Access to data on overheating risk(1) For the purposes of supporting the making of local plans, spatial development strategies and planning decisions, the Secretary of State must make provision for local planning authorities to have access to relevant data relating to overheating risk.(2) The Secretary of State must ensure that data on overheating risk made available to local planning authorities is updated at intervals not exceeding five years.”Member's explanatory statement
This new clause would require the Secretary of State to ensure that local planning authorities have access to up-to-date data on overheating risk, to support the making of local plans, spatial development strategies, and planning decisions.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I rise to speak to several amendments in this group, Amendments 125, 126 and 181, all of which address the issues of overheating.

I shall constrain myself to commenting on the amendments in my name, but this is the direction of the overall travel of the group. I do not have any particular attachment to the different means by which this issue is addressed here. What is very clear from the level of engagement is that there is a serious issue of overheating, as reflected by this group of amendments.

I shall start with a statistic that is quite shocking. Since 2016, about 570,000 new homes have been built without adequate adaptations to respond to increased temperatures. We have heard from Members of your Lordships’ House who are members of the Committee on Climate Change, and many of us in this debate will have heard from the reports about the inadequacy of climate adaptation. We were speaking in an earlier group about the inadequacy of dealing with flooding. This is overheating, which brings huge financial costs. We have had heatwaves this year but, if we go back to 2022, we saw temperatures over 40 degrees centigrade for the first time, which resulted in more than 3,000 heat-related deaths, the highest level of mortality since the first heatwave plan was written in 2023. We know that, with the climate emergency, this is going to happen more and more often at greater and greater levels. It is particularly the young and old who are most vulnerable to this, but we are increasingly in a situation where everybody is vulnerable.

To go back to a point that I raised on an earlier group about ventilation and so on, we are also going to see, sadly, an increasing number of fires, in natural environments and probably, as we saw in London in 2022, in urban environments as well. That is where we also have to think about wildfire smoke and its impact on human health.

I want to go to the issue that we keep raising again and again in amendments—that this is very much a social justice and inequality issue. It is broadly the more economically disadvantaged households that are at greatest risks from these overheating issues, although it is not just those households. Almost 5.5 million children, over half of those in England, are living in homes at risk of overheating; according to the English Housing Survey 2022 analysis by the Resolution Foundation, more than 1 million of those children are living in London, mostly in social housing.

These amendments look at allowing local authorities, where the local climatic data indicates elevated risk—which, in essence, now means everywhere in the UK—to take specific action under the Town and Country Planning Act. Also—and this is important, and it is crucial that we discuss it under my Amendment 181 about cooling hierarchy guidance—we heard during the recent heatwaves that we have experienced in the UK a great deal of discussion about air conditioning: “Why do we not have air conditioning? Why don’t we install air conditioning?” Of course, the problem with air conditioning is that it is innately counterproductive: you are cooling the home and heating the outside, whether that is through the electricity used or even very directly, with urban heat islands, and so on. Air conditioning is not the answer—and then there are the inequality issues that arise from that as well.

Amendment 181 talks about the Secretary of State providing guidance to local planning authorities to outline a cooling hierarchy and provide guidance on how it is applied. This is where again—it is the problem with green politics of everything being related to everything else—I have to cross-reference back to our discussion about nature. One of the best ways to provide cooling in environments is to have trees and greenery; it is much better than concrete, as it reflects back the heat heating up the area around it. It is about having a structured approach and looking at greenery and at passive and sustainable design elements.

Let us think, for example, of the people of Yemen, who have a traditional architecture, in the hottest temperatures that humans can just about stand, that is cool and comfortable, based on centuries of knowledge of how to build in ways that encourage breezes and bring the air coming over. We come back to the noble Baroness, Lady Willis of Summertown, not currently in her place, and the value of water as a key cooling element—a breeze coming across water, circulating through a house and cooling it down; shades in the right directions and in the right places; and, obviously, the thermal mass of a house so that it does not heat up too quickly but also ensures that it can cool itself down.

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[Lord Wilson of Sedgefield (Lab)]

To the first part of the noble Lord’s question, there has been an energy follow-up survey, which said that energy-efficiency measures that have been taken over recent years have not significantly increased the risk of overheating. On his second point, I will write to the noble Lord and give him the specific answer to his question.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, this has been another rich and full debate, and I thank the Minister for his answers and everyone who has taken part in this debate. It will, I am sure, please the Whips to know that I am not going to run through the whole lot, but I want to pick out a couple of highlights.

The cri de coeur from the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, was “nobody listened”. I cannot help feeling that—we are here rather late in the evening, talking about what are truly matters of life and death, and this is perhaps not the ideal way to do it, but we are doing the best that we possibly can. I apologise to the noble Lord, Lord Ravensdale, for failing to acknowledge his signing—I think I lost a page somewhere in the general pile of a very long evening. I thank the noble Earl, Lord Russell, particularly for picking up the embodied carbon point, which is so crucial, as we have just been discussing. I particularly want to highlight, too, what the noble Baroness, Lady Young of Old Scone, said in reminding us how close we got to net zero-carbon homes—

[Lord Wilson of Sedgefield (Lab)]

May I revert to being the Whip and ask the noble Baroness to move the decision? It is not about rehearsing the whole of the debate, which is what is happening, but about getting to the point of what she needs to be saying.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

I am going to point to what the noble Baroness, Lady Young of Old Scone, said—how close we got, and a really bad decision was made. How do we make good decisions really quickly?

Okay, I will come to what the Minister said. It relied on building regulations and compliance with those, but we know what is being built now is not complying even with the inadequate regulations we have now, and that issue needs to be discussed. The final point I want to make is this: the noble Lord, Lord Jamieson, said that we cannot do anything to interfere with much-needed housing delivery. We have to build houses that people can safely live in. That has to be an absolute prerequisite. But, in the meantime, I—

[Lord Jamieson (Con)]

I do not think I said that we cannot do anything. It is all about having a balance.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

I accept the point made by the noble Lord, and I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment 125 withdrawn.

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[Baroness Thornhill (LD)]

It would certainly put more pressure on the council to allow that, which I think they should.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

The noble Baroness talked about people who would not dream of participating. It is also worth stressing that certain people would not be able to participate because of disabilities, caring responsibilities and other reasons. In fact, given the responsibilities the Government have in terms of protected characteristics, surely that would make the argument for this amendment.

Planning and Infrastructure Bill

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 4th September 2025 Lords Chamber

The amendment would ensure that the individual assuming the designated chief planner role has proper qualifications and proper experience. As the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, mentioned, it follows the success of the arrangement in Scotland, where, alongside having a chief planning officer—a chief planner—there is guidance on the duties, responsibilities, qualifications, skills and experience required for the status of that postholder as a chief officer. That guidance feeds into job descriptions for the post in Scottish authorities, emphasising the significance of the position of the head of their planning services, who reports—this is important—directly to the local authority’s chief executive. Councils may decide to combine this chief officer role with other duties—for example, as deputy chief executive—but, whether the job stands alone or is part of a wider brief, it will be vital that one fully qualified person holds the position of chief planner in taking on the significant new delegation duties that will be introduced by the Government, which we will discuss with the next group of amendments. I am very pleased to support Amendment 162.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I will speak to Amendment 100, which is in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Boycott, and to which I and the noble Earl, Lord Caithness, have attached our names. In the interests of time, I will chiefly restrain myself to commenting on that, although I note the fortunate congruence of Amendment 99AA, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Moynihan, appearing right beside it, because they fit together very well in thinking about a one health perspective.

Amendment 100 is about environmental health, but human health is entirely dependent on environmental health. In fitting all those things together, the lack of healthy places is undoubtedly one of our society’s great problems. The noble Baroness, Lady Boycott, has already made a powerful argument for Amendment 100. I commend her on including mycological surveys, because that is all too often left out. That relates to the issue of soil health, which we are starting to recognise is such a crucial issue that we have ignored far too long. It is crucial to our health—human health and environmental health.

The noble Baroness, Lady Boycott, said that we have a real shortage of education in our highly concentrated education system about ecology and biology. That is undoubtedly true, but our understanding of biology and ecology is moving and changing enormously fast. If you were taught biology and ecology 20 or 30 years ago, what we know now will disavow a great deal of what you were taught as statements of fact 20 or 30 years ago.

To illustrate that, and because I know your Lordships’ House loves a good chalk stream, I refer to a very alarming study out this week of the River Itchen, which is a chalk stream that has been found to have alarming levels of microparticle pollution. Microfibres and fibreglass fibres were sampled throughout the chalk stream. This has been found in samples from spring 2025. The researcher who found this says we have got to work out the sources of this pollution and what to do about them. We need to start thinking about how we stop polluting these wonderful environments and make sure that the built environment is not wrecking that. This is ultimately related to a planning question that we have got to understand.

Tying in with that—I am sorry, this is also alarming—is a study just out this week about tyre wear particles in the Rhine River. Where does the road go? The noble Baroness, Lady Boycott, talked about the importance of where roads go in terms of splitting up habitats, but roads also pollute the watercourses. This is a fascinating study that shows that the nature of bacterial biofilms in the river is substantially changed by the presence, absence and nature of these tyre wear particles. Bacterial biofilms are at the base of food chains. They are key parts of aquatic ecosystems. They control nutrient cycles and form the basis of food chains.

All this is news from just the last week. If we are going to ask people to make decisions that are crucial to the biology and health of our environment, I am not saying that everyone has to be spending their time—as I probably spend too much time—focusing on studies such as this, but people need a basic level of understanding of biology or ecology to understand the way in which this knowledge is moving so fast to be able to read these reports and understand them.

My first point was about understanding ecological and biological education. In my second point, I will venture with some tentativeness into the legal side of this, because it is worth noting that the law around biodiversity and the climate emergency is a very fast-changing area. It is crucial that people have at least a basic understanding of these areas if they are going to make planning decisions that, as the noble Baroness said, are both right and will stand up in court.

I point Members to the Law and Climate Atlas, a really useful resource which was developed by the Centre for Climate Engagement in partnership with the Net Zero Lawyers Alliance. It notes that:

“Climate change may be a material consideration in individual planning decisions, and may be a necessarily material consideration, but there is no statutory requirement”,


but it may come up in court. I note that chapter 14 of the National Policy Planning Framework states that the planning system could lead to

“radical reductions in greenhouse gas emissions”.

But how are we going to make sure that happens? This is where the training is crucial.

With some trepidation, I will venture briefly into a specific case: the R v Surrey County Council judgment given on 20 June. This was around the scope 3 emissions from fossil fuel extraction. The final judgment given in this case in the Supreme Court stated:

“The only issue is whether the combustion emissions are effects of the project at all. It seems to me plain that they are”.


These are all issues in a fast-moving area and it is crucial that we provide planners with the training to understand what is happening. That training will have to be updated regularly. If we throw people into decision-making positions without this understanding, which we cannot expect their previous experience to have given them, we are setting them up to fail—to fail themselves, their councils and our communities.

[Baroness Sater (Con)]

My Lords, I will briefly support my noble friend Lord Moynihan’s important Amendment 99AA. The role of training can never be underestimated, and the importance and consistency of knowledge and skills introduced by training is very important. There is no statutory protection for playing fields, parks or playgrounds, and people are extremely concerned about the potential loss of the playing fields and parks in their communities. These open spaces are critical to preserve if we can because, once they are gone, we cannot get them back.

Diminishing any existing levels of scrutiny, especially with Sport England’s role as a consultee potentially being relinquished, could further impact the loss of our sports fields and physical activity spaces and facilities. We have heard from my noble friend Lord Moynihan about the desperate state of our swimming pools and sports centres.

A study by the Fields in Trust charity quantified the well-being value of parks and green spaces at £34 billion per annum. Frequently using these spaces results in better general health and reduced need to go to the GP, quantified as saving the NHS £111 million every year. It certainly goes a long way to help the NHS and it gets people, especially young people, active, playing sport and outdoors.

Work done by other organisations, including Fields in Trust and ukactive, is vital to sport and physical activity in this country. Training all members of local planning authorities and including an emphasis on healthy place-making, which includes planning adequate provision of sport and physical activity spaces and facilities, will help greatly to ensure that we have open spaces for sport and physical activity for future generations.

My noble friend Lord Moynihan said that this is his first of many amendments to several Bills. I will support him and would like to hear from others about these critical issues that will affect us in future. This amendment is important to ensure that planning officers have the skills and knowledge to deliver the planning outcomes that our local communities really need.

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[Lord Fuller (Con)]

The noble Baroness will know that I was interrupted on more than one occasion. I am on my last 50 words, so we are going to get there. Normally, interventions from other parties do not count against the time. I will take advice from the clerks if necessary.

This problem is created by national politicians, but local people need to be heard and to be part of the solution. We need to recognise that, in this infrastructure Bill above all, we should be building economic infrastructure and community spirit. We do not do that by removing hotels from circulation.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I rise briefly to offer the strongest possible Green group opposition to all these amendments. I do that to make sure that the breadth of opposition across your Lordships’ Committee is demonstrated. I hope that we are going to hear very strong opposition from the Government Front Bench too, but I cannot be sure of that, so I want to put this on the record.

I will start with the rather oddly grouped amendment from the noble Lord, Lord Howard of Rising, about bats. The noble Lord characterised bats as a minority interest, but I hope that I am going demonstrate why they are not. I begin with a study published in Science journal on 6 September last year about what has happened in the United States of America in certain areas where all the bats have been wiped out by white nose disease. In those areas—it is a natural experiment—the rate of infant mortality has increased significantly. This looks very strange. How can it be? How is the health of newborn babies and bats related? Well, with the bats gone, insect populations have risen enormously. Then, farmers have sprayed 30% more pesticide, and that pesticide is linked to infant deaths. When I talk about this study, I am usually focusing on pesticide use, but in this case, there is an important illustration of a point we were discussing in an earlier group of amendments about one health—human, environmental and animal health are intimately interrelated.

I say with the greatest of respect that, from the noble Lord’s own Benches, there was a suggestion that there should be education about ecosystems for members of the Government and civil servants—maybe we need that right across the House, because ecosystems, including bats, are crucial to the health of all of us. We are one of the most nature-depleted countries on this planet and that is bad for human health.

I come now to the other set of amendments in this group, in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Scott. I was talking, on that last amendment, about the health of our society. My reaction to these amendments is about the nature of our society. What kind of country are we? Changing our planning law by creating a special use category for asylum seekers is entirely inappropriate and dangerous. The noble Baroness, Lady Scott, said that these amendments are “targeted”—absolutely too right they are. That is very evident and disturbing.

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[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh of Pickering, who provided a detailed, comprehensive introduction to the amendments in this group in her name, a number of which I have attached my name to. I also look forward to hearing from the noble Baroness, Lady Willis, on this topic.

I will try to be fairly brief as I am very aware of the hour. I am going to start with Amendment 227A in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Grender. In researching this, I found the most perfect case study to follow the recommendations—which I am sure we will hear from the noble Baroness shortly—of the need to build to allow for the practical reality of the world we live in today. This study comes from flooding in York in 2015. The noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Sentamu, who is not currently in his place, was then the Archbishop of York. He was resident in Bishopthorpe Palace and tweeted:

“We are fortunate … that back in the 13th Century they built with flooding in mind, such that when the water subsides it soon washes through the original flood drains made for the purpose”.


We have tended over the past century to think that we can just ignore nature and natural forces. We will build a wall—we will just put things down and assume that nature is going to adapt to us. Amendment 227A in particular, but all these amendments, are an acknowledgment of the fact that we now live in a climate emergency world. Many of these issues are much larger than they were previously, but we cannot ignore them anymore—we should not have ignored them previously, but we certainly cannot ignore them now.

Amendment 108 is about not building on flood plains. Many years ago I was chairing a session at the Green Party conference on flooding and heard a phrase that I have repeated many times since, and I make no apologies for that. It was that the flood plain is not beside the river; the flood plain is part of the river. If we think about that lovely little green patch that might be called Meadow Flat, or Wetland, or something—it is just beside the river, with a beautiful view over the river, and we have put housing on it. That is exactly the same as putting the house in the middle of the river. We cannot afford to keep doing that, and that is why I make no apologies for this amendment. If that is the only place where we can put housing, we should not be building new housing in the river.

The noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh, went through a great many of the things that I had in my pile, so I am going to avoid repeating them. Just to note that, as the noble Baroness said, there is a government review on measures that we should be taking on flooding. I also note that the Environmental Audit Committee is conducting an inquiry right now in the other place on flood resilience. The concern is obvious, but we really cannot wait for all of these to report many of the measures here in terms of taking action to protect people, their lives and their property from flooding. We already know what to do; we do not need further inquiries.

I will just point out to noble Lords who are interested that there was an excellent report out on 26 June called the UK Climate Resilience Roadmap from the Green Building Council and a number of other largely commercial organisations. To highlight a couple of things from it, it found that flooding would make Peterborough—and I note the noble Lord who would be particularly interested in that is not currently in his place—and the Welsh village of Fairbourne likely uninhabitable by the end of this century, which is not very far away at all. I do not know about Fairbourne, but I know that we are still building new housing, probably in very vulnerable places, in Peterborough.

I suspect we are going to hear lots more, so I will just point very briefly to the Committee on Climate Change pointing out how far we are from tackling the climate adaptation measures that we need to take. To pick out just one of its most recent recommendations, we need to integrate adaptation into all relevant policies. For policies, also, of course, read law. I hope we are going to hear positive words from the Minister on these amendments.

[Baroness Willis of Summertown (CB)]

My Lords, I declare an interest as noted in the register, as chair for Peers for the Planet. I am delighted to add my name in support of Amendments 108 and 109, tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh. I also support the other amendments in this group, all of which come together on a core purpose to strengthen our resilience to flooding through the planning system. I particularly support Amendment 135B, which seems really sensible.

It is hard to believe we are having this discussion as we have just come through a summer of heatwaves. However, as we all know, and as we have already heard from the noble Baronesses, Lady McIntosh and Lady Bennett, flooding is becoming increasingly common and all the predictions on it are very scary when you look at them. We see this year in and year out, and it is increasingly costly to the UK. We have heard about the cost involved, but it is not only housing that is impacted. The increased flood risk has an impact on all aspects of urban infrastructure. Some 38% of all roads in England are currently at risk of flooding, as are 37% of all railways, 34% of all water pumping stations and sewage treatment plants, and 59% of grade 1 agricultural land. This is not just a housebuilding issue; it is an issue for the whole urban infrastructure.

To flag up another issue that has not been mentioned, it has not only economic risks and risks to lives and livelihoods, but risks to health. There is now a lot of research that shows that flooding can cause long-lasting mental health conditions such as anxiety, depression and PTSD, and all these add a burden to the health budget, as well as everything else.

We have heard from many—and we have even heard from the Climate Change Committee—that it is critical that we build mitigation strategies into our land management policies. This is where the issue comes in. We have natural capital assets in this country that are perfectly adapted for fulfilling this role, and it is in the name: flood plains—they have been here for hundreds, if not thousands, of years to do this role. It was highlighted in the Government’s own 2024 State Of Natural Capital Report, in which they made the point that they recognize them as crucial natural capital assets for flood management by storing and slowing water flows. The Office for National Statistics natural capital accounts in 2024 also recognised their value. For example, the total asset value of natural capital in England was estimated at £1.4 trillion. It did not disaggregate the flood plains, but it explicitly noted that wetlands and flood plains are a significant part of these natural capital assets, contributing to this cost through regulating services and risk reduction. Not only does housebuilding impact hugely on the people whose houses are flooded, but by building on the flood plains we are taking away our one natural way of maintaining and enhancing our resilience to flooding.

What is wrong with the planning system? I keep hearing about the National Planning Policy Framework, and I keep being told, “It’s all right, it’s covered in the NPPF”. This time, I went back through it in detail to see what it is in the NPPF that is going to allow us to stop building on flood plains. Of course, the problem is that it is guidance; it is not mandatory. It does not stop people from going ahead and building. As we heard from the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh, the report by Localis showed in 2024 that over 7,000 dwellings are currently in the planning pipeline for areas with an existing very high risk of flooding—that is over 7,000 houses. When they flood, should we be surprised? Over 1,600 dwellings have already been given planning permission in the first half of 2024.

Despite the precautions and people saying, “It’s fine, they’re covered in the NPPF”, there is no existing law against granting planning permission for and the construction of homes on the flood plain. Even the Environment Agency advice has been ignored in the building of these houses.

There is a big problem here. I do not think the legislation or guidance we currently have is being adhered to, and the problem is going to get only worse. If we are going to build on the flood plain, we absolutely have to put in some of these mitigation measures so eloquently described in this amendment by the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh. I support these amendments wholeheartedly.

As one last point, I welcome—as I am sure we all do—the increased government investment of £2.65 billion to protect communities from flooding, which was announced earlier this year. That is fantastic, but it does not make sense to have that being pulled in the opposite direction of the legislation we have for housebuilding on flood plains.

To conclude, we need much firmer legislation to prevent the building of houses on flood plains. If there really are no alternatives, we also must have legislation which means that the houses built are able to withstand the flooding that will happen. Let us be honest about it—it is not if, it is when.

Planning and Infrastructure Bill

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Committee stage
Monday 1st September 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Young of Old Scone (Lab)]

My Lords, I will speak to Amendment 93 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, who, alas, cannot be with us today. I declare my interest as chair the Labour Climate and Environment Forum. The noble Lord’s amendment would insert into the Bill a new duty for the Forestry Commission to take all reasonable steps to contribute to the Government’s statutory climate and nature targets under the Climate Change Act 2008 and the Environment Act 2021 in exercising its functions related to planning, development and infrastructure.

The Forestry Commission is a really important player in the delivery of these statutory targets and, for that reason, was listed as one of the public authorities in the original Bill from the noble Lord, Lord Krebs. His Private Member’s Bill sought to apply these duties to a whole range of public authorities. During the debate on that Bill, the Government said that they were sympathetic to its aims. This would be a real opportunity for the Government to put that sympathy into legislation.

The Forestry Commission is really important to the achievement of the Government’s targets for three reasons. First, it is the single largest landowner and manager of land in the country, with 750,000 hectares under its control. Secondly, it impacts, to a much bigger extent, on other woodland and associated land in its permitting and regulatory role for other landowners. That covers in excess of 3 million hectares of land. So we are talking about an organisation that, if it does the right thing, can have a huge impact and, if it does the wrong thing, can have a huge impact. Thirdly, this amendment would simply be a natural evolution of the development of the Forestry Commission’s role.

The Forestry Commission was invented in 1919, originally with a sole focus on producing timber and encouraging the replanting of Britain’s depleted timber-producing land. This depletion had become incredibly apparent during the First World War. In 1968—we do not move very quickly when it comes to dealing with forestry—the Countryside Act extended its role to include the provision of public amenities, such as footpaths and open spaces. In 1985, the Wildlife and Countryside (Amendment) Act extended the Forestry Commission’s role to include conservation. This amendment is simply another step on that road. It would complete the extension and modernising of the Forestry Commission’s duties to include the delivery of the climate and nature targets that have been invented over the last 15 years.

I am sure the Minister will say that the Forestry Commission has already got conservation duties and is already asked to deliver for climate change. Indeed, the biomass issue that has just been mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, raises some considerable questions about the way in which that extension is happening. It is messy and piecemeal. The amendment would provide an unambiguous and up-to-date duty, without which the Government will very likely not deliver their statutory nature and climate targets. We cannot simply depend on some very piecemeal roles for the Forestry Commission to deliver the right thing on that extent of land.

Noble Lords will understand from this introduction that I do not support Amendments 87A and 87B in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Coffey. The spirit of the land use framework, which is under preparation by government at the moment, is that our scarce land supply has to work in a multifunctional way, delivering multiple benefits. Timber production is important because we are a massive net importer of timber, but so are climate change, biodiversity, flood risk management and access for health and well-being. They are also things that the Forestry Commission needs to deliver in the way it manages land and encourages other landowners to deal with their land. The Forestry Commission is absolutely fundamental in that as the biggest landowner in the country.

To revert to the primary purpose of the Forestry Commission being timber production risks going back to the bad old days of regular ranks of subsidised Sitka spruce—I caricature—marching across the countryside on inappropriate sites with poor outcomes for biodiversity and much subsidised by taxpayers. We simply cannot go back there. We need a modern Forestry Commission that delivers those multiple outcomes that the land use framework requires.

I also express agreement with some of Amendment 88 in the name of the noble Earl, Lord Russell. I am not sure if the percentage ceilings that he gives for land to be used for energy infrastructure are the right ones in percentage terms, but there certainly needs to be an appropriate balance between the requirements of timber production, biodiversity, access, recreation and energy infrastructure. His proposed new paragraphs (c) and (d), which would protect against the adverse effects on sites protected for nature conservation and irreplaceable habitats such as ancient woodland, are absolutely spot on.

I also look forward to the Minister’s response to the very real and important inquiry from the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, into what is intended in the Government’s mind for the Forestry Commission and its role in biomass. I am concerned already at some of the species that the Forestry Commission is permitting at the moment—novel species, very fast growing, with as yet untested uses. I would be concerned if we lost sight of the fact that the vast majority of Forestry Commission land, particularly in England, is in fact moving towards being a mixed woodland mix that can do all these other duties like biodiversity, access and public health, rather than simply being species that are aimed at commercial return.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow all the noble Lords who have spoken in this group, and as has already been said, I attach my name to Amendment 87 in the names of the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, and the noble Baroness, Lady Boycott, and to Amendment 93.

I will seek to add to, rather than repeat, what has already been said, but I just follow the noble Baroness, Lady Young of Old Scone, in addressing Amendment 88 and agree that I am also not sure about the percentages. I would particularly highlight the ancient woodland, how terribly important and terribly rare that is, and so, as per paragraph (d) in that amendment, there is no way we should be doing anything to damage ancient woodland for energy—it is such a precious resource. Noble Lords have heard me go on before about looking at the trees, but let us also see how incredibly precious the biodiversity in soil in ancient woodland is.

On Amendment 87, I think biomass is now a very dirty word, and the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, rhetorically asked, “What could possibly go wrong?”. Of course, that has already been answered with the single word, “Drax”. The energy think tank Ember said Drax is “the UK’s largest emitter” and that the power

“is more expensive than … gas, it’s more polluting than coal, and more dependent on imports than oil”.

There should be no future biomass at Drax; that is my position and the Green Party’s position. It really is a tragedy that we did not get to that point when we recently had the opportunity.

The noble Baroness, Lady Boycott, picked this point up. I signed this amendment, but I am almost tempted towards saying simply that there should be no biomass from forests, because as the noble Baroness asked, what does “waste material” really mean? We are thinking about biodiversity and about organic material that is a resource. If you leave it on the forest floor, it contributes to the generation of soil and provides habitat for a huge variety of organisms. Is that really waste at all? Is there any such thing in a forest? That really is the question. We need to be thinking about having a war on tidiness and the idea that for any sort of planting, we want these nice, neat rows with clean bare soil in between—we need to think about what kind of damage that does.

Particularly in addressing Amendment 93, I want to draw the Minister’s attention to a study that was out last year funded by the Forestry Commission. It was entitled Rapid review of evidence on biodiversity in Great Britain’s commercial forests. It found that there is in fact a huge shortage of data and information about what is happening in the biodiversity, specifically in commercial high forests. The noble Baroness, Lady Young, raised the issue of the land use strategy. How can we be making the plans within this Bill, or indeed for the land use strategy, if we do not have the data about the biodiversity, which this study, funded by the Forestry Commission, identified? I also point to another Forestry Commission study from late 2023, which warned of the risk of catastrophic ecosystem collapse in our forests. This was signed—the work of 42 experts—and pointed out all the risks that our forests face from wind, fire, pests and diseases, and it said there are already forests in continental Europe and North America where we have seen this kind of biological collapse. We need to be thinking about making sure that the Forestry Commission is given the statutory duty, which Amendment 93 would give it, to ensure that it looks after biodiversity as well as, of course, the crucial issue of the climate emergency.

It is worth repeating again that we are incredibly forest and woodland-deprived in the UK by international comparisons. We have to look after what is there for human health, for well-being, for the climate and for nature.

[Baroness Coffey (Con)]

My Lords, I speak particularly to the amendments that I have tabled in this group. It is fair to say that the Forestry Commission is quite an unusual organisation—it is a non-ministerial department for a start. I was the Minister and then the Secretary of State with the relationship with the Forestry Commission and my experience was that, frankly, I used to get somewhat frustrated, thinking that it should get on and plant some trees. It almost seemed very reluctant to just get on and plant trees. The reason it matters—the clue is in the name, but perhaps the organisation literally cannot see the wood for the trees—is that trying to give the extra targets is important for the Forestry Commission to make sure it is on track in doing what it is supposed to do.

One of those aims is to help achieve the 16% woodland cover target by 2050, which we are at risk of missing. The Forestry Commission should have at the forefront of its mind that its role is about trees, woodland and forests. I am conscious that the noble Baroness, Lady Young of Old Scone, was concerned about single species, or perhaps only certain species being granted in commercial estates. It is vital that we have mixed forests. One of my concerns was that it seemed like, for any tree that was not a broadleaf, it was almost like it was automatically bad and we should not be touching it. Actually, we need that mix for a combination of factors. There is no question that a broadleaf tree will bring absolutely better biodiversity overall, but so do the pines and, critically, the pines will grow a lot more quickly and contribute far more quickly to issues involving climate and emissions. That is why having a combination tree estate under the UK forestry guidance really matters.

Planning and Infrastructure Bill

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Committee stage
Monday 1st September 2025 Lords Chamber

To finish, local area energy plans are crucial to a joined-up systems view of the energy transition, ensuring that we have the view from the ground to inform the national plan, and to have a properly joined-up view of energy systems governance—from local plans through to regional plans, right up to the strategic spatial energy plan to govern the system at a national level. In accepting this amendment, the Government would demonstrate their buy-in to the process and take a critical first step. By providing guidance, they could start to ensure that a coherent set of plans are being developed by local authorities. A funded programme and a technical adviser to ensure consistency and join-up could follow. This is a great opportunity for the Government to get energy planning moving at a local level and ensure coherence and systems join-up. I look forward to working with the Minister and the noble Earl on this.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I offer my strongest possible support for Amendment 90 in the name of the noble Earl, Lord Russell, to which I have attached my name, and some slightly qualified support for Amendment 177, which we have just heard about from the noble Lord, Lord Ravensdale.

Coincidentally, and entirely without prompting from me, I started the day—rather a long time ago now—speaking to a senior civil servant. They said to me that they thought the great malaise of the UK was people’s lack of a sense of agency—a lack of ability to step up, take control and change what is around them and the direction of the country. This amendment, starting with the local and saying, “Here in your community you can democratically work through your council, local authority and combined authority to decide how to deliver your energy” is the perfect way to start to address those issues.

We are the most centralised polity in western Europe: power and resources are overwhelmingly concentrated here in Westminster. We have almost universal agreement that we have to have an energy transition. This is a major infrastructure element in all our lives, as we have been discussing this evening. We also must have a just transition, so that no community is left behind. Every community needs the opportunity to make plans for its energy future, and that is exactly what Amendment 90 seeks to achieve.

I note that a great deal of work and resources have been put into this over a long period of time. The Centre for Climate Engagement at the University of Cambridge, funded by Innovate UK under the Net Zero Living programme, is building on the work of the Skidmore review—we are talking about cross-party approaches across all Benches—which emphasised the importance of local government, leadership and place-based actions in dealing with the climate emergency.

This goes back a very long way. Green councillor Andrew Cooper, who was working through the European Committee of the Regions, got the UN COP process to acknowledge locally determined contributions. Everyone has heard of nationally determined contributions, but that was about locally determined contributions. Of course, the energy system is only part of this, but it is a very crucial part that impacts people’s lives and communities and on what they look like.

Your Lordships’ House has, in a very long wrestle with two successive Governments, finally got an acknowledgement of the importance of community energy. What I think we would see going forward is local authorities and combined authorities being very keen to encourage and support community energy. That of course is where we can see public support and financial returns growing. This is not about some giant multinational company coming and landing on your community, but about your community saying, “Right, how do we want to generate our energy?” That has to be the foundation.

I am broadly in favour of Amendment 177, but my question is around the weight and shape of the word “guidance”. We are talking about local energy plans, and anything provided from the centre should be support and not—as we see, for example, in planning and with housing allocations—direction. If it is indeed guidance, Amendment 177 is pointing us in the right direction. Together, these two amendments are crucial and I can see no reason for the Government not to accept them.

[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)]

My Lords, I support the amendment from the noble Lord, Lord Ravensdale, to which I have added my name. I am also very sympathetic to the amendment tabled by the noble Earl, Lord Russell.

The noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, raised a very interesting question about the centralisation of this country. In one sense, this Bill is about further centralisation when it comes to major infrastructure projects, which are so crucial to our growth. In essence, in the housing agenda, as well as with a lot of energy infrastructure projects, local government has not been very helpful and has been obstructive. If we believe that growth is a strategic aim of government, as I believe it to be, stronger central direction is vital. The question, however, is whether it can be complemented by local initiatives, which do indeed give local people ownership. That is where I agree with noble Baroness, Lady Bennett: community energy schemes are a fantastic way to leverage support from local people for the kinds of changes that we want to make to our energy infrastructure.

The noble Lord, Lord Ravensdale, obviously speaks with great authority as an energy expert, but he has also played a hugely important leading role in the Midlands Engine. He chaired the Midlands Energy Security Taskforce, which of course strongly supports local area energy plans.

When I was a Minister at DESNZ, I became very much aware of the potential of local community-based energy projects. I remember one visit to my own city of Birmingham, under the auspices of Footsteps: Faiths for a Low Carbon Future, when I met a number of local groups that were dedicated to community green energy projects but were seeking support from agencies at the centre to deliver something tangible. Interestingly, the MECC Trust, based in Balsall Heath, is hosting the launch by the Lord Mayor of Birmingham, in a couple of weeks’ time, of Birmingham’s first net-zero retrofit demonstrator community hub. The potential of hundreds of projects such as this, up and down the country, is very clear.

The amendment that the Government brought to the then Great British Energy Bill, which added projects involving or benefiting local communities to the crucial objective section, was very important. Great British Energy has made it clear that it will work with local energy groups, councils and mayors to fund and support community-led energy projects.

Noble Lords will be aware of recent decisions by some local authorities to roll back commitments in relation to net zero. Ironically, this is taking place as the scientific evidence of the impact of climate change becomes ever clearer. I do not think we can let this go by default. In essence, the noble Baroness asked: what does guidance mean? I think you really have to put the two together. I take the amendment of the noble Earl, Lord Russell, to be a statutory requirement on local authorities to encourage and develop local energy plans. I think that is really important now, in the light of some decisions being made by local authorities. Then, it seems to me, the guidance that we are suggesting fits into that structure.

I hope that the Government will be sympathetic to the need to make sure that local authorities do not pass up the opportunity to support local community energy groups.

Voting at 16

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Thursday 24th July 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Khan of Burnley (Lab)]

My Lords, I am just going to repeat the fact that there are places, both across the United Kingdom—Scotland and Wales, the Isle of Man, Jersey and Guernsey—and other places such as Austria, where they have successfully lowered the voting age to 16. Let me repeat this very important point to the noble Lord: evidence from these places shows that those who vote at a younger age are more likely to continue voting as they get older. We have 16 year-olds serving in the British Army. Regardless of the difference in ages that the noble Lord cited, we want to make sure that we get long-term habits enabled and established with young people, since the evidence shows that, later in life, they will be more focused on taking part.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, earlier this month, there was an absolutely inspiring event in the House, with lots of 16 and 17 year-olds and, indeed, younger students who were very keen, engaged and interested in voting. This was run by the Democracy Classroom network, the Politics Project and others, and it set out a road map to votes at 16. We need lots more political education right across our society. Most of the 16 year-olds I meet are as well prepared to vote as the 60 year-olds are, which is not to say that both cohorts do not need much more education. One point that was made at this event that I thought was really useful was about the importance of youth clubs and other informal organisations. We often talk about education in schools, but are the Government planning to ensure that resources are available also to youth clubs and other more informal organisations?

[Lord Khan of Burnley (Lab)]

My Lords, more widely, a programme of work, including engagement with the Electoral Commission, local authorities, think tanks, academic and civil society organisations, is being done to identify the barriers to participation, along with potential interventions to tackle those barriers. This programme of work addresses issues around participation in our democracy, including participation in elections both by those not on the register and those registered but not voting. I am happy to speak to various stakeholders and listen to the views of young people, who are the most important in this aspect.

Planning and Infrastructure Bill

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 17th July 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Miller of Chilthorne Domer (LD)]

My Lords, I support my noble friend Lady Pinnock’s amendment. Pre-application consultation, as she correctly said, not only gives communities a chance to shape proposals but can speed up things further down the line. It is not necessarily a delaying factor.

The noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe, just raised an interesting issue in that we do not know what the delaying factor is. Is it the statutory consultees, far more than the communities, for example, that are part of the delaying factor? Given the scale of the Government’s ambition, quite rightly, to develop housing and the accompanying infrastructure, and to make master plans to do that, it is much better to take the community along with you. If the community already feels left behind because it is cut out at the very first stage, which is what the Bill does, then however many nice words may be said later by the development corporations or so on, that is not really going to cut much ice. Therefore, the amendments tabled by my noble friend are particularly important.

I also really do not like the fact that, even if communities and the public have made some responses, there is no requirement for the people doing the development to take that into account. Again, that is a very disempowering issue, which undermines the whole democratic basis of our planning system.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I offer my strong support for the entire presentation from the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, and her amendments. I cannot top her example of unknown mines underground, but the example that I was thinking of is on a much smaller scale, and it addresses the point raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe. She said that those mines, et cetera—the physical infrastructure—should be on the record; I think we all know that very often they are not.

However, there is also the question of the local community and how it works, which is never going to be written down. The example that I was thinking of comes from central London, from Camden borough. I was at a meeting where the council came along very excitedly with the idea that it was going to knock down a community centre, build housing, and build a new community centre on what most people from the outside thought were some pretty unpleasant, small, raggedy corner shops—a little row of shops which you get typically in suburban areas. The council officers and the local councillors were visibly astonished when local people, mostly elderly, were up in arms and horrified about the idea of those shops being demolished. They said, “We’re not mobile enough to get to Camden High Street and we’re scared of the traffic on Camden High Street and the speed at which it goes. Even though these shops are probably both very expensive and don’t have a great range of goods, et cetera, we hugely value them”. That is just a small-scale example of how only communities themselves know the way in which they work. If they had had input earlier on, there would not have been lots of very angry pensioners at that meeting, as we saw.

Amendment 107 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Miller, is really important and picks up the use of technology, and potentially its positive use, and sets out rules for it. Again, I am afraid that my next example is also from Camden, because that is where lots of my planning stories come from. The Crick centre was imposed on the local community—I declare a retrospective interest in that I was the chair of the St Pancras and Somers Town Planning Action committee that opposed it, a long time ago. When it was finally built, people said, “But that doesn’t look anything like what the pictures looked like”. I think that is something that we are all extremely familiar with. The idea of creating some standards and rules—they already exist, but we should put them into statute—seems an extremely good one.

[Lord Jamieson (Con)]

My Lords, first, my apologies: I should have mentioned my interest as a councillor in central Bedfordshire earlier in the debate.

I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, for her leadership on this important group of amendments. Clause 4 systematically removes several pre-application requirements. I will focus first on Amendment 25, tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock. This amendment seeks to retain Section 47 of the Planning Act: the duty to consult the local community. Can the Minister clarify the Government’s position? Ministers have previously stated that the Bill does not in any way reduce local democratic input. If that is the case, can the Minister explain why the duty to consult communities is being removed? How did the Government arrive at the decision to remove Section 47 of the Planning Act, as my noble friend Lady Neville-Rolfe raised, and what are the specific problems they are trying to resolve in doing so?

We know from experience that when local communities are given genuine influence over planning through mechanisms such as neighbourhood plans, they are often more supportive of new housing and infrastructure—we have heard cases from the noble Baronesses, Lady Pinnock and Lady Bennett, where the local input added significant value—especially when it reflects local needs such as affordable housing, safeguards green space or comes with vital local infrastructure improvements. Indeed, neighbourhood plans introduced under the Localism Act 2011 have in many cases led to more housing being approved rather than less. This suggests that working with communities delivers better outcomes.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)]

My Lords, I support the noble Lord, Lord Ravensdale, on his Amendment 46. On Amendment 46A, I would be very surprised if the Secretary of State did not take account of EDPs. From the provision that the noble Baroness, Lady Coffey, read out, the Secretary of State clearly has the power to do so.

On Amendment 46, we partly return to the role of regulators. There is a perverse output of regulators making it difficult to achieve net-zero targets, which I find very difficult. Some regulators find it difficult to go wider than the very narrow remit that they seem to work under. One of the questions to the Government is: do they really think it will make a difference? It is easy to make fun of bats or acoustic fish deterrents, but it is fair to ask whether, as a result of this legislation, we will see an end to the ludicrous behaviour of regulators, which has cost so much money, delayed projects by so much time and, as we know, achieved absolutely zilch for conservation or nature preservation. Ultimately, that is the test.

It seems that the regulators do not come under enough challenge on their performance. Somehow, we need to put some mechanisms in the Bill to ensure that the regulators come under the microscope much more on how they behave and that they are held accountable. That is why the amendment is very well judged.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I will chiefly offer support to Amendment 46A from the noble Baroness, Lady Coffey.

In response to the challenge from the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, who said that of course the Government would not do this, I am afraid that we hear that very often in your Lordships’ House. The noble Lord may be speaking for his own Government, but we are making law for potential future Governments, and we cannot know how they will behave. That is a reason to put Amendment 46A in the Bill.

I respond to the speeches of the noble Lords, Lord Ravensdale and Lord Hunt, with a little reminder that we are one of the most nature-depleted corners of this battered planet. If our regulators have not succeeded in doing the job they should have done in protecting nature, the answer is not to take away more power from the regulators. By all means, make them work better. As the noble Baroness, Lady Coffey, said, we will undoubtedly discuss this at great length in relation to Part 3, but the Bill currently takes away an enormous amount of protection for nature, which is a huge problem.

In talking about Amendments 46 and 46A, I will refer to Defra’s own words from a blog post in 2025 that, we can assume, represents the Government’s view. It starts with a statement with which I can only agree:

“Nature is the bedrock of our entire way of life”.


As I often put it, the economy is a complete subset of the environment; none of the economy exists without a healthy environment. That blog seeks to defend the nature restoration fund, the environment delivery plans and all the other steps that this Government are introducing. You might say that the blog post is a little too vehement for its own good and that its tone sounds extremely defensive. None the less, we can all think of examples of where the Government have, on the one hand, done something for nature, but, on the other, done enormous damage with other policies.

One of the obvious examples that comes to mind here is peat. Peatland is terribly important for nature and for climate. Large amounts of money are spent on restoring peatlands. We also have continued use of the land for driven grouse shooting and the burning of large amounts of peat causing great damage—and continual horticultural use of peat. So we have the Government trying to expensively restore something while continuing to allow the destruction of it. That is why this needs to be in the Bill. I could give many more examples, but given the hour I will not, of where the Government are, in essence, facing in two directions at once and nature is torn down the middle as a result.

[Lord Berkeley (Lab)]

My Lords, the amendment from the noble Lord, Lord Ravensdale, is a very good amendment, but it refers only to low-carbon energy infrastructure. Of course, he is an expert in that, and that is fine. The comments made by him, my noble friend Lord Hunt and the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, referred to a much wider subject: are regulators a good thing or not and are we controlling them? To say that we want to make changes to the regulations on low-carbon energy infrastructure without looking at others means we are missing something. We have big problems with many regulators, but it should be a consistent policy. It needs to be done on a much more scientific and level playing field rather than it being just something which relates to whether we think what they are doing is a good thing or a bad thing. I do not think that is the right way to look forward. Maybe when the noble Lord comes to wind up, he can explain why the amendment refers just to low-carbon energy infrastructure.

--- Later in debate ---

For what it is worth, I am generally supportive of my noble friend Lord Banner’s proposals. I have to say that, if Amendment 52 were ever put to a Division, I would be in a different Lobby from the good former Minister, the noble Lord, Lord Hunt.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, briefly, I feel that the discussion of this potentially extraordinarily far-reaching group of amendments has a different perspective from that of those I often work with—the environmental groups, human rights groups and groups representing disadvantaged communities that are bringing judicial reviews. The perspective I approach this from is how incredibly expensive and difficult judicial reviews are and how often they fail, even when, according to measures of common sense at least, they should have succeeded. That is very much where I come from.

The Committee does not just have to listen to me on this. We saw, particularly after the judicial review over the Prorogation of Parliament, a great deal of debate about judicial review. The noble and learned Lord, Lord Reed of Allermuir, the President of the Supreme Court, was quoted in the Law Society Gazette of March 2020:

“Judges are very well aware of the risk of challenges being brought in what are political rather than legal grounds. They are repelling them and are careful to avoid straying into what are genuine political matters. When this is a matter that is to be considered it should not start from the premise that judges are eager to pronounce on political issues. The true position is actually quite the opposite”.


We have a system of judicial review that very often does not work to defend the powerless in our society, and that of course includes nature as well as people. Yet it is there as a final backstop, and sometimes it works—sometimes it does protect those people—and so it is crucial that we maintain it.

I commend the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, for his ingenuity. This single amendment has possibly the largest legal consequences I have ever seen, as I think the noble Lord, Lord Banner, set out for us very clearly and with vastly more expertise than I can offer.

I say to the noble Lord, Lord Banner, that if we are thinking about trying to speed up judicial review, which in principle is not something that I have any problem with, one thing that undoubtedly slows it down is inequality of arms. Small community groups and environmental groups face a massive inequality of arms; it is very hard for them to go fast, because they just do not have the resources. They have to wait until the crowdfunder has raised some more money before they can keep going. Perhaps dealing with that inequality of arms would be good for the efficiency of decision-making in our society.

None the less, it is fairly self-evident, but, for the avoidance of doubt, I will say that I am strongly opposed to the approach being taken in this group of amendments.

[Baroness Pinnock (LD)]

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, has brought before us his own Bill. It is worthy to stand alone and provoke a significant discussion about how different procedures could deal with large-scale infrastructure applications. I am not in a position to know whether it would work or not. It is an attempt to provide an alternative, and I am looking forward to the Minister, with all the civil servants behind her, being able to explain why it will or will not work.

I always start from a different starting point, which is that, first, we are a small island. Comparing us with Canada and its vast expanse, or even with France, which is significantly geographically larger than the United Kingdom with a similar population, makes for poor comparisons.

That is the first of the challenges anyone in this country has with large-scale infrastructure. The second is this. No case was made to people about the benefits to them from either of the large-scale infrastructure projects that have been mentioned, HS2 and the A303. HS2 was never about shaving 10 minutes off a journey between London and Birmingham or 20 minutes off a journey to Leeds—though it will never get there. It was never about that. It was about congestion on the railways, but that case was never made. So it is no surprise when the public do not respond to the project in that way. Why are we going through the destruction of our villages and favoured landscapes for the sake of 20 minutes? That was the argument. You have to make the case and the case is not being made. It was the same with the A303 and various other major projects. That seems to me to be a difficulty.

I take issue with the noble Lord, Lord Ravensdale, using the word “radical”. That word is always used by developers when they want something that the rest of us do not want. We might want its outcome, but we do not like what it is going to do to our environment. I think we have to try harder.

As for the noble Viscount, Lord Hanworth, calling planning “sclerotic”, this element of infrastructure planning is very difficult, but let us not label the whole of the planning process as sclerotic. Local planning authorities do not hold up development; the statistics demonstrate that. The issue is with infrastructure planning. That is why the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, has brought forward his alternative procedure for it. Whether or not that would work, I will leave to others with more detailed backing from the civil servants to decide.

The issue with planning applications, big or small, is always that if you do not involve the public and tell them what it is for, what it will do and what the downsides are, you set yourself up for a big fight, and that is what happens. As for the judicial review, what do I know about it except that it seems to go on for ever and achieve nothing—and costs a lot of money as well. If you resort to the legal process to resolve applications which should be decided between elected people and the community, you are never going to get an answer. I look forward to the reply and a judgment on this one.