Planning and Infrastructure Bill

Lord Banner Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 17th July 2025 Lords Chamber

I have not had an opportunity to sit down with the Minister. One of the things that worries me at the moment is that I can hear Wes Streeting, quite rightly, wanting to move large parts of the health service out of hospitals and into communities and get upstream in the prevention agenda. We have been leading that agenda for 30-odd years. We have 55,000 patients nowadays and we know quite a bit about it. That is the right direction of travel; they are in the right space. But it is one thing to want it and another thing to do it. That aspiration in the health service is not connected with this conversation we are having. I am trying to have a conversation with the Minister about this—we all need to have this conversation. There is a real opportunity to join the dots here, but can we please have the conversation?

[Lord Banner (Con)]

My Lords, I declare my interest as a practising Silk in planning and environmental law, with a range of clients affected by planning regulation in various ways. I am a non-executive director of SAV Group, a property developer, and of Crossman Special Projects, a land promoter. I am the author of the independent review into legal challenges against NSIPs, which I will speak more on later in these proceedings.

I like purpose clauses in legislation. They are helpful because, in time, the courts will have to interpret the provisions of what will become the Act in due course, and if we do not spell out what the purpose is then the courts will have to define that. Surely it is far better to have a degree of parliamentary control in specifying what the purposes are. If that is to be done—it is not essential, but it is certainly nice to have—I certainly cannot improve on the amendment from the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, as proposed to be amended by the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, and my noble friend Lady Scott.

I have a degree of nervousness, however, about the Bill having its own purpose without there being an overall statutory purpose of planning, as is advocated by the Royal Town Planning Institute and proposed in Amendment 132 from the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett. I do not agree with all the wording of that, but that is not the point for today’s purposes.

The Bill, once enacted, will be part of the wider framework of planning Acts, of which there are many. If it has its own stated purpose but the purpose of planning is not stated, there is a risk of a potential mismatch. That could be remedied by having an overall purpose of planning, which would have a number of advantages. For example, in the context of the increased role of planning officers, they would have that guiding beacon, which may avoid undue pressure being placed on planning officers by elected members—something that does happen, and there is a risk that it may happen to a greater extent if some of the other provisions of the Bill find their way into law. I would advocate consideration of the RTPI proposal, as outlined in Amendment 132.

I emphatically agree with the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, about the need for proportionality. We have to put an end to the days of environmental statements being delivered by vans. No one will read them apart from the people who paid huge fees to produce them and review them—I declare a kind of interest in that respect too, of course. The EIA process is largely intended to help the public understand the environmental effects—it is consultation and taking into account the fruits of the consultation. No member of the public is going to read a lorry full of documents; it is simply not going to happen. Proportionality would be hugely helpful in that respect. There are recent instances of DCO examining inspectors asking 2,000-plus questions. I am sure that was with the best of intentions, but if we aim for perfection, we will not achieve anything.

[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)]

My Lords, from the noble Lord’s experience, does he think it possible to legislate for regulators to use their common sense?

[Lord Banner (Con)]

I tried with my proportionality clause, which we will come to later in the proceedings. That is the best I can do so far; I am toying with tweaking it so that if it were to find its way on to the statute book, the Secretary of State would have the ability to publish statutory guidance on how to give effect to it. But, to echo what the noble Lord said before, if proportionality was spelled out in neon lights in legislation, it would send a message to everybody—consultees, consultants, applicants, decision-makers, the courts and the public—that less can be more. To my mind, that is a fundamental way of furthering the objectives of the Bill.

[Lord Ravensdale (CB)]

My Lords, I declare my interest as a chief engineer working for AtkinsRéalis.

I support what the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, and the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, have set out around the purposes of the Bill, and in particular what the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, said about putting growth front and centre.

It is important to set out a bit of broader context here, because this goes all the way back to 2008. In the decades before 2008, we had that consistent 2.3% labour productivity growth over many years, but since then, that productivity growth has fallen off a cliff, with only around 0.5% per annum growth since then. That then feeds through into flat real wages. Again, there was a 2% growth in real wages for decades, but they have been flat since 2008, which has led to all those problems with debt, tax take, the NHS, and even the political problems—the frustrations of those who have been left behind.

Of course, growth is a complex picture, as are the reasons behind that slowdown in growth, but our inability to build enough productive infrastructure to invest in that is very high up on that list, whether that is new infrastructure to bring down the price of electricity; new transport infrastructure, with all the agglomeration benefits that come with that; or new digital infrastructure.

We can contrast what is going on elsewhere in the world—to expand on what the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, said—with electricity. China has gone from 6,000 to 10,000 terawatt hours of electricity generation in the past 10 years, whereas our electricity generation has been flat or even declining slightly, at only around 300 terawatt hours. That of course has many other implications: the cost of our electricity, which is around four times that of the United States; the knock-on effects of that to inward investment; and circling back to growth as well. Even if we look at the Government’s targets, such as the 2030 target for clean electricity generation, the amount of electricity infrastructure that we need to build to hit that target is far below what we need to hit to get to 2030, and of course that will have effects on net zero and on energy security as well.

The planning system is at the heart of this, with the key issues of judicial review and environmental regulation, which are being addressed to some extent in the Bill. But, circling back to growth, that needs to be front and centre. It is vital that the Bill delivers for critical infrastructure as well as houses, so that purpose clause which sets that out front and centre in the Bill is vital, with all the benefits it will bring for net zero, the environment, and energy security, and resolving those broader issues of net debt, government spending and quality of life.