Planning and Infrastructure Bill

Lord Banner Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 24th July 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, I apologise that this amendment, which started life some time ago, got lost somewhere in the system. That was identified only yesterday, so it was tabled as a manuscript amendment, but the Minister has been aware for some time that the area is of concern. It is, I think, the first substantial area of concern. I set out my stall immediately as a Conservative who believes in the rights of private property and that, consequently, the Government’s power to undertake compulsory purchase should be constrained to occasions when it is absolutely necessary.

The clause appears to create a new type of compulsory purchase altogether. It is entirely open to the Minister to correct me in all this, because I am not a planning or property lawyer, but it purports to create something that is, in effect, temporary compulsory purchase, and we have never heard of such a thing. We have heard of the temporary acquisition, compulsorily, of certain rights and usages across land that may be necessary for the purposes of construction on an adjacent site—way leaves, for example, may be acquired compulsorily—but the clause talks about the possession and acquisition of the land, and that seems to go considerably beyond what exists at the moment, unless, as I say, the Minister can correct me.

This measure is hard to find in the Bill because all this, which is at the bottom of page 48, is encompassed in five lines of text. So what I regard as potentially a very significant change—meriting, in my view, a Bill of its own, a Bill that actually has the words “compulsory purchase” in the short title—is possibly, though I am not saying deliberately, being slipped through in a way that would hardly be noticed at the bottom of a page in a Bill that on the face of it is about something very different.

My amendment does not seek to set the provision aside because it is possible that the Minister can correct me and explain that all he is doing is building on well-established precedents, which he will be able to cite. My amendment is simply to say that any order creating such a compulsion, any compulsory purchase order, must specify the manner in which the compensation is to be paid. Normally, for compulsory purchase, there is one payment and you pay to acquire the site, the land or the building. If you are doing it temporarily, what are you paying? Are you paying a form of rent, or are you paying a price together with a fixed repurchase price at the end of a defined period? None of that is known.

Then we come to the question of period. The second thing that my amendment would require is that when such an order was made, it should specify the period. Otherwise, what is to stop temporary becoming permanent—and for what purpose? If it is temporarily needed for a certain purpose, could it become permanent and used for a different purpose? If you temporarily need access to a field to put portakabins in it next to a construction site, could it somehow slip into being permanently acquired for development by the Government themselves? On what basis then would the recompense have been decided? Would that have been a valid recompense?

I think asking these questions through the amendment is more valuable than simply trying to slap the clause down completely, especially as I do not claim to be 100% sure of my ground, but this is potentially quite a dangerous clause that the Government are going to have to justify thoroughly if it is to stand, as it does, part of the Bill at the moment. I beg to move.

[Lord Banner (Con)]

I endorse the comments of my friend Lord Moylan. I have two questions and two observations. First, “temporary” can mean different things to different people. For example, in the context of onshore wind, temporary permission tends to be granted for 25 years, whereas if one is talking about occupation or possession of land, ordinarily one would think of a considerably shorter time. Can the Minister give any elucidation of the intent behind the use of that word in the provision to which the amendment relates?

Secondly, can reassurance be given on whether the power that Clause 33 proposes to introduce would be used only where lesser alternative forms, such as those existing powers that my noble friend Lord Moylan referred to, would not do the job equally or similarly well?