Planning and Infrastructure Bill

Debate between Lord Banner and Lord Ravensdale

Committee stage
Thursday 17th July 2025 Lords Chamber

[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.

Planning and Infrastructure Bill

Debate between Lord Banner and Lord Ravensdale

Committee stage
Thursday 17th July 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Banner (Con)]

My Lords, it will probably already be apparent that in many respects the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, and I are in agreement about how the Bill can be made more effective, but on this group we are not yet quite aligned. I have a lot of sympathy with the intention behind Amendments 52 and 65 in particular, and I have immense respect for those behind the drafting. I myself wanted to go further when I was undertaking the review of legal challenges to M6, and I think it is important that I explain why I felt I could not, while I still need some convincing that it would be possible or sensible to go further.

When I did the review, I concluded that the evidence demonstrated that the overwhelming majority of judicial reviews of the M6 failed. It follows from this that the problem is not with the law, nor is it about “activist judges”, the term often used by some people about judges. It is about the time it takes for bad JRs to meet their doom. That is the problem, and to my mind the remedy for it is to shorten the judicial review process as much as possible. That is what my recommendations focused on, and I am told that Clause 12 in conjunction with the CPR changes—I have not been checking my emails so I still have not seen them—gives effect to those recommendations. That is what the changes would do.

To my mind, therefore, removing judicial review altogether, as things currently stand, would not achieve much more than a truncated JR process. For the really big stuff, the Heathrows and HS2s of this world, the system already allows for the JR process to be fast-tracked. The HS2 and Heathrow cases, both of which I was involved in, went from ground zero to the Supreme Court far quicker than normal cases—not much more than a year, in the HS2 case in particular.

The question then is: what are the downsides of going further, and does the relatively marginal benefit outweigh those downsides? In my view, the answer is no. There is a difficulty with ousters, whether done expressly through an ouster clause, which hardly ever works, or done in a more intelligent fashion than an express ouster, as the amendment from the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, does, essentially asking Parliament to endorse a DCO and thus giving it the benefit of parliamentary sovereignty. Most DCOs involve the compulsory purchase of land and/or the acquisition of individual rights. There is a real danger, if that approach is undertaken, that there will come a point—whether because someone was denied a hearing because there was a mistake or because someone involved in the decision-making process inadvertently failed to disclose an interest—where something goes wrong in a CPO context. A person whose land, maybe their home, is to be acquired—or there is to be some other fundamental interference with their rights—is, it is said, denied any possibility of correcting an obvious legal error.

In that scenario, there is a real danger that the untested working assumption that Parliament is sovereign—for there is no written tablet of stone saying that the Supreme Court cannot quash legislation—will be tested, and we will not get the right answer. Pandora’s box would be opened and the Supreme Court would quash the legislation in question, and once opened you would never be able to put it back in the box. The lessons from the USA Supreme Court tell us that it would not stop there. This building would no longer be the most important on Parliament Square; it would be the Supreme Court building. That would clearly be a fundamental constitutional change, and most people would regard it as unwelcome to our democracy.

I also have a degree of discomfort about what is fundamentally an executive process being essentially laundered by Parliament, as opposed to it being a legislative process from start to finish, as the HS2 and Crossrail hybrid Bill processes were. I do not want to rain on the noble Lord’s parade, and that of those behind this. As I said, I see a lot of merit in trying to go further, but once you realise that the adverse delaying effects of JR can be cut down very substantially, the question is: does going further risk the constitutional crisis that it may very well facilitate, bearing in mind the very severe consequences and implications of that?

On Amendment 47, I recommended that the single shot for cases totally without merit be an oral hearing—as opposed to a written procedure, which is what Amendment 47 covers—because we are dealing with something that interferes with people’s property rights and can take away someone’s home. To my mind, given that degree of interference in fundamental rights, the individuals in question ought to have the right to at least one hearing, even if it is a 30-minute JR permission hearing that declares a case to be totally without merit. There ought to be at least one day in court—otherwise, fundamental constitutional principles and the legitimacy of the process could be undermined. There is no doubt that we need to sharpen up planning and infrastructure, but, if at all humanly possible, we need to do it in a way that carries people with us as opposed to alienating people; that is the way to make the system work.

I am yet to be convinced, but I am willing to be convinced. Ultimately, it is not me that the noble Lord needs to convince but the Minister and her colleagues. For the reasons I have given, I have a degree of nervousness about these amendments.

[Lord Ravensdale (CB)]

My Lords, I do not have a huge amount to add to the comprehensive introduction provided by the noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Kings Heath, but I want to pick up on a few things related to the nuclear industry.

The noble Lord, Lord Hunt, mentioned the eight years from application to consent for Sizewell C. The Government, of course, have big ambitions for the nuclear rollout. Tomorrow I am chairing a board meeting of Midlands Nuclear—a partnership organisation for nuclear across the Midlands region. We are looking at where we can site nuclear power stations within the Midlands, and at small modular reactors and advanced reactors, all in coherence with the Government’s plans through EN-7—the new national policy statement for a more flexible siting approach for nuclear.

There are big ambitions for nuclear and for the industry, but, given the experience we have had with Hinkley, Sizewell and other large infrastructure, we have to be radical. We have to think of new ideas that are going to help speed infrastructure through the system. That is why the Government should take these suggestions from the noble Lord, Hunt of Kings Heath, very seriously. I note that a lot of the principles in Amendment 52—the noble Lord mentioned the tried and tested process within that—and Amendment 65 are similar to those in a law that is being rolled out in Canada. The Government should consider these amendments very seriously.