Planning and Infrastructure Bill

Debate between Lord Framlingham and Lord Inglewood

Committee stage
Wednesday 17th September 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Framlingham (Con)]

My Lords, I wish to make a brief intervention. In terms of infrastructure, nothing has had a more devastating effect on the countryside and nature than HS2—for no purpose at all, which is very sad. The point I wish to put to the Minister relates to compulsory purchase orders. I do not know whether she is aware that the farmers have been paid only 90% of the value of the farmland taken for HS2, which seems grotesquely unfair. I wonder whether she would take that on board and perhaps comment on it or think about it.

[Lord Inglewood (CB)]

My Lords, I rise briefly to support those who have argued that the levy must be spent exclusively on nature. That is what it is collected for. The Government, who administer these things more generally, have enormous resources at their disposal and they are ordaining that this is the way things will be done. As part of that, they should foot the bill for their own activities.

If I may, I will also turn briefly to Amendment 309, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Gascoigne. I have great sympathy with it, but it might be better to include a spatial measure, rather than a local authority boundary measure, behind the approach we adopt. If we have a development very close to a local authority boundary, it may be that the right place to spend the money is just over the boundary. Equally, I have suddenly discovered that I live in the county of Westmorland, when previously I had always lived in Cumberland. The distance from Alston to Barrow-in-Furness, which are in the same county, is over 100 miles, and I think that would throw up problems.

There is also a deeper, fundamental problem, to which I do not know the answer. Part of the emotional element of the levy is that the money is to be spent on nature and environmental improvements quite close by—that is the psychology of it. As the noble Baroness, Lady Coffey, said, in cases such as the Channel Tunnel, that is not really possible. Speaking as someone from the north of England, where we have plenty of projects which could benefit from money of this kind, if all the money raised is in the south of England and cannot be spent in the north, you would find a very considerable feeling of discontent. A lot of the problems, once you get away from the immediate locality of any particular project, may well be, at the most extreme, quite a long way away.