Planning and Infrastructure Bill

Lord Fuller Excerpts

Report stage
Wednesday 22nd October 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Pinnock (LD)]

My Lords, we on the Liberal Democrat Benches are firm and constant supporters of the right of locally elected councillors to make decisions in their area based on clear national policies. The proposals in the Bill for a national diktat of delegation are the backdrop to this group of amendments. The Government are ostensibly in favour of devolution of decision-making. However, there is a tendency within the Bill to centralise decisions on planning by making it virtually impossible for local decisions to reflect local need and nuance.

Amendment 62A, tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Coffey, is interesting but could be problematic—actually, I thought it less problematic when I heard the noble Baroness’s explanation of the first part of the amendment. Although there are occasions during the life of a plan when unforeseen events arise which mean the local plan is not sacrosanct, on the whole it ought to be, otherwise it will be nibbled away at during its lifetime through precedent.

I have some sympathy with the second part of the noble Baroness’s amendment. Too often, housing sites are assessed as being able to accommodate a large number of units, then along comes the developer—with his eyes on the profit line—who applies for a different balance of houses in which larger, more expensive and more profitable units are to be built. The consequence is that the balance that we need, which is somewhere in between, is not met. The result of allowing developers to determine the density of a site is that more land then has to be allocated for development. I will give one example from my own area. A housing site was allocated in the local plan, under the national rules, for 402 homes. Currently, just over 200 are being built, because of the need—apparently—for five-bed exec homes. The local assessment of housing need shows that what are required are start-up homes and smaller homes with two or three beds. I have a lot of sympathy with that part of the amendment.

Amendment 63, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, is right to seek to put safeguards in place in the rush to take the local out of local democracy. As the noble Lord explained, the amendment is to ensure that the affirmative resolution would be required for the initial changes to the national scheme of delegation. That has got to be right, because it will set the tone for the future of what is accepted as being part of a national scheme of delegation and what is okay for local decision-makers. That is fundamental, and the noble Lord is right to raise it in the amendment. If he wishes to take it to a vote, we on these Benches will support him.

The noble Baroness, Lady Scott of Bybrook, has not yet had the opportunity to speak to her Amendment 76, so I hope she does not mind if I comment on it. We on these Benches will support the noble Baroness if she wishes to take it to a vote. This amendment would be another move towards empowering local decision-makers with the right to take planning applications to committee where there is a volume of valid objections to an application, and then to have the debate in a public setting.

Amendment 87F, tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Coffey, seeks a sensible change to help understand where the real problems lie in the failure to build the houses the country needs. As the noble Baroness hinted, it is not with local planning committees or authorities, otherwise there would not be 1.2 million units with full planning permission waiting for construction. Those figures are from the ONS, and I am not going to quarrel with the ONS. If the Government could get the housing developers to start building those 1.2 million units, we would be well on the way to the 1.5 million that the Government reckon they need during the lifetime of this Parliament.

This is an important group because it is about getting the balance between national need and local decision-making, and between a national view of what is acceptable and local elected councillors being able to reflect local need, nuance and requirements in their local setting. I hope that at least the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, will put his amendment to the vote. It is fundamental to the democratic process to have local decisions on planning.

[Lord Fuller (Con)]

My Lords, I strongly support Amendment 76 in the name of my noble friends on the Front Bench. As I have reminded noble Lords before, I have sat on a planning committee many times, I have appointed such a committee as a leader of a council and chosen the chairman, and I know it is a very important quasi-judicial position. Planning exists to arbitrate between the public good and the private interest. I use the word arbitrate purposely because people who sit on the planning committee have a difficult job. They have to weigh up so much conflicting information. It is an adversarial system, because, ultimately, either the proposer wins or the objector wins. There is no grey purpose in the middle.

Much of the Bill is established under the false premise that local planning committees are the blockers of development and it is only with the ranks of officials that we can get things going. Of course, this is rubbish. Evidence for that assertion was given by the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom, which this morning ruled that it was wrong that Governments and quangos had asserted that Ramsar sites had an equivalence to European sites and thus had to have a full environmental assessment, and overturned it on that narrow point. Within an hour, we had officials and Treasury solicitors boasting how this Bill is going to turn that around and reinstall that unnecessary gold-plating—gold-plating that, after four years, the Court of Appeal ruled should not have happened.

The Government’s suggestion that Ministers should usurp planning committees and instead form a national planning committee among themselves in Marsham Street is as fanciful as it is risible. It is a recipe for hurry up and slow down, and it is not fooling anybody that that is going to speed up development.

The premise is that officialdom brings none of its own particular personal or institutional prejudices to bear, but each quango brings its own vetoes. We have Natural England, with a track record of leaving no stone unturned in blocking or delaying development. We have the railways, which ballast every proposal for a new footbridge with £5 million-worth of cost and preposterous delays. We have the highways authorities, which tie themselves in knots over overly precious technical guidance and misdirect themselves that the private motorcar is intrinsically bad, when it is not. And that is before we get to the other bad actors, which time does not permit me to list.

I do not deny the importance of these quango representations, but the problem is that they all claim a veto, and it is from this that we have the £100 million bat bridge or that mitigating trade in great crested newts, which are rare in Europe but commonplace in every pond in my electoral ward in Norfolk. It is the way that planning works: it takes only one of these proverbial blackballs or vetoes from one of the statutory consultees to stymie a proposal.

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Above all, it is the change of tone that I would worry about. I express concern about some of the public statements that have been made about nature being a blocker, in a way that is incredibly polarising and unhelpful, and, quite frankly, in many cases not true. I recently received the Home Builders Federation’s list of 10 barriers to housing development. Of those 10, there is really only one that applies to nature; the rest are all sorts of other considerations. Nature should not be demonised in the way that it is. I worry that this amendment could be either seen as doing that or interpreted in practice as doing that.

[Lord Fuller (Con)]

My Lords, in the last group your Lordships’ House gave a pretty strong steer when it felt that the role of councillors and councils in determining local planning applications locally, based on a plan—not acting capriciously but on balance, with all the material considerations taken into account—was a very important principle, not just for the way that we run things in the country but for the fact that decisions are made by accountable people in a democratic way.

I am astonished that government Amendment 64 has come forward—although I am not surprised that the Government’s Back Benches are so sparsely populated. What this amendment would do is emasculate the principle of a proper local planning process. It raises the spectre of political interference, at very short timescales, in what is a quasi-judicial process. Clearly—and this is the reason I will ask for reassurance in a moment—it demonstrates a prematurity that is likely to slow down the process of development, rather than speed it up.

My evidence for the slowing down was given by my noble friend Lord Banner. I did not take down all the different sections and stages, but there are clearly statutory safeguard overrides, as well as practice guidance, procedures and statute, so that when development processes come forward, everybody has their say, in the right way, with the appropriate process. While there will always be a winner and a loser, at least people can say that it was done properly.

My concern with this is what the process will be whereby a Minister may call in a decision for stalling it. What intelligence will be relied on, and on what timescale? Planning committee agendas are normally published seven days in advance of the meeting. So within five working days of a recommendation for refusal from the officers, what is the process by which Ministers will be advised, “You’d better jump in on this one; this one might go wrong”?

What happens if there is a recommendation for approval but, on the basis of hearsay, rumour or possibly a letter in the local newspaper, there is a suggestion that the committee might decide to go the other way? I cannot quite understand how that would normally happen, because, as anyone who sits on a planning committee knows, they keep their mouths shut for risk of predetermination. This is where I am concerned about party-political interference in planning. There may be nods and winks and comments such as, “We think that so and so on the other side might be going this way”.

It all belies the fact that, as we all know, because the planning committee meets regularly and because it is quite an onerous thing and other people have different responsibilities, there is a series of substitutions, which are quite proper, with trained substitutes on that committee. With all those moving parts, I wonder, with a week to go, on what basis would the Secretary of State jump in?

I play to the point from the noble Baroness, Lady Young, about a quango report. At what stage are we going to prematurely judge that, of all the different material considerations, one report may be more important than another, when we all know that it is the role of the committee to balance all of them in the round and take in all the material considerations? Are we going to sleepwalk into a situation where Ministers give an additional vicarious respectability to one set of reports over another, with only half the evidence to hand and without seeing in the round the benefit of all the objections, proposals and debate in the chamber? We understand that the purpose of the Bill is to speed up planning, but it seems that its consequence is to slow it right down. How on earth would we end up in a situation where Ministers could be properly advised?

In this House, and in Parliament, there is a proper 12-stage process. We are at stage 10 of 12. For the reasons that my noble friend Lord Banner gave—about the interplay of all the complexity and detail here—this should have been brought forward in Committee or at a much earlier stage. But here we are, at the 11th hour, in Parliament’s revising Chamber, trying to work this out on the hoof. I cannot support this. It rides a coach and horses through established process, principles and democracy. It is half-baked, and it should be thrown out.

[Lord Freyberg (CB)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Earl, Lord Clancarty, to speak in strong support of Amendment 87D in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Coffey. It seeks to address a clear gap in our planning framework: the ease with which valued community buildings can be demolished under permitted development rights.

I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Fuller, for reminding us in Committee that, since 2017, it has not been possible to demolish a pub under permitted development rights and that, since 2020, the same protection has rightly been extended to theatres, live music venues and concert halls. But every other community building—from sports halls to scout huts, youth clubs, village halls, arts centres, community hubs, social clubs, rehearsal rooms, day centres and faith spaces—can legally be demolished through permitted development under class B, in Part 11 of the general permitted development order, usually via only a prior approval notice to the council. In other words, a community can spend months achieving an asset of community value status, believing it has secured protection, yet the owner can still flatten the building with no full planning process, and the opportunity to save it is lost for ever.

The Minister suggested in response to the noble Baroness in Committee that local authorities can already protect such assets by issuing Article 4 directions. Although that may sound reassuring, in practice it is neither adequate nor realistic. Article 4 powers are slow, complex and discretionary. They require public consultation, ministerial approval and significant resources that many councils simply do not have. They are rarely used pre-emptively, and too often they are invoked after buildings have already been lost.

This amendment would provide a far simpler and fairer solution: an automatic national safeguard for assets that communities have already demonstrated to be of real social value. These are not sentimental relics but the social infrastructure of everyday life: the places where children learn to play sport, where community choirs rehearse, where food banks and lunch clubs operate and where amateur dramatic societies, after-school classes and local support groups meet. Once demolished, these spaces are almost never replaced.

As has been referenced, the London Nightlife Taskforce, which offers strategic advice to the mayor and will publish a major action plan later this year, has already underlined the urgency of this issue. Its early findings show that demolition and redevelopment continue to erode London’s community and cultural infrastructure, despite existing local powers. The task force, supported by the Night Time Industries Association, the Music Venue Trust and UKHospitality, is calling for stronger statutory safeguards to prevent the loss of spaces that sustain local life and creativity. Although its recommendations are directed at London, the same challenge exists nationwide. Communities in Manchester, Bristol, Cardiff, Glasgow and countless smaller towns face the same slow erosion of shared civic space, too often replaced by development that contributes little to social cohesion.

If we accept that pubs, theatres and music venues deserve protection from demolition, surely the same logic must apply to any building formally recognised by its community as an asset of value. This modest reform would give communities a genuine say before their most valued spaces disappeared.

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[Lord Blencathra (Con)]

My Lords, I strongly support Amendment 119 and agree with the excellent case set out by my noble friend Lady Neville-Rolfe. My support comes from two cases in my constituency some years ago, caused by the forerunner of Natural England. I think it was the Countryside Commission at the time, and then it was the Countryside Agency, before being amalgamated into Natural England. These two cases simply demonstrate the point that my noble friend has been making. They were a couple of years apart, but the issues were the same, and they have annoyed me to this day because I was absolutely powerless to help small businesses in my constituency.

The first was on creating the Pennine Bridleway, and later a national trail alongside Hadrian’s Wall, both of which had many miles in my constituency. Some of that opened in 2002, some in 2006, and some is not opened yet, but the approval process in principle started either in the late 1980s or early 1990s. The plan was to make these national trails and encourage thousands more people to use them—no bad thing in itself, and I liked the idea. Local farmers were generally not opposed, since they thought they could get involved in providing services to the walkers and riders.

Farmers and householders along Hadrian’s Wall said that, without toilet facilities en route, their stone walls—or behind them—had become toilets. With no cafeterias for miles, sandwich wrappers and uneaten food were dumped in their fields and were a hazard to sheep. They said it would be good for them if they could convert a barn into a coffee shop or toilets, as a quid pro quo for letting thousands of people march over their land. It seemed a very good idea to me at the time to assist small farmers in this way. This was in the wilds of northern Cumbria, near the Scottish border, where some farms had more rushes than grass. It used to be called marginal land but the EU terminology is “severely disadvantaged area”. The lush land of East Anglia it is not. They need every opportunity there to make money and survive.

Farmers on the route of the proposed Pennine Bridleway also wanted to convert some barns into tack rooms, providing food and water for people and horses, and parking space for their trailers. Only a few riders would want to traverse its whole length, or at least the stretches which were open; most wanted to park up and ride a loop of about 15 miles or so. Again, that was a reasonable suggestion which I thought would benefit everyone: walker and riders, the local farmers who would have them on their land, and the environment, which would not be desecrated with rubbish. But that was not to be.

The Countryside Commission said, “Nothing to do with us”. Its job was the trails and bridleway, and it did not care about helping the rural businesses along the route. It was purely a local planning matter. To hear that from a body set up with a remit of helping rural businesses, I was appalled and angered. It would not even publish a statement suggesting to local councils that it might be a jolly good idea to support planning applications which would provide those small infrastructure developments. I approached the local councils, which said they could not comment until an official planning application was received and would not bend the rules to look favourably on them in principle.

I ended up opposing something that I thought was a good thing because of the recalcitrance of government bodies and local councils that would do absolutely nothing to help small businesses in their own patch. I may be wrong but to this day I do not think that a single farm or private building on either of those routes has been given planning permission for even a simple tearoom. That is why I support my noble friend.

[Lord Fuller (Con)]

My Lords, briefly, I support Amendment 103, in the name of my noble friend Lord Banner, who I see is now in his place, on proportionality in planning. In Committee, his amendment was rejected out of hand.

This is a Bill promoted by several departments. We have spent the last hour with the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, from Defra, justifying government Amendment 68 strictly on the grounds of proportionality between good governance, effective value for money and so forth. I say to the noble Baroness, Lady Taylor, from the other department, that the Government cannot have it both ways. Government Amendment 68 having been pressed so hard on the positive angle of proportionality, I now challenge her to accept Amendment 103, which makes exactly the same grounds, but of course from my noble friend Lord Banner’s perspective rather than the other.

[Lord Meston (CB)]

My Lords, I wish briefly to support Amendment 69, for the reasons advanced by the noble Earl. I just want to raise one question. The amendment would provide for guidance promoting the use of mediation. I would like to know whether the expectation of that amendment, if agreed, is that mediation should become mandatory, as is really the case in much civil litigation. If it is to be mandatory, what would be the sanctions for non-compliance with a direction for mediation?