Planning and Infrastructure Bill

Lord Mawson Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 17th July 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness McIntosh of Pickering (Con)]

My Lords, I am delighted that we have reached Committee, and I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, on having tabled the first amendment for debate. I echo many of her comments and those of my noble friend Lady Scott. I greatly enjoyed the contribution from the noble Lord, Lord Hunt; it is great to see him in his new position. We very much enjoyed working with him when he was on the Front Bench, and we look forward to working with him in his new place.

My concern is not that I do not want to see the critical infrastructure and housing that we need—particularly, as the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, said, in rural areas. In fact, I would propose to add a little “subsection (e)” to her existing Amendment 1, to protect the countryside from overdevelopment, as well as to protect and promote food security; those issues should be at the heart of the Bill.

I was delighted to hear on “Farming Today” this morning—I obviously had an early start—the CPRE mention the protection it would like to see for affordable homes. It mentioned in its briefing that the current definition of affordable homes is not accurate and should be revisited. Can the Minister—with whom I look forward to collaborating through the passage of the Bill—say whether the Government are minded to do that? The plea from the CPRE—which I believe is appropriate to Amendment 1, and particularly to a hypothetical “subsection (e)”, which I may bring forward on Report if the amendment is brought back—is that, to protect the countryside, it would like a commitment from the Government to use brownfield land first. I wonder whether the Minister would agree to that. In the CPRE’s view:

“England has space for 1.2 million homes on previously developed land”.


The benefit of building in this type of area is:

“These homes would: be close to jobs, schools, and transport connections; regenerate town centres and urban communities; protect green spaces and farmland from development”.


My concern is that, without an amendment such as a hypothetical little “subsection (e)” to protect the countryside and food security, we risk trampling over the countryside and greenfield in a mad dash to build houses at pace.

The CPRE also says, quite rightly, that there is a role for planning. As a one-time Member of the other place, if there were a development in my constituency that looked as though it was going to be wildly unpopular with a village or rural community, I would always urge the developers to meet at the earliest opportunity with parish councils before the development got into the public domain. I believe that there should be—this view is also shared by the CPRE—a clear role for local planning committees in the context of the Bill and that the role of parish councils should be cherished and strengthened. Without that, we would remove grass-roots democracy.

I very much enjoyed the remarks of the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, on the environmental recovery programme, which is often at some distance from the damage being done. If Part 3 is to remain, I hope that it will cover the issues that were addressed successfully in the pilot project in rural North Yorkshire—the Slowing the Flow at Pickering flood scheme—where we have effectively protected the development downstream by having not a major reservoir but a small reservoir. The construction of bunds, alongside other projects such as chopping down trees and growing trees in appropriate places, has allowed us to slow the flow. It is that type of imaginative nature solution—working with nature by, for example, planting trees in appropriate places—that can achieve flood resilience and flood defences, while also not contributing to flooding going forward. I hope that the Government might be mindful of protecting the countryside and farmland for the food security that is urgently needed, while also strengthening grass-roots democracy in the way I have suggested.

[Lord Mawson (CB)]

My Lords, I am sympathetic to these amendments, but I am also very sympathetic to what the Government are trying to achieve in getting things built.

My colleagues and I have been at the other end of this telescope in communities trying to build things and get things done. We are now at year 41 and probably nearly a thousand projects in—some have been very small; others, such as the Olympics, became quite big. You get a perspective from practice on all that, which might be helpful to this discussion. Many years ago, we came across the challenge of what we call the two Ds: democracy and delivery. What I discovered many years ago with an East End group of people, on a failing group of housing estates where everything was failing constantly, was that local people were fed up to the back teeth with endless chatter and endless promises by councillors, when nothing seemed to happen. We only really became credible in Bromley-by-Bow, and trust began to emerge, when we delivered our first nursery with local parents and their children, which made a difference to their lives, and began to take over a derelict park where people were injecting every day in a completely dysfunctional situation.

It might be just worth me sharing the reasons why we made certain long-term choices. When I arrived in Tower Hamlets in the early 1980s, it was profoundly dysfunctional. The schools did not succeed, and the roads did not get swept. Some 97% of everything was run by the state, and it was a terrible mess. I was a local clergyman arriving in a rundown church; 12 old people sat where they had always sat in a 200-seater church, and it looked as though the dead had been carried out and no one had noticed. I had £400 in the bank. The little problem for me was to ask myself: what on earth can I do about this? The answer was: I do not have the faintest idea. As a Yorkshireman, my initial instinct was to do a runner; it is all too much for me. Phillip, the Jewish headteacher across the road at the primary school, was retiring early because it had become too much for him, so I thought, “This is me in a few years’ time, falling off my trolley”—I was 29 then.

Planning and Infrastructure Bill

Lord Mawson Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 17th July 2025 Lords Chamber

My amendment is very modest. It is saying two things: first, impose strict deadlines for statutory consultations. We cannot have a situation where regulators do not respond and do what they are expected to do on time. We have to draw a line on that. Secondly, the council recommended international benchmarking. Regular international benchmarking of British project performance on infrastructure as compared with other countries would be very valuable indeed. It would be salutary because we would have it confirmed that, in general, we take longer, we cost more money and we get less outcome. This amendment would be helpful, and I hope noble Lords and the Government will be sympathetic. I beg to move.

[Lord Mawson (CB)]

My Lords, I wish to say something about the housing regulator, because it is absolutely as the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, is saying. As I explained earlier, in our practical experience, we have built a very successful housing company with local residents, which is trying to join the dots between housing, education, health and placemaking. We find that the housing regulator is constantly getting in the way of the innovation that we, with local residents, need to do, which has local support and a serious track record.

This particular regulator—and I have seen it in other areas as well—is a real problem. There needs to be real thought and reflection about whether these regulators are helping us innovate and find new ways of working—or are they just getting in the way? Of course, they need to ask challenging questions on using the money right, I get all of that. We need to address these issues, as the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, is telling us. It is stopping us in east London doing what we now need to do to take our work to the next stage.

[Lord Banner (Con)]

I want to say something about what the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, said about the default risk aversion, and how there is a significant risk of that with regulators. There is a lot of merit in those comments. Largely, that stems from the application of the precautionary principle in much of the field of law that we are discussing now. Materially diluting the precautionary principle in a substantial way would have all sorts of troublesome consequences, but, in my judgment, some kind of counterbalance, which is what the proportionality principle is seeking to do, would help temper the effects of that. There is a later amendment in the noble Lord’s name which would seek to modify the precautionary principle in quite a sensible way. But I agree that something needs to be done to ensure that that over-precautionism does not infect the application of these provisions.

Planning and Infrastructure Bill

Lord Mawson Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 25th June 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Mawson (CB)]

My Lords, it is very difficult to talk about anything of substance in five minutes on a subject so central to this Government. But having talked with colleagues in the industry, I would like to make the following brief points. I declare my interests.

First, my colleagues are reassured by the sense of purpose and drive that the Government are demonstrating in this policy area. We need to help the Bill get on to the statute book soon, so that we can get building.

Secondly, the Bill needs to think more about building communities and place-making, not just about building more soulless housing estates. The Government are rightly committed to addressing a range of different problems: housing, health, crime, education and net zero. The lesson from the history of failed housing estates built in the 1960s and 1970s by the public sector, and the worrying signs from too much of what is being built today, is that if we build homes in the wrong way, we will not only fail to help solve these problems but make them worse.

We need to build places and strong, humane cultures and communities, not just homes. If noble Lords are in any doubt what this means for local residents, they should take five minutes and listen to Billy Connolly’s description on YouTube of what happened to him and his family when they were moved out of their home and community in the Gorbals in Glasgow and placed in a soulless housing estate on the edge of town. No one can describe the experience more clearly than Billy.

My colleagues and I are working on addressing precisely these issues in projects across the country with some of our major developers, and we are happy to share with the Minister and her colleagues our 360-degree approach to place-making, which is focused on buildings and culture—maybe she can let me know if there is interest.

We are all very concerned about what happens to bats and newts, but how concerned are we about the young mother I was with a few months ago on a multimillion-pound new housing estate in east London whose two year-old was already picking up needles in the play area? We all need to think very carefully together about how we do not repeat those mistakes in this next phase of development.

Thirdly, it is good news that planning officers will be given greater responsibility to determine smaller applications, reserved matter submissions and schemes on allocated sites through a new proposed national scheme of delegation. This should lead to greater consistency of approach across local planning authorities, plus certainty and timeliness of decisions. The mandatory training of planning committee members should, in theory, also lead to greater consistency and certainty for applications that do not fit into the above national scheme of delegation.

Having sat on a planning committee for many years, I know how flawed these present processes are, and I have watched too many local councillors play political games with these local processes. I think His Majesty’s Opposition need to think more clearly about the connections between democracy and delivery. There needs to be more clarity in their thinking about this matter.

Fourthly, the nature restoration fund, hopefully, will remove the restriction on 160,000 homes stalled by nutrient neutrality restrictions by allowing developers to pay into a nature restoration fund that delivers habitat improvements at a regional scale, rather than requiring site-specific ecological mitigation for every scheme. This should speed up the delivery of sites. There are, however, concerns about Natural England’s ability to deliver a robust scheme on a timely basis.

Fifthly, the proposal in the Bill to speed up the delivery of nationally significant infrastructure projects is also much welcomed and should provide greater clarity and certainty over the delivery of these projects.

Having said all this positive news, I think there remain some challenges for business colleagues in the industry. The introduction of new cross-boundary regional strategic planning could be positive, driving a more joined-up approach towards housing, economic and infrastructure growth across LPAs. However, there are significant concerns about the potential delays to new local plans and housing schemes because of this structural change. LPAs, which remain critically underresourced are undergoing significant change through forthcoming devolution and the abolition of the two-tier authority system, which, when tied in with the need to deliver these regional strategies soon, mean there may be an awful lot of resource tied up in delivering restructuring and not delivering local plans and housing schemes, which are needed in the short term.

I finish with a reality check: the current length of timeframes for securing planning permission will likely not shrink by a significant amount. Bidding on a site now does not realistically generate volume for the large housing businesses until 2028, given the timescales associated with securing planning permission, selling consented land, securing reserve matters, signing Section 106 agreements, site preparation and the build and sale of homes. By and large, the Bill is seen by many in the housing industry as very positive, with several of the changes proposed leading to quicker, more consistent and more certain outcomes. However, this has to be set against the wider context and systematic issues present, which may limit the positive impact these reforms will have.

Local Government Reorganisation

Lord Mawson Excerpts

Thursday 16th January 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

I thank my noble friend for his important question. It gives me an opportunity to clarify some of the misunderstanding around the number that has been given. It was in our manifesto that we would pursue a devolution agenda, and for many months after the Government were elected we were pushed to give an optimum number for the size of a council. Of course, when we did so, everyone said, “Not that number; that’s not the right number.” There is some flexibility around it. The important thing in the whole of this process is that the size, geography and demography of the units created make sense for people. We can be flexible around the numbers, but the number of 500,000 was intended to set out what we feel would be around the right size for the economies of scale and to deliver effective services at local level in a way that gives value for money.

[Lord Mawson (CB)]

My Lords, can the Minister please inform the House of any work the Government have done on what the practical implications might be of this local government reorganisation on their encouraging plans to build 1.5 million homes during this Parliament? Will this reorganisation help speed up the delivery of these homes or, in practice, slow the whole process down? Can the Minister give us a clue as to how this will work in practice as public sector staff look for new jobs?

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

The intention is that this will help with the delivery of both growth and new homes. The intention, as set out quite clearly in the White Paper, is for mayors to have powers over strategic planning—not the local planning that local authorities currently do—so that they can work with the constituent councils in their areas to set out plans for housing. The noble Lord referred to issues of planning. We have put in a significant sum of money to improve the capacity for planning authorities as we take forward the programme of delivering 1.5 million homes.