Planning and Infrastructure Bill

Baroness Pinnock Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 4th September 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Pinnock (LD)]

My Lords, I do not envy the Minister having to respond to this very cogent debate, which at first sight seemed important but not as in-depth as it has turned out to be. We on these Benches strongly support the amendment in my noble friend’s name, and she made a very strong argument for its adoption. Other key points have been made and we have broad agreement with them, dependent on the detail that will come, I guess, from the Minister.

First, on listed building consent, which is currently free—not the project itself but the actual listed building consent—we would support that remaining free of charge for the owners of those listed buildings. The noble Lord, Lord Parkinson, clearly made the very strong case for its continuation. I hope that the Minister will be able to give us a categorical reason for its retention.

Secondly, on enforcement and appeals, it seems to me that the legislation that enables costs of appeals to be made ought to be enforced and enacted, and the money should go to where it belongs—not to the Treasury but to the Planning Inspectorate. Again, that was a strongly made argument with which we have broad agreement.

Finally, the issue raised by the noble Lord, Lord Young of Cookham—which he and I raised during the long debates on the levelling-up Bill—has come back again. He rightly raises the issue, as I did at the time, that councils ought to have a local plan and, without it, the planning system falters or, indeed, often fails. It would be good to hear from the Minister what actions the Government intend to take to encourage and enforce the idea of all councils having a local plan, albeit within the context of further reorganisation of local government, which will put such concentration of energy on to a strategic planning system for local councils in jeopardy.

This has been a really good debate, and we have broad agreement with all the points that have been made.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (Baroness Taylor of Stevenage) (Lab)]

My Lords, that was a very interesting, wide-ranging, detailed and thoughtful debate around many planning matters, including some of the amendments that had been tabled. I am very grateful to all noble Lords who have taken part. As a planning geek myself, it is never a trouble to listen to these types of discussions. I will answer some specific points, but I would like to make a couple of general comments first.

In introducing her amendment, the noble Baroness, Lady Scott, asked for a more radical approach to planning. The noble Lord, Lord Young, set out the radical approach even better than I could myself. I have, of course, heard completely opposing views on the Planning and Infrastructure Bill before us, with one set of people saying that it is too radical and another saying it is not radical enough. I always think that if you get to there, you are probably in about the right place, but your Lordships will be the judge of that.

The Bill is a step in driving forward the infrastructure planning and changes to planning that we want to see in order to get economic growth going, but it is not the only step. As the noble Lord, Lord Young, outlined, as we continue with our planning for new authorities, there will be further change in introducing the strategic plans—that is coming forward in the English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill. I look forward to debating those changes with noble Lords in due course.

The noble Lord, Lord Young, also mentioned the investment that is needed in planning. We are very aware of the fact that the cuts to local government funding that we all experienced over a couple of decades have meant that the investment in planning was not always there. We have already put £46 million in to try to improve the investment in planning and the quantity and capacity of planning departments. We will continue to work on that.

The noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, raised the issue of local plans. We are already making progress on that. The Secretary of State has made it very clear to local authorities that she expects to see local plans in place. You jeopardise the whole process of development in this country when you get an out-of-date local plan, and developers can ride roughshod over local wishes because there is no local plan in place. It is a very important part of the process. The noble Lord, Lord Young, raised the issue of how these local plans will be reconstructed when we get new authorities in place. Of course, much of the work will have been done. We will not need to redo all the studies; they can be aggregated into those wider plans. But it is important that those plans will be in place.

To pick up a point that is not in these amendments, I say to the noble Lord, Lord Fuller, that I am aware of the issue with level 7 apprenticeships in planning. I was very keen on planning apprenticeships and having that route to good quality and more capacity in planning teams. I am discussing that with colleagues in the Department for Education and will comment on that further when I have had more discussions with them.

Turning now to Amendments 94FB and 94 FC, tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Scott, I understand the importance of ensuring that local planning authorities or the Mayor of London are not burdened with unnecessary obligations, particularly in relation to fee setting. That is why I want to be very clear. The Government’s intention is to pursue a local variation model. The approach will not require local planning authorities or the Mayor of London to set their own fees but instead provides those authorities with the option to vary from a national default planning fee where they consider it necessary to do so to better meet their costs.

However, we believe it is important to retain a flexibility within that power. The inclusion of “or require” preserves the ability to mandate local fee setting should there be a compelling case for it in the future—for example, to improve service delivery or address disparities in performance. Removing that flexibility would risk constraining our future ability to evolve the system. The noble Lord, Lord Lansley, talked about how we will monitor planning performance. He will know very well that an extensive planning monitoring regime in already in place, which local authorities have to meet. Keeping an eye on this, as well, will help with that. I hope the noble Baroness will agree that retaining this power in its current form represents a balanced and prudent approach and that she will agree to withdraw her amendment.

I am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Thornhill, for tabling Amendment 94G. I am entirely in accord with her on the importance of ensuring that fees are proportionate to the nature and size of the planning application. In her very clear explanation of her amendment, she rightly highlighted the importance of our SME building sector, which we also saw highlighted, as she will remember, in the report of the Competition and Markets Authority. I share her intent to do all we can to support SMEs. Indeed, it was a local SME builder who helped me kick off my housing development programme when I was a council leader. It was a mutual arrangement—we helped support them and they helped support what we were doing. There can be very good arrangements locally.

However, the Bill already provides a clear and robust framework to ensure that planning fees are proportionate. The noble Lord, Lord Fuller, and the noble Earl, Lord Lytton, mentioned the proportionality issue. As I just mentioned, the Government intend to introduce a local variation model under which a nationally set default fee, developed through benchmarking and public consultation, will serve as a baseline, as is currently the case with planning fees. To answer the noble Baronesses, Lady Thornhill and Lady Neville-Rolfe, this will account for variations in the size and nature of sites.

The model ensures both consistency and transparency in fee setting while allowing local planning authorities the flexibility to depart from the nationally set default fee where circumstances warrant. The Bill requires that any locally set fee must not exceed the cost of delivering the relevant service—I hope that picks up the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Lansley—and that local communities must be consulted on proposed changes. Importantly, the Secretary of State will also retain the power to intervene where fees are considered inappropriate, thereby providing an important safeguard to uphold consistency and equity across the system. I am therefore confident that the Bill already addresses the concerns that this amendment seeks to resolve.

On Amendment 95, tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh, I agree that well-resourced planning departments are essential in enabling the development that our communities need, but also for safeguarding those communities from unauthorised or harmful development. We appreciate the intention of the amendment in supporting the resourcing of enforcement activity but, as planning enforcement serves the wider public interest, it is appropriate for local authorities to allocate funds to support these services. Allowing planning authorities to raise planning fees to cover enforcement costs could result in disproportionately high fees. We are concerned that that may deter development at a time when we are committed to accelerating housing delivery and getting Britain building.

To answer the noble Baroness’s question directly, this was not an oversight in drafting the Bill; we did consider it. More broadly, the Government have, as I have already mentioned, committed to the £46 million package of investment to support the capacity and capability of local planning authorities.

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Moved by

[Baroness Pinnock]

103ZZA: Clause 51, page 67, line 21, leave out “by regulations require” and insert “issue guidance that requires”
Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment and others in the name of Baroness Pinnock change the provision of regulations in Clause 51 to guidance issued by the Secretary of State.

[Baroness Pinnock (LD)]

My Lords, we now turn to the mechanics of making planning decisions. I accept the Government’s purpose in Clause 51 to drive greater consistency and expectations of the process by developers. There is a great diversity of the ways in which planning decisions are made across the country. The Government have obviously had their ear bent and are trying hard to understand that and to come to some arrangements by which planning applications are dealt with in a similar way across the country.

However, a drive to do so through regulation removes what I assert is absolutely vital local flexibility. Setting regulation by, for example, the size of application, number of houses, by hectare or, worse still, by local plan site allocation only, as may be the case, absolutely ignores local geography and the existing local built environment. Unduly restricting publicly taken decisions on planning issues may well feed the lack of trust in public institutions, which we surely all want to avoid.

That is why my amendments—there is a whole string of them—are designed to ensure that local decisions remain with local people and their elected representatives, where that is determined by local policies and by a combination, as we heard on the previous group, of local chief planning officers and the planning committee chair. People care passionately about the places where they live, and they care about the changes that are made to them. They want to be included in helping influence decisions about those changes—for example, new housing sites.

Enabling residents to take part in planning decisions is vital. At the moment, there are two ways in which residents can do so. The first is by formally objecting to an application through the planning portal and hoping that that will be taken into account in a decision. But, if that is a decision made by an officer, there is no report that will include those objections and the reasons why they may have been overturned. So one of the benefits of having decisions, particularly and mainly about controversial developments, is that the objections made by local residents can be heard in public and seen in the report that the planning officer has to make for the planning committee, which will include a summary of the objections and the reasons for them. Restricting the number of applications that are heard in public, as the regulations will do, is totally detrimental.

I will give one example of why that may be the case. A planning application near where I live is bounded by a busy main A road, the M62, a cricket field and a residential road. There are a lot of constraints on this small housing development of 20-odd houses that have to be taken into account and will conflict with one another—dealing with the motorway noise, the cricket field, the busy main road, access and safety and all the rest. A lot of issues have to be considered. Under these regulations, it is very likely that that planning application would be determined by officers. There would be no ability, as there is currently, for local councillors, in conjunction with the committee chair and the chief planning officer, to make a decision. There are so many controversial and conflicting issues that that decision is best taken through an open decision-making process in the committee. We ought to be proud of that as a country—that is how we make decisions. It is democracy, and we need to strengthen it, not pull the rug from under it.

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[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

We trust planning officers, but we do not want to undermine that scheme of delegation.

Amendment 135HZF seeks to ensure that any applications by the council itself or any of its employees or councillors where there are no objections do not need to go to committee. While I understand the noble Lord’s reasons for tabling such an amendment, I again think that this is a matter best dealt with in the regulations rather than in the Bill. Indeed, the recent technical consultation on planning committees sought views on the treatment of such applications. I can therefore assure the noble Lord that we will consider his suggestion alongside the formal responses to that consultation.

To conclude, I assure noble Lords once again that Clause 51 is not about taking away local democratic oversight. It is about improving the system to allow planning committees to operate more effectively in the interests of their communities and to give them the time to focus their attention where it really matters.

I now turn to a series of amendments tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, which seek to remove the requirement to create regulations needed for the framework for a mandatory national scheme of delegation and would replace this requirement with a power to make statutory guidance. They would also remove the ability for the Secretary of State to control the size and composition of planning committees.

The Government have been very clear: we want to see a national scheme of delegation introduced to ensure greater certainty across the country and to speed up decision-making to support the delivery of 1.5 million homes during this Parliament. I emphasise that these reforms are a real priority for this Government. We need to ensure that the legal framework for the national scheme of delegation is robust and clear, and that is why we need to legislate for it through regulations. Statutory guidance is not sufficient to provide the certainty and consistency that we want to see.

I also disagree that we should not legislate to control the size and composition of planning committees. I fully accept that many planning committees have slimmed down in recent years and are nearer the optimal size for effective engagement and debate. However, there are still too many which are unwieldy, undermining the quality of decision-making. We firmly believe that there remains a strong case to have powers to regulate the committees’ size and composition. With these explanations, I kindly ask noble Lords not to press their amendments.

[Baroness Pinnock (LD)]

My Lords, I thank everyone who has spoken in this debate about the practicalities of planning application decision-making. I thought the most telling point that the Minister made was in her introductory remarks, when she said that the Government want councillors to focus on local plan making. Local plan making is an absolutely vital building block to planning decision-making, because it sets the local policies within the framework of the National Planning Policy Framework, and it sets out and, in theory, agrees sites for development by business, commerce or for housing—or institutions of various sorts.

In my long time as a local councillor, I have taken through, I think, three or four local plan-making processes, and all my experience tells me that it is very difficult to get local people to engage in the theory of site allocation and what it will mean for them. And that is why I have made the case I have today. Yes, local plans are vital and set the foundations for a plan and for place making for an area, but, equally, we need the flexibility within that for local people to have their say. If local people do not have their say, that essential safeguard, that essential safety valve of an open public discussion about an issue which is controversial, will be taken away, to the detriment of local democracy and national democracy.

However, with those points, and thanking everybody who has contributed to the debate, because it has been a good one, I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.

Amendment 103ZZA withdrawn.

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[Baroness Coffey (Con)]

It is reflective of what is proportionate to the local community. My noble friend Lord Framlingham will be aware of the legal judgments of the past few years where some large-scale accommodation sites were deemed unlawful. As my noble friend Lord Jackson of Peterborough said, the current Government are trying to work this out and balance it as well. It is not a straightforward action, so I will not criticise them for it. However, it is certainly valid to have this debate about whether these hotels need a separate planning class, recognising the decision that was made last week in the Court of Appeal.

Houses in multiple occupation require both planning permission and a licence. I do not want us to get into the situation of having to license hotels. However, HMOs have both because the accommodation is being used in a perhaps non-traditional way compared to its original intention. Therefore, extra conditions are put on by the local council or there is deliberate consideration, recognising the change in impact that the transfer of traditional uses of accommodation to others can have on the local community. Therefore, while I expect that the Government will probably brush this aside, it is important to understand the temperature, but also what we have done in the past to recognise when things have changed significantly, in order to make sure that decisions are made carefully, considerately and competently when addressing this type of situation.

[Baroness Pinnock (LD)]

My Lords, the sheer hypocrisy of those on the Conservative Benches seems to know no bounds. As we have heard, it was in 2020 that this scale and number of hotels being used for asylum seekers began in earnest. It seems that it has taken five years for Members on the Conservative Benches to come to the conclusion that it may have been necessary for the use of these hotels to require planning consent. What on earth has triggered their sudden interest in planning issues for hotels harbouring asylum seekers? I am struggling to think what the issue could be. What I do know—

[Baroness Laing of Elderslie (Con)]

I will give the noble Baroness one brief answer to her question. An asylum seeker who was living at the Bell Hotel in Epping has been found guilty of the sexual assault of a young girl. That is just one small reason.

[Lord Teverson (LD)]

That was a somewhat desperate contribution—seriously so.

[Baroness Pinnock (LD)]

The intervention by the noble Baroness, Lady Laing, seemed to distance where somebody lives from their behaviours. The intervention she made was irrelevant. The fact is that the previous Conservative Government started using hotels for temporary accommodation for asylum seekers and made no effort to increase the speed of assessment for those asylum seekers, so that they could have certainty in their lives and local accommodation would not be put under undue stress. It was not only a failure of public policy by the previous Government; it was inhumane. It surprised me that the noble Baroness, Lady Scott, for whom I have high regard, has seen fit to bring these amendments. It is out of character for her to do so. Perhaps on later reflection, she will regret bringing them.

[Lord Fuller (Con)]

This is the Planning and Infrastructure Bill—the opportunity to have this sort of wider debate on asylum, borders and infrastructure was yesterday with the borders and asylum Bill. What we are trying to do here is focus on the very narrow point about when there is a change in the planning status. As my noble friend said, when there is development, should the rules that cover planning and development be engaged and, if so, to what extent? I think my noble friend’s amendments—I am sure she will say something aligned with this when she winds up—would establish the principle that, when development happens, we cannot just pick and choose which bits are subject to planning law and which are not. When development happens, local people should be able to have their say.

It pains me to do so, but I ask the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, directly: is it her position that local people should not have a say when development happens and there is a material change of use, either from a hotel to an HMO or from an HMO to a hostel? If it is, we need to know.

[Lord in Waiting/Government Whip (Lord Wilson of Sedgefield) (Lab)]

I ask the noble Lord to get to the point of his question.

[Baroness Pinnock (LD)]

I will continue. Why has it taken five years for the Conservatives to wake up to the fact, as they seem to think now, there is a principled planning issue associated with using hotels for temporary accommodation for asylum seekers? That is the question.

[Lord Banner (Con)]

My Lords—

[Baroness Pinnock (LD)]

No, I am not taking any further interventions.

The failure of this approach is that, if hotels are not used, what other temporary accommodation is going to be used for asylum seekers? That is where we are with the attempt made by these amendments.