Planning and Infrastructure Bill

Debate between Blake Stephenson and Dan Tomlinson

Report stage
Monday 9th June 2025 Commons Chamber

[Dan Tomlinson]

I should make progress so that others can speak; my hon. Friend and I will have to talk later.

This Bill and this Government are all about the economic growth that ultimately is the route to more jobs, more opportunities and higher living standards—a better life for all of us in every part of the country. That is the potential of this Bill, and we must match the scale of the problem with the scale of our ambition. Britain’s economic decline has gone on for too long. Families are suffering with a crippling cost of living crisis, driven by high housing costs in many parts of the country and high energy bills everywhere. We just do not invest as a country; we do not build, and year after year we find ourselves surprised that we are worse off and that we are stuck in a doom loop from which no politicians in recent decades, if we are honest, have had the guts to pull us out.

We finally have a Government elected on a promise to wrest us from this decline, and legislation that takes steps in the right direction to do just that. Of course, there is more to do—much more—but this is a strong legislative start. For the prosperity of all our constituents, I hope the Bill passes unamended today.

[Blake Stephenson (Mid Bedfordshire) (Con)]

I rise to speak in support of new clauses 43, 44, 52, 53 and 81, if I have time. Mid Bedfordshire is a fast-growing area and has accommodated more than its fair share of new homes in the past decade. Since 2012, the two districts that my constituency covers have delivered over 35,000 new homes, including the new town of Wixams. Yet this Government would have us believe that those people in my constituency who have seen housing growth outpace services, who are still waiting for the long-promised GP surgery, for train stations and for other infrastructure, and who fear that the character of their historic Ends villages is being lost, are all blockers because they are concerned about what more badly planned development would mean for the overstretched amenities and services in their area.

The Bill is an opportunity to lead. It is an opportunity not to pit blockers against builders but to deliver a system that turns blockers into builders. Regrettably, as it stands, the Bill will fail, but it does not have to fail. My new clause 52 would create a fairer way of managing new towns by reforming the new towns programme, which seems expressly designed to make local communities resent the towns foisted upon them. It would replace that new towns model with one that does not involve a double whammy of house building—currently, communities that want to do the right thing and build the houses that people need find every patch of countryside is hoovered up because the Government have added a new town on top of the developable area in their district.

My new clause 53 would close the loophole that allows planning authorities to grant developments on floodplains. That is a perfectly sensible and pragmatic position. People in Maulden in my constituency know all too well how bad development compounds the risk of flooding. They are honest hard-working people who want to enjoy the warm and dry homes that their hard work has paid for, but the Government are backing big-box developers, not them. The new clause would prevent developers from getting away high and dry with their profits while our constituents pay the price in flooded homes. New clause 44, in the name of my hon. Friend the Member for Ruislip, Northwood and Pinner (David Simmonds), would do the same by ensuring that where development does happen, developers must deliver and maintain sustainable urban drainage infrastructure. The current guidance is too vague and the current rules too lax to ensure that our residents are protected.

My Mid Bedfordshire constituency has lots of beautiful villages, but they are under threat from the creeping spread of urban sprawl that threatens to merge them into a conglomerate mass of development, which flies in the face of the historically gentle and natural evolution of our beautiful estate villages. I therefore endorse new clause 43 for its efforts to stop our beautiful villages from being lost to future generations.