Planning and Infrastructure Bill

Debate between Chris Curtis and Alberto Costa

Report stage
Monday 9th June 2025 Commons Chamber

[Alberto Costa]

I would welcome that. The Government need to take into account Lutterworth East and to ask themselves why a Labour parliamentarian and a Conservative parliamentarian have had to go begging to the Government to look into the matter. The Government purport to want to see more social housing, more affordable housing and more accessible housing, but with Lutterworth East they have had the opportunity to look into that and have chosen not to rectify the issue. In concluding—I am aware that others wish to speak—I simply ask the Government whether they are willing to have a meeting with me and the Labour parliamentarian in question to discuss what they could do on this matter, given that the developer, incredibly, is none other than a county council.

[Chris Curtis]

May we please start by acknowledging something that still has not been acknowledged enough: the current planning system is broken? Nowhere is that clearer than in our environmental and habitats regulation, which part 3 of the Bill is hoping to fix, and which many amendments—amendment 69 in particular—would make significantly worse.

Let us start with a couple of clear examples. First, we have the lower Thames crossing. Some £250 million was spent on a planning application spanning over 350,000 pages. That is more than 250 times the length of “War and Peace” at a cost that is more than Norway paid to build the world’s longest road tunnel. Fifteen years on, not a single spade is in the ground.

Secondly, we are currently building the most expensive nuclear power station in the history of the human race at Hinkley Point. Why? For the last eight years, EDF has been stuck in regulatory wrangling over—I kid you not—a fish disco: an acoustic system designed to guide fish away from water intakes. Millions spent and still not a single resolution.

My personal favourite is the infamous bat tunnel, where £120 million of taxpayers’ money was wasted on a tunnel that might save a handful of bats from a nearby forest, though many experts argue it will more likely put them in harm’s way. That is not planning; it is parody. While we argue about newts and bat tunnels, what is really happening in Britain is that 150,000 children or more are growing up in temporary accommodation, with all the consequences mentioned by my hon. Friend the Member for Vauxhall and Camberwell Green (Florence Eshalomi).