Planning and Infrastructure Bill

Earl of Lytton Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 25th June 2025 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Lytton (CB)]

My Lords, I must remind your Lordships of my professional involvement in aspects of this sector as a fellow of the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors, an honorary fellow of the Chartered Association of Building Engineers, a vice-president of the National Association of Local Councils and joint president of the East Sussex Association of Local Councils. I am also a CLA member and a small-scale landowner.

There is much to welcome in this Bill, especially on the need to speed up the pace of delivery. Inordinate delays involve substantial cost and risk. However—and I apologise for concentrating on some of the bits that concern me—cutting out consultees and some local deliberations, which seems to be part of the proposal, strikes me as an unlikely saving. I feel that a more systematic approach to a rather labyrinthine planning system is in fact needed. The main focus of the Bill is infrastructure rollout, but delivery seems to remain via a rather poorly regulated private sector and still risks putting commercial imperatives in front of national policy and public interest, both as to rollout and cost to the taxpayer. Look where we are with utilities and telecoms right now.

As to electrical power, for instance, the rate of transfer of carbon-based road fuel and heating loads on to a greener electricity grid remains fettered by excessive cost per unit, while generation capacity and distribution lag years behind need, arguably requiring significant redesign beyond ever more pylons—which, of course, is a challenge in itself.

Water quality and quantity affect several key regions. Limiting consumption of a finite resource by the rest of us is a necessary offset as part of new housing and water neutrality, but that is happening only at the margins. Simply adopting an aspirational cut of 40% in per capita consumption is nonsense, if my information is correct; there is a good trade in removing water flow restrictors and upgrading showers. Nobody seems to have any incentive to monitor or enforce neutrality offsets effectively.

The same could easily happen with environment and nature. Will there be eco-deserts of some sort where development takes place, but for commercial convenience ecology has been traded away to another location? Or will the immediate locality have priority, as it rightly should? Will nature offsets still be adequately managed in 100 years’ time—as mentioned by other noble Lords—and will Natural England remain the objective government conservation adviser, or become the agent for a developer-led offsetting activity based on viability? Will it continue to command respect, especially if environmental NGOs start being excluded as consultees—they are, after all, the source of one’s information.

We have a system that involves democracy and rights of public audience; that has been mentioned by other noble Lords, and needs to be fostered. Councillor training has been referred to more than adequately by others.

I am unclear what Part 3 means for urban density or long-promised reforms to tenure, for individual autonomy and exclusivity—the sort of things that go into building a concept of one’s home, whether it be by ownership or otherwise—for communities that are stable, engaged and self-sustaining, and for making the best use of urban infrastructure as a means of preventing endless development on the fringes and urban sprawl.

I am concerned about the commercial risks to urban redevelopment, in particular those caused by the expanded compulsory purchase powers in the Bill. All of these issues are interlinked and need to be dealt with together, unless coherence is to be lost.

I turn specifically to the compulsory purchase step-in powers under Part 5 of the Bill and the removal of hope value from compensation. The Bill does not actually say that it will use existing use value as the basis for land value, but the Explanatory Notes do say that. However, there is no national or international definition of this term, without which the measures are flawed, uncertain of outcomes and, arguably, expropriatory and open to challenge. Many desirable sites are under option, so I simply ask: whose existing use are we addressing? Others, including society at large, make large profits from developers on greenfield sites, whereas the landowner often gets quite a small proportion of the overall profit after it has been totted up.

I will make one point that I was not going to make. For too long, emphasis on housing development has been a proxy for growth in the economy. There is evidence that this is reaching an endpoint. Whether we are going to continue to have year-on-year increases in values, including in the value of the housing inventory, is in doubt; if that is correct, it will have profound implications, socially and economically. I therefore agree with the noble Lord, Lord Best—but for other reasons—that a different delivery model is in fact needed.

Unless these critical factors are addressed, many of the measures in this Bill risk substantial failure. I look forward to pursuing these as the Bill moves forward.