Local Transport: Planning Developments

Freddie van Mierlo Excerpts

Tuesday 24th February 2026 Westminster Hall

[Victoria Collins]

I agree with parts of the hon. Member’s intervention. The developers have armies of legal teams and, as I will come on to, the national legislation is open to interpretation when it comes to roads. Councils are essentially left powerless to enforce the legislation, because developers find the loopholes. They have the money and the power to push past.

[Freddie van Mierlo (Henley and Thame) (LD)]

My hon. Friend is right to point out that developers have armies of lawyers, and one of the most frustrating things for local authorities is when they come back again and again. Even when planning authorities reject an application, developers will take it to appeal, and even if the appeal is rejected, they will wait a short period and then come back again. They only have to win once, which is incredibly frustrating for the communities that face the threat.

[Victoria Collins]

Absolutely. On top of that, councils also warn that when they get section 106 money or funding from the community infrastructure levy, the funding available is not enough for the new roads needed for development. They also warn that if we expect section 106 contributions to deliver all new infrastructure, the burden will often be pushed on to new homeowners, as prices can be pushed up.

What is more, there is no guarantee on the delivery or timing of infrastructure plans, often because major infrastructure depends on external bodies or funding cycles, such as for highways and regional transport, as well as on NHS capital planning cycles or educational funding cycles. The Government must adopt an infrastructure-first approach. How will they empower communities to take a cumulative view of the infrastructure impact of planning? What action are the Government taking to address the train capacity and service issues I have highlighted?

Let us turn to the reality on the ground for transport services, starting with roads. Local people put it best. Fiona from Berkhamsted says:

“The roads are completely overwhelmed by traffic through Berkhamsted.”

Anne captures the absurdity of national planning guidance:

“The biggest issue for Berkhamsted is a one-size-fits-all NPPF”—

national planning policy framework—

“for a valley town where the only place left to build is at the top of valley sides, and ancient narrow streets give little scope for cycle routes—certainly not a joined-up network.”

Having once been a keen cyclist in Berkhamsted, I can confirm that the difficulty of getting around means that my poor bike has been left locked up. Sarah from Berkhamsted asks:

“What’s the point of building new houses if there are no pavements for people to walk or safe roads for cars to use?”

Gill from Harpenden is direct, saying:

“The town has so many pinch points on already narrow roads that are already causing jams.”

As I said, the towns and villages in my constituency are old, and many of the roads were built for horse-drawn traffic. Berkhamsted is a hilly place, but there is not a single mention of topography in the national planning framework. Yet the loose definition of “severe”, in terms of cumulative impact tests for roads and traffic, leaves another door wide open for developers.

If someone cannot get around by car, perhaps they can use the bus. Well, that is a whole other story. Under the Conservatives in Hertfordshire, we saw a 56.5% reduction in bus mileage between 2017 and 2023—the biggest reduction in England. That has left us with inaccessible areas where people need a car to get around. The 307 bus in Redbourn runs to Harpenden station only from 9 am, with the last departure at 2 pm, and on Sundays there is no service at all. There is no direct bus connection to local secondary schools. Catherine from Redbourn says it plainly:

“While you might have had to wait ten minutes in London for a bus, here we have three buses a day to Harpenden—you cannot rely on the buses.”

In Berkhamsted, we worked with local campaigners to bring back the 500 bus every half hour, but the service stops at 7 pm. It is a similar story in Tring. I once tried to get a bus across my constituency, from Wheathampstead to Berkhamsted, but what should have been a 30-minute drive took four hours. The recommended route from Harpenden to Berkhamsted is actually via London and costs £35 one way.

Hannah, a sixth-form student from Harpenden, makes the point well:

“Public transport allows me as a young person to visit friends and do activities outside the House—it gives me independence.”

She adds:

“I have never considered living in Harpenden in the future, because it would be far too expensive to buy a place to live.”

That is a double failure by this Government that needs to be heard. Young people say they cannot afford to stay and cannot get around even if they could.

So what about the train? In the last four weeks, only seven out of 122 daily trains from Harpenden to London ran 100% on time. From Berkhamsted to London, only three out of 78 daily departures ran 100% on time, and from Tring there were also only three. From driver availability issues to Thameslink core infrastructure failures and a bottleneck around Croydon, it seems that things will only get worse as pressures grow around the Thameslink line from Bedford to Brighton. Beyond housing development, I have mentioned the other pressures from the expansion of Luton and Gatwick airports, and the Universal Studios development.

There is a two-track bottleneck through central London, and when it fails, the whole line fails. Govia Thameslink Railway has asked the Government for funding for a back-up system; has that been agreed? What are the Government doing to work with rail operators to prepare for the pressures that are building up on the Thameslink line from Bedford to Brighton?

--- Later in debate ---

[Freddie van Mierlo (Henley and Thame) (LD)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Sir Desmond. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Harpenden and Berkhamsted (Victoria Collins) for securing the debate. I have listened with great interest to many of the speeches given today, including from my near neighbours. It has been interesting to hear a run through of their constituencies and I will give a bit of a run through of some of the issues in my constituency as well.

Many Members have spoken to the issues of bolt-on developments and so-called ribbon developments where we get additional speculative developments extending villages and towns beyond their infrastructure capacity. That is true for a village in my constituency called Chalgrove, which is at risk of becoming one of the longest villages in the country. If the developers get their way, it will eventually look a bit more like Chile when we look at it on the map. Developers are seeking to take advantage of the B480 without delivering any infrastructure alongside it. As a councillor, I have fought against developments that seek to do that.

I also want to speak to badly planned development in particular. That is nowhere more true than in Chalgrove, which has an airfield that was sold by the Ministry of Defence back in, I think, 2001 to Homes England. Chalgrove is in the middle of nowhere and I do it no disservice by saying so—it is a lovely village in a rural setting. It has no mass transit system; there is no railway and there is a very limited bus service. It is a car-dependent community and there is no getting away from that; it is purely the geography of where it is.

Yet Chalgrove has been assigned 3,500 new homes in the local plan that was forced through by the former Conservative Government and, indeed, by a Member who no longer sits on the Conservative Benches but sits with Reform UK. Residents are wholly opposed to that, as am I, because it requires massive road building to facilitate it. It requires bypasses at the villages of Chiselhampton, Stadhampton and Cuxham, even though Homes England is trying to row back from that. We will also get bottlenecks at Little Milton as residents try to move from that car-dependent, dormitory town to the M40 and onwards to London, Oxford or beyond for work. We need to move beyond car-dependent communities for the reasons that many, including my hon. Friends, have outlined.

Elsewhere in my constituency, bypasses—so-called edge roads—are still required to facilitate developments, and I have been supportive of the Watlington relief road. That is an example of a community that has embraced development. It actively sought the development of new homes that it did not have to take on in the local plan. It put them into its neighbourhood plan so that it could get a relief road, because the historical nature of the town means it has a choke point that was previously used only by horse and cart, but is now used as the main through route to the M40.

It has therefore been incredibly frustrating to see homes being built ahead of the relief road, to the point where we are now seeing intense difficulties navigating the town. Even where we have communities that embrace development, we are betraying them by not delivering the infrastructure alongside it. I want to see more investment in infrastructure for those communities that get new developments.