Local Transport: Planning Developments

Jim Shannon Excerpts

Tuesday 24th February 2026 Westminster Hall

[Victoria Collins (Harpenden and Berkhamsted) (LD)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered the impact of planning developments on local transport.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Desmond. Let me start by making something clear: the local people of Harpenden, Berkhamsted, Tring, Redbourn, Sandridge and the surrounding villages are no nimbys. They are not against housing. They are raising the alarm against top-down national planning that does not serve local housing needs; that leaves local services bursting at the seams without adequate investment, or with investment that is delivered far too late; that fails to deliver the transport infrastructure that communities actually need; and that is eroding precious landscapes, some of which are home to rare chalk streams found nowhere else in the world. Some of those people have joined us in the Public Gallery, and I thank them.

This debate is about the impact of planning on transport infrastructure, and to understand that, we need to see the big picture. The towns and villages in Harpenden and Berkhamsted, including Tring, Redbourn, Wheathampstead, Sandridge and Markyate, are steeped in history. The beautiful Chilterns national landscape can be found around Tring, Berkhamsted and Aldbury. Four rare chalk streams thread through the constituency, alongside the Grand Union canal. Settlements that appear in the Domesday Book can be found, and the old Watling Street runs through the centre of Redbourn. There is also Berkhamsted castle, where the English throne was surrendered to William the Conqueror.

But there are also towns in the constituency that were originally designed for horse-drawn traffic and are now gridlocked with commuter cars. The M1 cuts right through the middle of the constituency, and every time there is an accident, it causes further gridlock on country lanes. The capacity of Luton airport, which is just seven miles away, is nearly doubling, going from 19 million to 32 million passengers a year. That will add roughly a million passengers per month, many of whom will travel on the same routes as local people.

On Thameslink and London Northwestern services, rammed trains are cancelled almost daily—indeed, a group from the Probus club in Harpenden arrived after their train was cancelled today—and bus services have been decimated. That is before we even talk about the impossibility of finding an NHS dentist, the pressures on GPs and the desperate need for additional school places, particularly for children with special educational needs. These old towns and villages are not built for growth of such scale.

We must, then, look at the Government’s approach to planning. Labour has continued the top-down numbers legacy that the Conservatives left behind and, in some cases, made it significantly worse. From top-down targets to grey-belt land, developers are literally having a field day, using loopholes to get unplanned development through. This matters. Giving developers the green light leaves us with an unco-ordinated approach, and infrastructure and communities are coming last.

The new methodology for calculating housing supply has hit St Albans council particularly hard. Its targets have almost doubled, from 855 to 1,660 homes per year, and the numbers in Dacorum have gone from 1,016 to 1,380 homes per year. Both those increased figures will have to be dealt with in further local plans, because they do not even include the massive housing development that we are seeing now.

The changes have left us facing substantial housing sites, such as the 1,400 homes in the Marshcroft development east of Tring, the 850 homes at South Berkhamsted and the more than 700 proposed homes in north-east Harpenden. The Marshcroft development alone would increase the population of Tring by a potential 40%. As Lucy from Tring says:

“It makes no sense…our roads can’t handle it.”

The town got its market charter over 700 years ago, and it has the roads to match. It is also buttressed against the Chilterns national landscape.

I warned the Government from the outset that their plans for development on grey-belt land would hand the advantage to developers rather than communities, which is exactly what has happened. The unclear definition of the grey belt creates a wide-open door for developers, not for communities. Crucially, by focusing protections on towns, the guidance leaves villages, which often have fewer services and weaker infrastructure, far more vulnerable to unplanned development. In Berkhamsted, developers have used the grey-belt back door to push applications adjacent to allocated sites. For example, the grey-belt back door was used in the Haresfoot farm application to get permission to build on green-belt land.

The situation in Redbourn is even more alarming. The latest proposal is a 1,000-home development that is not in the local plan but claims grey-belt status. If that is combined with other sites, Redbourn faces a pipeline of development that could see its population grow by over 70%. As Jen from Redbourn says:

“I am hugely concerned that there is no local democracy that allows villages to stop disproportionate housing development.”

Catherine from Redbourn is equally clear:

“When it comes to measuring green belt, brown belt and grey belt land, villages should not be measured in the same way as a town. This is green-belt land with rare chalk streams, water vole and flora that you don’t find in Europe—it should be protected.”

Redbourn is precisely the kind of village with less infrastructure that has been left more exposed by grey-belt development. Will the Minister speak with colleagues from the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government to address the top-down practices that take powers and critical infrastructure away from communities?

Although the previous Conservative administrations left Dacorum and St Albans without adopted local plans, which left our area ripe for speculative development, Liberal Democrat councils in the area have worked hard to finally get local plans to the examination stage, but while the plans remain in inspectors’ hands, the Government give no protection from unplanned development. Despite continuous calls on the Government to help to protect us, we have been left exposed.

All that is before we even consider the wider pressures bearing down on local councils, which leave the looming threat of Government takeover when too many appeals are overturned. Nor have we covered the lack of teeth for neighbourhood plans, or the proposals in the planning legislation to make it easier to build near train stations. All these rules put the power in developers’ hands and take it away from communities—so no wonder developers are popping up across the constituency. Does the Minister agree that tackling unplanned development and giving communities more power is vital when preparing transport infrastructure?

Underlying all this is a structural failure in how infrastructure can be planned. The speculative and unplanned development I have outlined sits entirely outside of planned growth modelling. That means that unplanned sites are assessed site by site, in isolation, and with no cumulative way of seeing what they mean together for the roads, buses, rail, cycling, schools, GPs or dentists that communities need. It is wholly inadequate, fragmented and reactive.

Local plans cannot account for national infrastructure decisions, either. The Luton airport expansion, the Universal Studios theme park, and even a rail freight development, approved by the Government, have taken the place of thousands of potential homes elsewhere, and cannot be accounted for. When councils do secure investment for infrastructure with section 106 money or the community infrastructure levy, the current viability criteria mean they can often get out of building more affordable homes, or limit that investment.

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

I commend the hon. Lady for bringing this topic to the House. We have similar problems back home in Northern Ireland. From listening to her, it seems that whenever a new development goes up, it relies on private cars, because there is no public transport out in the countryside, so the pressure is always on people to provide their own transport, which affects the local roads and infrastructure. It also seems like private developers are not following the rules that require a detailed traffic and transport impact assessment for all major developments. If that has not been done when the rules indicate it should have, should the councils, Government or local bodies not take enforcement action to ensure that what is required actually happens, rather than sitting back and doing nothing?

[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.