Planning and Infrastructure Bill

Lord Inglewood Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 4th September 2025 Lords Chamber

I strongly endorse what the noble Lord, Lord Parkinson, said, because it would allow a planning authority—as is the reality today—to be rational. If someone wishes to change a plate of glass because it has been smashed, the planning authority would not pursue them and would have no motivation to do so. That is common sense. A move away from that would lead to unnecessary conflict and to people choosing not to abide by the law. That is bad governance and bad law. I am sure the Minister will want to listen carefully and think through the logic that the noble Lord, Lord Parkinson, wisely outlined to the Committee.

[Lord Inglewood (CB)]

My Lords, I will speak particularly to Amendment 97, to which I have put my name. I am an owner of a listed building, and I have been involved with a large number of others, both as an owner and a trustee, over a long period. I am also president of Historic Buildings & Places, which is one of the national amenity societies, and I ought to add a confession: I am a geek about old buildings, having become a life member of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings as a 21st birthday present.

I echo the general comments that have been made on this grouping more widely. The proposition behind Amendment 97 is relatively simple; it was laid out in some detail by the noble Lord, Lord Parkinson, so there is no advantage in my going over much of it again. Listed building consent is an integral and important part of the overall town and country planning code of this country—albeit its character is a bit different from the general rules about development, as the noble Lord speaking previously pointed out. In reality, its scope is wider and deeper than the general planning rules in some ways and relates to matters of historic and architectural significance, which are very important to place-making—which is one of the things at the centre of current thinking about the future spatial development of this country. Sometimes, these things are hardly noticeable to the layman; they may not necessarily be understood. It is the reality of the world in which we live that many of them are overlooked and go by default—sometimes, I regret to say, wilfully and sometimes not.

Against a background of that kind, charging a fee is likely to encourage more of the same—more turning a blind eye and more hoping that nobody will notice. We are talking about physical things here, and our response should be pragmatic and to accept this reality.

As was commented on by the noble Lord, Lord Parkinson, some may say that some listed building consents are integral to big, visible schemes. As he said, in those circumstances, regular planning consent—if I can call it that—is invariably required for the wider scheme of which they are an integral component. That is the way that the matter should be dealt with. I simply suggest that this amendment represents a realistic and pragmatic way to make the system work as well as it can, simply because charging a fee is unlikely to make the system as a whole work in the public interest.

[Lord Lansley (Con)]

My Lords, it has been an interesting debate. I will ask two questions of the Minister. I apologise for asking them at the end of the debate, when the time available to get a reply is modest, but I was prompted by some of the points that have been made. I declare an interest as the owner of a listed property, but I do not propose to talk about that much, as I thoroughly agree with my noble friend Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay, who explained the case very well.

The first question is on setting fees. The Minister may recall from previous debates on other Bills that I am keen on the capacity for applicants to enter into planning performance agreements with local planning authorities, and for those agreements to have not only the opportunity to pay additional fees to secure performance by the local planning authority but a rebate if the performance of the local authority does not meet the agreement. I am not entirely sure that that is presently legal. Can the Minister let me know, now or later, whether we need to do more to ensure that the regulations that this Bill will enable will stretch so far as to include that kind of provision to support planning performance agreements?

The second question is in pursuance of my noble friend Lady Scott’s Amendment 99ZA. She is asking on what basis the Secretary of State, in Clause 49, will ensure that the income from the surcharge does not exceed the relevant costs of the listed persons—these are mainly statutory consultees and the like. New Section 303ZZB(8), inserted by the clause, says:

“Regulations under subsection (1) may set the surcharge at a level that exceeds the costs of listed persons”.


So we appear to have a clause that says, “They shouldn’t exceed the costs; oh, but, by the way, they may exceed the costs”. What precisely is the Government’s intention?

--- Later in debate ---

Why do I say all this about Clause 51? It is because I hope that I have demonstrated that there is a substantive argument about what the national scheme of delegation should say. It is not purely a technical issue. The delegated powers memorandum states that regulations about the national scheme of delegation should be made by the negative procedure. It seems evident that these are substantive issues that should be governed by the affirmative procedure—and making it the affirmative procedure is the purpose of Amendment 105 in my name. The Minister might well argue that there may be a number of changes to the national scheme of delegation over the years ahead. I agree, but they may well be relatively technical. I therefore put it to the Minister that, if she recognises any merit in my arguments, we might compromise on the thought that, as we do sometimes with legislation, the first use of these powers should be by an affirmative procedure, but not subsequently. Perhaps we might return to that, after a conversation, on Report.

[Lord Inglewood (CB)]

My Lords, I will briefly support my noble friend Lord Cameron of Dillington’s amendment. In the 1980s, I was chairman of the development and control committee of the then Lake District Special Planning Board, and I can see no reason why those kinds of organisations should not be treated exactly the same as the others on the inherent merits of what is being proposed and what the authority members wish to occur. I was the Secretary of State-appointed member of the Lake District Special Planning Board. It occurred to me then that that was rather analogous to being a Member of your Lordships’ House as a life Peer—but, of course, I would not understand that.

[Lord Fuller (Con)]

My Lords, I strongly support this set of amendments, particularly Amendment 135HZE, which I think my noble friend is just about to wrap up on.

Noble Lords will recall that I have been a councillor and sat on a local planning committee for 23 years; I was the leader for 17 years. It was one of my privileges to appoint the committee and choose the chairman. I always explained to my members that the purpose of planning was not an administrative function that existed as an end in itself—although this Bill sometimes treats it as if it were so—but to arbitrate between the private interests of the applicant and the public interest. I use the word “arbitrate” purposefully, because people who sit on a planning committee have a difficult job. They must weigh up so much conflicting information within an adversarial system and, ultimately, either the proposer or objector wins.

Much of this Bill is established under the false premise that local planning committees are blockers of development and that the ranks of officials will not rest until every square inch of our nation is concreted over. But this is nonsense. The premise is that officials bring none of their prejudices to bear, but that is simply not true. We have Natural England, which leaves no stone unturned in blocking development. We have the railways, which ballast every proposal with ridiculous costs, such as £5 million for a footbridge to cross between two platforms. We have the highways authorities, which tie themselves in knots under the misdirection that personal transport outside development boundaries is unsustainable. That is before all the other bad actors in many other quangos that increasingly advance their own narrow self-interests rather than the public interest.

I do not deny the importance of some of their representations, but the problem with these quangos is that they all claim a veto—it is their way or no way. It is from these vetoes that we have got the £100 million bat bridge, to which I expect my noble friend Lord Howard may refer. It is from these vetoes that we get this mitigating trade in natterjack newts or whatever they are, organisms that are rare in Europe but commonplace in every English village pond. And then of course there is the insanity of nutrient neutrality, as if building a bungalow in Bristol is going to somehow clean up the River Wensum.

Given the way planning works, in many cases it takes only one of these vetoes from just one of the statutory consultees to block the entire proposal. That is especially the case when officers advise members to refuse an otherwise acceptable proposal on the overly precautionary grounds that an adverse decision could be grounds for appeal or expensive judicial review. We need the planning committee to cut through the undergrowth, and to stop looking over their shoulder and being fearful of challenge.

I congratulate my noble friend Lord Banner, who is not in his place, on his report in which he made several recommendations. But those will count for nothing if there is nobody without the mandate, duty and courage to get those applications to committee. In my experience, it is the committees populated by the accountable councillors that do more to get Britain building than the faceless dead hand of the state quangos.

We need elected people who know a self-serving veto or spurious objection when they see one. We need people on the ground who know the importance of building homes, economies and places that enhance communities to arbitrate those competing interests. That is why this amendment is so welcome and necessary. It is absolutely right that the chair of the planning committee, working with the senior planner, should be able to revisit otherwise fatal objections to get that balance, to enable the local champions who populate those committees to take all the evidence into account, to listen carefully to objections, to balance the private and public interest and to get Britain building, and not pander to the self-serving quangos sometimes interested only in pursuing their own ideologies to the exclusion of all else.