Planning and Infrastructure Bill

Lord Lansley Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 4th September 2025 Lords Chamber

[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 ---

I agree that Clause 50 does not go far enough, but what is sauce for the goose is good for the gander. Ministers must be trained, and Secretaries of State too, because if it is good enough for the councillors, we must ensure there can be no perception of one rule for Cabinet Ministers and another for the rest of us—if you know what I mean. While we may have a little lightweight lampoonery, it should not distract from the serious substance of my amendment. The real irony is that a certain Secretary of State has undermined her ability to provide permissions in that quasi-judicial way, and we will find out in due course if she needs to take those exams after all.

[Lord Lansley (Con)]

My Lords, Amendment 162 in my name is in this group and I am very grateful to the noble Lords, Lord Best and Lord Shipley, who have also put their names to it. I am glad that we have included it in this group and brought it forward, because it adds to the debate we had on the previous group—and this one—about how we arrive at a resourced and professionally effective overall planning function in local planning authorities. The last debate was principally about the resources that are available; this group and this debate tells us the importance of understanding the scope, complexity, breadth and degree of professional expertise that is required to deliver a successful planning function, and the planners themselves. The amendments that lead this group, on issues relating to health, the environment and so on, have amply demonstrated the degree of influence and importance that should be attached to the planning function in a local authority’s activity. I was delighted to hear what my noble friend Lord Moynihan had to say. I hope, when we reach Clause 52, he will note its value in showing that spatial development strategies should focus on health effects and inequalities. I hope that we can develop that important point.

Planners are often in this space already. Chapter 8 of the National Planning Policy Framework includes precisely the issues that relate to delivering on healthy and safe communities, including promoting healthy living. I am sometimes in awe of what is needed, as my noble friend Lord Fuller said, when putting together a local plan: the range and complexity of what needs to be included in it and the extent to which one has to anticipate the many issues that many communities will face in order to deliver it.

The new clause proposed in Amendment 162 says that local planning authorities should have a chief planner and, in doing so, they can—if they choose to do so—join together and appoint a chief planner for more than one authority. I say this advisedly, knowing that in my own area Cambridge City Council and South Cambridgeshire District Council jointly run a shared service, with the Greater Cambridge Shared Planning service at its head. The clause would allow for what is current best practice. It would also flexibly but necessarily require of local planning authorities that the person they appoint to be a chief planner must have the relevant expertise and experience to justify their doing so. I hope that we could say that was always the case; it is pretty nearly always the case, but it is necessary when giving them a power and requirement to do so that we should be clear that it should be exercised in this way.

Why do we need this? Many local authorities have a chief planner—but not all. I was very struck in the briefing that we received the Royal Town Planning Institute—and I am very grateful to it for inspiring this amendment—by how important this could be in terms of supporting the professionalism and development of the profession. We want more planners; I agree with the Minister about managing to maintain level 7 apprenticeships if we possibly can—these have been very important. We need more planners, and I welcome the Government’s financial support for additional planners. However, we need not only more planners but to make sure it is very respected profession.

What will bring people into planning as a profession is an understanding that there are professional leaders. I suppose my pitch for Amendment 162 is that not only should we be resourcing planning and increasing the number of planners but we should recognise that leadership matters in every walk of life, and that we should encourage local planning authorities to have chief planners who are themselves leaders of their profession. In future there will be fewer local planning authorities than there are now. I hope that through the chief planner role, we can encourage them to look to have that kind of professional leadership.

The example we might look to is the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government itself. My noble friend Lord Fuller talks about relevant planning functions and decisions made by Ministers; they are informed by professional expertise within the department. That is a profession led by the chief planner, who herself demonstrates the value of a chief planner role in relation to the planning functions of any organisation.

Interestingly, when the Government published their technical consultation on reform of planning committees—we will come on to more about that in the next group—they referred specifically to the question of a decision being made about the allocation of decisions to planning committees to tier A and tier B, and said that it should be done by the chief planner, together with the chair of the planning committee. That seems to me to be a present, important illustration of the independence of the professional expertise that should be brought to decision-making in local authorities.

If we are to rely on that, not least in relation to the national scheme of delegation, as a basis for making solid decisions about the allocation of decision-making, we absolutely need assurance that there will be a chief planner in each of these local planning authorities. I hope that when the Minister comes to respond to this debate, this might be one of the things that she has written against it not “resist” but “agree to consider”.

[Lord Shipley (LD)]

My Lords, I will speak in support of Amendment 162 in the names of the noble Lords, Lord Lansley and Lord Best, as well as mine. As the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, has rightly pointed out, this is an issue of professional leadership. It also underpins the delivery of the Government’s objectives with this Bill.

I add my support on the importance of comprehensive training for those involved in making decisions on planning matters. There are some very wise additional proposals in Amendments 99A to 102, and the case made by all those amendments is overwhelming. Someone in a local planning authority has to manage the training process, which has to be done at a senior level. That is one reason why I support the statutory requirement for local planning authorities to have a chief planner—but there are other compelling reasons, as the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, has identified.

Yesterday in Grand Committee, there was a statutory instrument to devolve housing and regeneration powers to Buckinghamshire, Surrey and Warwickshire councils. It was most welcome, it was approved, and it is a decision by the Government in their drive to devolve more decision-making to a local level, but it will succeed only if the capacity is there to deliver the desired outcomes. That capacity relates to the number of planning officers, their status and the training they have received. As we have heard, in recent years there have been rising levels of complaints about the planning system, its complexities and its delays. As we have heard also, one major cause is the lack of qualified planning staff and the downgrading of the status of planning, given the low number of chief planning officers reporting directly to the chief executive of a local authority.

We should recognise that Scotland has, for a year, had a requirement for statutory chief planning officers to be appointed by local authorities. I submit that we should do likewise if the planning system is to be speeded up in England and if the Government are to deliver their devolution agenda.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Coffey (Con)]

My Lords, I intend to speak to Amendment 103ZA in my name and to Amendment 104 tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Cameron of Dillington, who has just spoken. While I intend to reserve my comments more broadly on Clause 51 until group 4, where we will debate whether it stands part, I am astonished that we are in the situation where national park authorities are in effect the only kind of local government that this would not apply to. I say that because no one is directly elected on to a national park authority.

Some of the board members may indeed be elected councillors but, by and large, they are appointed as a proportion and the majority are appointed by the Secretary of State and central government. A great irony of this wider debate is that we are most likely removing ways for locally elected councillors to make determinations, but where the Government have already appointed people, they can carry on. It seems an odd thing in this whole set-up.

I have tabled Amendment 103ZA—as I say, I will get on to the merits of the clause in the next group—because I am concerned that with the pressure of the increasing housing targets that have been imposed on local councils, the pressure about aspects of five-year supply, it will be too easy for officers to simply say they have to go beyond the plan that has already been agreed. As has been set out regularly by Ministers in this debate, the local plan is agreed by local people. It is not really, but at least there is an opportunity for the public to contribute towards that determination and it is then decided and voted on by locally elected councillors, who are therefore accountable to their constituents.

The issue of going beyond the boundary of the local plan is important. I see this happen quite a lot in parts of rural areas where developers take a bit of a chance on trying to keep extending the boundary, including by making housing go beyond the local plan boundary and then trying to say that for economic reasons this should all be approved, even though it has already been through a process. I am concerned about that, and I think officers would be less hesitant to simply brush it aside.

The other issue I am very concerned about is housing density, and I have put my name to an amendment attached to Clause 52 tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb, which will be debated later on in the Bill. One example is part of a town called Felixstowe, in Suffolk, where the previous councils had agreed a pretty ambitious local plan building on greenfield to expand the town in what they perceived to be a controlled way but still making sure that the town was going to be vibrant and sustainable. Within that, they specified a particular housing density for the building of some 2,000 houses. That was to constrain it within the envelope of what was deemed to be land suitable for development. It was about 150 houses per whatever the geographic dimension was to reach 2,000. An application was made for outline planning permission. Developers had indicated that of course they would stick within this housing density, but the officers in their analysis presented to councillors considering the outline planning application anticipated the housing density would really be only about 50 if they took into account the extra bits such as access to nature, sustainable drainage and all the different things. So, there we go—and, by the way, I am pretty sure the officers recommended that they accept that outline planning application, knowing full well that they would not get anywhere near the 2,000 houses that had been allocated to the fields on the outside of Felixstowe.

The consequence of that would be that considerably more land would be needed to build the other houses that were due to be built in that part of the district. My concern is that by not being very specific about housing density—and we will come on to this later—we will end up with a lot more sprawl and issues connected with not having gaps between villages and towns.

The reason I have tabled this amendment is to make sure that, if these regulation-making powers do go through to the Secretary of State, for determinations of planning applications such as that, it really must be down to the elected councillors to be able to determine it—in effect, to go against their own plan that they, or their predecessors, had already voted on to approve. We are already aware of how many decisions are delegated to officers in a routine way that is right, but on these things, where the application is contrary to what had already been agreed in the overall strategic purpose, that must be done by elected councillors, who will be accountable to the wider electorate.

[Lord Lansley (Con)]

My Lords, I will speak to my Amendment 105 in this group. We are not debating that Clause 51 stand part in this group, but I intend to speak to it regardless, because it should be grouped with this, and it will save me having to make another speech on the same subject in the next group.

I do not object to Clause 51; indeed, I support it. There should be a national scheme of delegation. It is an important mechanism by which some of the planning reform policies being pursued can be reinforced in practice in the decision-making processes in local government and assist in the process of speeding up planning decisions.