Planning and Infrastructure Bill

Lord Lucas Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 25th June 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, whose wisdom and company I enjoyed during my time on the environment committee. I am a supporter of the Bill, by and large. I am delighted to see that the policy is shifting towards “We want more bats” and away from “No bat must be inconvenienced”, but as the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, said, bats are not the problem when it comes to planning. As Members of an organisation that can spend enough money to build 50 houses on a pair of front doors that do not work, we should realise that.

I hope to use Committee to encourage the Government to take some of their ideas further. There is obvious scope for allowing trusted partners to work alongside the Government to achieve what they are hoping to do with environmental delivery plans. Many farmers’ groups are in a position to work on that sort of initiative. To rule them out, as the Bill does currently, is missing an opportunity.

What the Government are doing in throwing into doubt the whole structure of biodiversity net gain is a mistake. In biodiversity net gain, people are asked to commit for 30 years. It was a policy which evolved with support across the House, and now this Government, after merely 30 months of the policy, are throwing everything into doubt. Those people who had got themselves organised to be part of that system are wondering whether they made a huge mistake, and by the time the Government get around to sorting their ideas out, those people will have lost confidence. The Government really need to understand that having trusted partners in the private sector to deliver what they want is a plus, and they need to put themselves into a position where those partners can believe that the Government—and any Government that follow—will support them through the long-term commitments which this Government and the previous Government were expecting to be made.

I hope to persuade the Government to accelerate their work on biodiversity data. We have a very rich and capable set of players in this country, with the local environment record centres and a lot of amateur effort. But a lot of biodiversity data that is created through the planning system is not captured. A lot of planning applications go through without using the data we have. We need a better structure that is better thought through. I know the Government are working on those things internally. I hope to see that brought forward into this Bill, rather than left for some future occasion.

I really hope I will be able to persuade the Government to take an interest in those measures which would allow more use to be made of the settlements we already have. I had a Private Member’s Bill on permitted development rights, but we should also look at measures like land readjustment schemes, the London system of public transport accessibility zones, and the use of design codes to make it easy for developers to know what will be permitted, rather than leaving the whole question of design to be an uncertainty and a rather individual and personal decision at the end of things.

We should pick up on an aspect of the Government’s industrial strategy, where in various areas they are supporting the use of digital twins. There is a great deal that could be done in planning, which does not appear to be specifically part of the industrial strategy, to reduce costs, enable collaboration and enable imagination when it comes to what the layout of a new town should be and look like. The AI-assisted capability that is embedded in some of the British products that underlie this are tools that the Government should be seeking to support.

I will try to persuade them to make livestock markets and abattoirs critical national infrastructure. We need to sort things out: we are causing a great deal of cruelty to animals by not renewing our structure. Animals are having to travel very long distances to their deaths, and we can do better than that.

I will recommend a duty of candour for planning officers to go with Clause 50, so that they feel absolutely confident in telling members exactly what is, rather than feeling that they can in some way be criticised, and therefore giving them a duty to support their views.

I will urge the Government to redefine what a newspaper is. It was set out in 1881. Things have moved on, and if we are to have Clause 98 with duties to put notices in newspapers, it ought to recognise the modern world.

Echoing the national security strategy and our need to fight on home soil, I will draw the Government’s attention to the fact that we may not have termites here now but look at what is happening in France.