Planning and Infrastructure Bill

Lord Whitty Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 25th June 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Whitty (Lab)]

My Lords, I am glad to follow the noble Baroness. I agreed with the first third of her speech. The latter part, however, I disagreed with. Less than 1% of agricultural land will be taken over by solar farms and similar sites. We need compulsory purchase to deliver some of our energy system. I therefore disagree with the latter part of her speech, but I agree with her on local control of housing developments and of other aspects of planning.

I will scrap the bulk of my speech. I will say what I agree with in the Bill, but I first appeal to my noble friends on the Front Bench, and to their colleagues, not to repeat all this stuff about blockers and builders, and not to give credence to saloon bar chat about frogs and newts preventing useful development. It was not frogs and newts that made a complete mess of a national infrastructure project such as HS2; nor is it frogs and newts—or even spiders—that are preventing us achieving our housebuilding targets.

I approve of the provisions in the Bill on providing easier access for national infrastructure, on energy and grid connections, on EV chargers and on electricity storage. However, I am dubious about much of the rest of it. Let me say something in defence of planners. The planning system is often too slow, and it is underresourced. There are bits of the Bill that attempt to address the underresourcing with the recruitment of better planners and better training for them.

Much of the countryside has been protected by the planning system. Had we not had a planning system since Lord Silkin in the 1940s we would have had urban sprawl, new modern slums, and much less protection of our natural resources and natural features. The planning system has its inadequacies, which we now have to address, but that does not mean we ought to dismantle it or make it more susceptible to the pressures.

As the noble Lord, Lord Best, said, the failure to meet housebuilding targets under successive Governments has nothing to do with the planning system itself. Indeed, the planning system has approved well over 80% of plans for housing. When there is an appeal, less than 3% of them are upheld by the appeals system. It is not the planning system that is preventing housebuilding but, as the noble Lord, Lord Best, said, the oligopolistic nature of the large housebuilders and the way they have squeezed out the competition there used to be with family building firms, and the lack of purchasing power from national and local public bodies. That is what needs to be addressed if we are to stand any chance of meeting our targets on housebuilding; it should not be an attack on planners.

The Government have written the net-zero strategy into their recent national industrial strategy and energy strategy. It is not written in to this Bill, nor are the contributions to tackling, slowing down and off-setting climate change. The protection of the countryside and of biodiversity, and reversing the biodiversity loss we have so tragically experienced in this country over recent decades, contribute to our tackling climate change. That needs to be put more explicitly in the Bill, as do the effects of climate change and our need to adapt to it. For example, why is there not a provision on not building in areas that are susceptible to flood or any pre-empting of much of the improvement in the water supply that we need to make?

I am sorry this has been slightly rambling. It is different from what I intended to say, but most of what I intended to say has been said. The most important message I give to my noble friends is: stop regarding those in the planning system as blockers; they are enablers of a better life.