Planning and Infrastructure Bill

Olly Glover Excerpts

2nd reading
Monday 24th March 2025 Commons Chamber

[Olly Glover (Didcot and Wantage) (LD)]

House building is essential to provide the homes that people need, but there are significant problems with our current approach to planning, and it is therefore welcome that the Government are giving time and attention to those topics.

My constituency and the areas surrounding it have seen 35% population growth in 20 years, yet the housing that has been built meets only some needs. South Oxfordshire housing association analysis highlights a serious shortage of social and affordable housing, particularly for one or two-person people households.

I have personally experienced the challenge of finding suitable and/or affordable housing, with very little to rent that is furnished. I appreciate that very few small violins will be played, but even as an MP on my salary, the place I have recently bought is wildly expensive, at nearly £300,000 for a small, two-bedroomed terraced house. In my case, building new housing has freed up an older house for me to buy, but the current market is not delivering for people on lower incomes.

Between 2012 and 2021, the Vale of White Horse local authority had the third highest net increase in dwellings as a proportion of their starting stock. I am proud that Liberal Democrat-led Vale and South Oxfordshire district councils have been proactive in developing a joint local plan, which has successfully combined meeting housing targets and five-year land supply requirements with gaining significant stakeholder support, for example from the Campaign to Protect Rural England.

The councils’ innovative and inclusive approach to consultation with the public meant that they were shortlisted for three national awards. They ran three stages of consultation to encourage as much engagement as possible. More than 5,000 responses were received from residents, parish councils and local businesses.

A key concern for my constituency is how any further increase in housing can be accommodated, given the dominance of lack of investment in infrastructure in recent years, leading to local concern about further housing. We need targets and measures for infrastructure, as well as housing, particularly given that local authorities do not have the powers or funding to deliver health and major transport schemes. The Bill does not remedy that.

[Luke Taylor]

My hon. Friend mentioned the capex costs of the infrastructure. Is it not also important that local councils and NHS integrated care boards are given increased budgets to maintain staffing for those facilities? There is no point in building a GP surgery if it cannot be staffed.

[Olly Glover]

My hon. Friend is right. Buildings need to be staffed, otherwise we will end up like the episode of “Yes Minister” with an empty building.

Key infrastructure needs and asks for my constituency include the Didcot-Culham relief road, with better walking and cycling provision than in the current plan. It is a controversial scheme, but I have given it my backing. They also include walking and cycling investment in new and existing areas of the towns; a new railway station at Grove; Didcot to Oxford line electrification; and health capacity to keep up with our growing population, particularly a GP surgery at Great Western Park in Didcot. That is why it is so critical that we link housing targets to targets and measures for wider infrastructure. Communities need housing, but they also need all the accompanying public and private amenities and services that are essential for happy and well-functioning communities.

Planning and Infrastructure Bill (First sitting)

Olly Glover Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 24th April 2025 Public Bill Committees

[Matthew Pennycook]

Q Marian, thank you for giving your time today and for the work that you and the organisation are doing to ensure that the new system will be operational shortly after the Bill gets Royal Assent.

Can I get you on the record in terms of the objectives of part 3 of the Bill? Is Natural England confident that the nature restoration fund will deliver better outcomes for the environment than the status quo? Specifically on the powers that will be available to Natural England in bringing forth EDPs, do you think the Bill gives you enough flexibility to consider a wide enough range of conservation measures to deliver those plans?

Marian Spain: We are confident that this will be an improvement on the current system. We have already run versions of the nature recovery fund for recreational impact, for great crested newts and for nutrient mitigation, so we have seen enough that these schemes can work. We are confident that they will work.

We are also clear that it is an improvement because at the moment the current arrangements are sub-optimal for developers and for nature. We see that developers are investing disproportionate amounts of time on data gathering that could be better done once and centrally. We see that investment in mitigation and compensation in the sequential scheme slows things down and does not always create the biggest impact. We also see that there is less transparency than the public and indeed developers themselves sometimes want about how the money is being spent. We are confident this will be an improvement.

The other important point to note is that many of the pressures nature is facing now, particularly water quality, air quality and recreation, are diffuse. They are not specific. They are widespread. They are cumulative. It is impossible for an individual developer to adequately consider, mitigate and compensate. We need to do that at much more of a scale. We think the measures in the Bill and the associated measures of having more robust spatial development strategies that look at nature and development together, and of having the plan up front that tells us what the impact will be and how to mitigate it, and then the fund to allow that discharge, is a major step forward.

It is unknown—well, it is not unknown, forgive me. It is a risk, of course, and people will be concerned that it will not be regressive and that it will not be a step back, but we think there are enough measures in the Bill that are clear that this is about improvements to nature—maintaining the current protections, but also allowing development to make its adequate contribution to restoration of nature.

[Olly Glover (Didcot and Wantage) (LD)]

Q You mentioned that you have already started some work on environmental delivery plans. Are you able to say a little more about how long you think individual plans will take to develop and come into force, and a little more on what you said about the criteria that you will use to decide where and what sort of areas will need them?

Marian Spain: I cannot yet give you specifics. This is thinking that is happening now. We have not yet made any decisions. I have mentioned that we are looking at feasibility, demand, and ability to deliver. I think that where we will look next, the areas that are at the top of our minds in our conversations with fellow officials, will be air quality; the impact of nitrogen deposition on nature, which we see as a major risk; water quality; water quantity —the availability of water for both nature and development is high on the list; and a certain number of protected species. The commoner species of bats are likely to be able to benefit from the measures—similar measures as for newts. It is not yet all protected species, and we do not yet know which, so I cannot give you a definitive answer. I think it will be the next financial year when we start to roll out those further plans.

It is also quite hard for me to give you any certainty about exactly how long the plans will take, because they will vary, of course. Some of them will be geographically defined; some will be subject defined; and some might be species defined. They will be varied and mixed. But we are conscious that we need to move quickly on this, because we need to give developers a better solution than they currently have.

[Olly Glover]

Q I appreciate that there is a lot of uncertainty and you have been very honest about that. As a colleague of mine has already acknowledged, there is a huge amount of concern about the provisions in the Bill. What is it that gives you such assurance or confidence, given that we know so little about EDPs, that the Bill’s measures will not reduce the level of environmental protection given by existing environmental law?

Marian Spain: I suppose there are two parts to that answer. One is the success we have seen of the similar schemes already running; I could expand on that if you wanted any specifics. Also, the Bill contains a number of safeguards. I think the first thing that the Bill does is that it effectively maintains the mitigation hierarchy, because the best way to protect nature is to avoid damaging it in the first place. The obligations on developers and the legal protection for sites and species remain. The Bill does not remove those. The Bill maintains that obligation, but makes it easier and simpler for developers to discharge, and the fact that a developer will have to pay a levy will in itself make them think, “Am I better off avoiding this and therefore the cost, and building somewhere else?” There is a safeguard there.

The other really important safeguard is that the Secretary of State is the ultimate arbiter of whether an EDP will be adequate and will produce the net overall improvement. That is the other reason why it is hard to be very specific about EDPs—because until we start to develop them in earnest, it is hard to see. There will need to be a fairly robust evidence base for the Secretary of State to be confident that the measures will have a positive impact and we will have a net overall improvement.

[Lee Pitcher (Doncaster East and the Isle of Axholme) (Lab)]

Q Thank you, Marian, for coming along today; that is massively appreciated. I have heard a few things today about genuine community benefits being essential—they must be delivered—and partnerships and relationships being hugely important in order to be able to facilitate those. Everybody we have talked to, including you, has welcomed the Bill and said that it will take us forward. But if the community benefits are key, you now have a huge duty, as part of the Bill, to deliver and support those. I just wonder about the cultural change that needs to go on in relation to working with others and working in partnership. How prepared for that are you as an organisation?

Marian Spain: Nearly all our work is done in partnership anyway. Perhaps I will just expand on what I think the crucial partnerships are for the Bill to succeed. Actually, before I do, I will say one other thing. The Bill will require us to not produce the EDPs in isolation. They will require us to do public consultation. They will require us to work with others. We will need to work with the local planners. We are also highly likely to need to work with those who already have the data. That might be the voluntary sector; it might be the professional ecology sector that we rely on heavily to provide us with the data to have the confidence to recommend a robust plan to the Secretary of State.

The other part very much on my mind at the moment is that one of our jobs will be to give confidence to everybody who needs to be involved in making this work that the plans are robust and adequate and will have the impact intended. One thing that developers say to me is that they want confidence that if they are going to pay money, it will be well spent. A developer said to me the other day that the thing he finds most frustrating is that he puts money into the community infrastructure levy and he never sees what it is spent on, so I think there is something about giving developers confidence that if they participate, they can see they have done some good. Planners will need a fair degree of confidence that they are giving planning permission that is within the overall planning laws still.

We need our wildlife groups to work with us on this. We need to give them confidence, because they will own a lot of the land on which we will make the improvement. But as important—a group that we have not often talked about in these conversations—are the private landowners, who we will also need to have confidence that they are participating in a fair market where they will be adequately rewarded, should they choose to put their land in, and that they will also see that they are doing something for the public benefit.

The final group, if I dare say it, will be parliamentarians, who need to have confidence that these measures will contribute to the statutory climate and nature targets. It is all about how we work with all those groups to show that this is better.

Planning and Infrastructure Bill (Second sitting)

Olly Glover Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 24th April 2025 Public Bill Committees

[Paul Holmes]

Q Thank you; that is illuminating and we will take it forward in Committee. Mr Miner, could you elaborate on my question about the NRF element of the legislation?

Paul Miner: We had concerns about biodiversity net gain when it was introduced because we felt that it would not lever in as many resources for nature conservation as some of its proponents claimed, and that it would not necessarily deliver strategic benefits. On that basis, we support the principle of a nature restoration fund as something that has the potential for taking a more strategic approach. From our perspective, it is particularly important that the nature restoration fund links well with the Government’s proposed land use framework, which we also support and which we urge the Government to bring in as soon as possible after the consultation finishes. There should also be strong links between the nature restoration fund and the local priorities that are identified in local nature recovery strategies.

We have concerns about the detail proposed in the Bill, and in particular about the potential compromising of the well-established mitigation hierarchy: the principle that you should avoid environmental damage before seeking to compensate for or mitigate it. We are also members of Wildlife and Countryside Link, which you will hear from later. We support what it has been saying about the nature restoration fund.

[Olly Glover (Didcot and Wantage) (LD)]

Q One of the challenges in planning is finding the optimum balance between housing, environmental requirements, food production and local decision making and consultation. Do you feel that the Government’s proposed Bill strikes a fair balance between those four things?

Rachel Hallos: No.

[Olly Glover]

Please expand.

Rachel Hallos: I am not convinced that there is clarity on the balance and calculations. If you take such land out of production, what imbalance does that create with production elsewhere? If you move environmental goods from one area of land on to another, what imbalance is being created there? If we are going to go down an accounting route, what is the cost-benefit of doing it—whether it is food production, homes or environment? I am not sure that is in the Bill, and I think it needs to be to make sure that the right decisions are being taken in the right places.

As an organisation representing farmers, and as a farmer myself, I know that what we do on our land is a long process, whether it is producing food or managing the land for environmental goods. This is not a quick fix; we cannot move a dial and have something change overnight. We need to make sure that the right decisions are being taken in the right places, and we also need to recompense the people who are taken along with it as they go.

Paul Miner: We broadly agree with Rachel. Overall, the Bill needs to strike a better balance between the various objectives that the planning system seeks to fulfil. It is not just about facilitating development but about mitigating and adapting to climate change, as well as helping to secure nature recovery. We think that the Bill can do more to give the wider public and ourselves confidence that, in future, we will get better plans and decisions that will look to achieve a vision for getting more sustainable development, as well as meeting our climate change targets and our very ambitious nature conservation targets.

One element that has not come up in questioning so far, which we are particularly keen to raise, is clause 22 on householder payments for electricity transmission lines. We do not think that making payments to householders is the way to go. Instead, we should really focus on building on the good practice that we already have for onshore wind farms, where we consult and involve communities in community benefit schemes, and also look to achieve community benefit schemes that help communities, in turn, address climate change, get more rooftop solar on people’s homes in rural areas and improve the energy efficiency of rural housing. It seems to us that giving payments to householders completely goes against working in any kind of public interest, and we urge parliamentarians to look at that clause of the Bill again.

[David Simmonds]

Q I would like to ask you both about the interaction between green-belt and farming areas. In a constituency such as mine, which is on the edge of London, as well as a lot of edge-of-city constituencies, there is land that is both in the green belt and farmland. That has significant implications for the landowner because the hope value is significantly higher than farmland might be elsewhere, but it also needs additional protection because it is ancillary to the existence of the city. It sometimes provides a source of food and leisure, as well as the environmental benefits of it being a green space.

I am interested in your view on whether the Bill sufficiently addresses the balance between green belt and agricultural use. What improvements would you want to see on compulsory purchase processes to ensure that landowners in those locations have appropriate recourse? Also, where it is clear that the land in question provides a broader public benefit, as opposed to simply being a business standing on its own, how can we ensure that the broader public benefit can be accounted for in the reckoning up of the value of that land?

Rachel Hallos: It is almost like having ransom strips next to urban conurbations. That green belt gets sucked into that urban conurbation and, all of a sudden, it becomes a brown belt—I think “grey belt” was also considered at one stage. The reality is, when you are in that situation—I can completely understand, although some of my members would not; that is the leadership role that we have to take—that that land is of national benefit through development. That is because it increases the size of the town, the infrastructure—the whole thing. On what the Bill needs to do, again it goes back to doing the number crunching. What is the long-term benefit of this?

We also have to remember that when we compulsorily purchase land from a farmer who is running their business and living there, they have every right to make a decision to restart their business elsewhere. What if the land value goes up and they are being paid just the flat agricultural rate? Everybody wants that land, because guess what? Everybody wants land right now. Everybody wants land for everything, so land prices are creeping up anyway. There is then artificial inflation of the land price in that area because everybody is after it.

That bit also needs to be taken into consideration when it comes to recompensing anybody who has land taken away from them. It is a complicated formula, but the Bill really does need to look at that if we are to go anywhere near rebuilding confidence and trust between the agricultural community and Government. Especially if we put it in the package of everything else that is going on, we are very much in danger of having it go “bang” again. This has to stop. We all have to get on with life. We all have to get on with what we do—produce food, infrastructure or growth for the country.

Paul Miner: Green belt is a planning policy, but as you have rightly pointed out, green-belt land often has a wide range of public benefits and meanings for people who live in the towns and cities that the green belts surround. We strongly support the Bill’s provision for spatial development strategies, because you need effective strategic planning in order for green-belt policy to work effectively.

Also, from our perspective, we should not just be looking at how the planning policy should work. If we accept that the vast majority of green-belt land will not become grey belt in the future but will remain designated green belts, we need to think about how we can better manage that land. That is why it is really important that in spatial development strategies and in the Government’s land use framework, we have policies for improving the management of green-belt land. Until now, green-belt land has been relatively poorly served by successive Governments’ environmental land management schemes. There is relatively low take-up in green-belt areas. We urge the Government, as part of the land use framework but also with spatial development strategies, to seek to improve the quality of green belts for nature and for climate.

Rachel Hallos: May I add one last thing to that? Sorry to be rude. When it comes to the spatial development strategies, LNRSs and all the different things that are going on and are being consulted on at the moment, there is no legal requirement to consult the land manager. That worries me. It is just wrong.

--- Later in debate ---

[Luke Murphy]

Q I am afraid that my questions are also to Richard, so apologies to the other witnesses. I want to go back to your original comment about nature and development not needing to be in conflict, with which I entirely agree. You also pointed out that we are suffering from significant species loss and environmental degradation.

As someone who has worked on both housing and protecting the environment for the last 10 years, I support this approach because the current system is not delivering. Do you agree that the current system is not delivering for either nature or development? Notwithstanding the flaws—I think there can be some honest disagreement on what the outcomes might be—do you welcome the fact that a new approach is being proposed, given that the current system is not delivering for either development or nature?

Richard Benwell: There is good scientific evidence that the habitats regulations are the most effective site and species protections in the world, but we definitely still need to go further. Some of those strategic solutions, particularly for landscape issues like water pollution, air pollution and water availability, can be improved.

You are right. There are loads of places where we could go further. We would love to see things like building regulations for biodiversity in the Bill, to help get nature built into the fabric of development as we go. To suggest that the habitats regulations are not working is wrong, but their implementation can definitely be improved and more use can be made of this kind of strategic approach if it is done well.

[Olly Glover]

Q I feel it would be a shame for Carol Hawkey and Mike Seddon to visit this wonderful building without making a contribution to our understanding.

We have had a lot of discussion about what Natural England’s chief executive said earlier. In her testimony, she was very clear that she feels that the provisions in the Bill do not have the effect of reducing current levels of environmental protection. What do you feel about that? Linked to that, do you feel that the Bill strikes the right balance between agriculture, environmental protection, housing and all the other things on which the planning system is here to deliver?

Mike Seddon: Thank you for the question and for inviting us. I will give you a perspective from a land manager. Forestry England is the largest land manager in England, and we are responsible for the public forest. I am not an expert on the development Bill, but from our perspective, the idea that environmental delivery plans can secure an improvement is correct, and it is particularly appealing if they can do that at a strategic scale. Anything that starts to join up nature across the country, which provisions of the Bill will enable us to do, would be a good thing.

[Lee Pitcher]

Q I am just trying to understand, Richard. I have watched programmes, I have worked in the world of climate and I spoke at COP26, so I have a bit of background. You have talked to us about the number of species that are dying out now and, globally, I know they are dying out 100 times faster than normal evolutionary rates of extinction.

We are in a bad place, and there is a lot to be done, but that is with the existing stuff that precedes this measure. That is the position we are in, so I cannot understand why a change will not better facilitate an improvement in nature as well as planning. That leads to growth, which can then put money back into the system to improve it further.

Richard Benwell: It is because the proposed change will weaken that level of protection and make unsustainable—

--- Later in debate ---

[Rachel Taylor]

Q James, I would like to ask you a question first. We heard a lot on earlier panels about the number of permissions that have been granted but not yet delivered. How do you think your members can be helped by the Bill to deliver those homes? Also, when we talk about affordable housing, how much of that really needs to be socially rented housing to help deliver homes that homeless people need? That second question is more for Kate.

James Stevens: On the first element of that question, we really dispute the notion that house builders just bank land and are not interested in building out. Craig Bennett of the Wildlife Trusts cited a figure on Radio 4, I think, of 1.4 million homes that have granted permission but that have not been built out. We strongly contest that. A lot of those things are not counted as a completion until they are actually completed. A lot of those schemes have to work through very complicated discharge conditions. A lot of those permissions can just be outline planning permissions, and not the detailed planning permissions that you need to be an implementable consent. A lot of those figures are just poor figures that do not reflect the true numbers that have actually been built out.

Lastly on that, this accusation of land banking has often been levelled at the house building industry over the last 20 years. Consistently, independent studies, including one by the Competition and Markets Authority last year, have given us a clean bill of health on that. There is an issue about absorption rates—the ability of a local market to absorb certain sales—but house builders do not make their money from sitting on land. That costs them money. We make money from the sale of homes.

The issue of social housing—I will allow Kate to come in shortly—is very important. The problem is that we have a severe housing crisis. As Kate said, we have many thousands of children in temporary accommodation. Local authorities had to spend something like £2.3 billion last year on temporary accommodation; local authorities would go bankrupt there. Therefore, the tendency is to try to maximise social housing provision—social rented housing. We can understand why local authorities want to do that. However, to follow up on the point I made to Gideon Amos, the problem is that if local authority policies are too prescriptive on the tenure split, that can make it very difficult for house builders to contract with registered providers, to provide registered providers with the type of tenure mix that they need. We need to be a bit more realistic and flexible about that.

The key issue is to get houses built—to focus upon the quantity—in order to alleviate the affordability problems that make people so dependent upon social housing in the first place. But absolutely, social rented housing is very important. We are not trying to say that we do not want to build it.

Kate Henderson: Social housing is needed in every part of the country. What is really important is that we have objectively assessed needs and that those needs are then incorporated in local plans, and that we deliver mixed, sustainable communities that reflect the needs of those areas.

I will just dispute a little bit the point about the London situation and the London plan. London is the only part of the country where we have a strategic development strategy. The reason that we have a crash of supply in London is not because of strategic planning. It is because of a building safety crisis, hugely high inflation, huge land prices, an absolute crisis in temporary accommodation, and huge pressures that have happened across the social housing sector over the last 15 years in terms of cuts and caps to our income.

To get out of the situation in London and in the rest of the country, we need a comprehensive planning system that is based on objectively assessed need; a long-term housing strategy that looks at our existing homes as well as new homes; a rent settlement, including convergence, and funding that addresses building safety as well as new supply. Those are all things that the Government are looking at, which is welcome.

As for bringing forward those spatial development strategies in the rest of the country, it is really important that they have a focus on social and affordable housing, and that that should be mandated within them. The percentages will need to reflect the context of the areas and the need in those areas, so there will need to be a degree of flexibility in accordance with place, but it is vital that that is mandated as part of the remit of those strategies. We welcome their introduction.

[Olly Glover]

Q Mr Stevens, you mentioned local plans briefly in one of your previous answers. Do you feel that the draft Bill sufficiently considers the interaction between the proposed spatial development strategies and existing local plan processes? Kate Henderson, it would also be good to hear your views on that.

James Stevens: I have been involved in commenting on, I think, all the last four iterations of the London plan, so I can see that it is a successful model, in that it does a lot of the heavy lifting for local authorities in terms of identifying broad locations of growth, but in particular setting out the housing requirement for all the constituent local authorities. Once that strategic plan is adopted, it becomes part of the legal development plan, and it means that whatever stage the local authority is at with developing its plan, at least the policies, including the policies for the number and distribution of housing set out in that spatial plan, become part of the development plan, so it does assist the Government in ensuring that their new mandatory standard method is embedded within the planning system as quickly as possible.

I have been involved also in all the spatial strategies produced by the mayoral combined authorities to a greater or lesser extent over the last six years. I think the Government’s measures to reform the governance so that with spatial development strategies, the Mayor only needs majority support rather than unanimity is a very important step forward.

Kate Henderson: Returning to a system of strategic spatial planning is really welcome. Trying to work out our housing need based on 300-plus local authorities does not get us up to the sum total of actually doing things comprehensively. In terms of addressing the housing crisis, economic growth and opportunity, nature recovery, landscapes, our utility provision and how we get to work, we need to work on a larger than local scale. The ability to co-ordinate all that infrastructure at a spatial scale where authorities are working together makes a lot of sense.

What is going to be a challenge is how we do this in a comprehensive way when there are huge capacity pressures on local authorities. There are some welcome measures in the Bill around ringfencing planning fees to give some additional capacity there and we support that, but how do you do the strategic planning function, in getting local authorities to have local plans in place and getting strategic plans in place at the same time, while also recognising that we are having local government reorganisation in the forthcoming English devolution Bill?

We would really like the long-term housing strategy, which is due to come forward this summer, to be the overarching framework for at least the next decade for how we transform the housing offer to people in this country. There is a question here about boosting capacity in the system. There is also about where levels of primacy are going to sit when it comes to decision making. There are lots of different things coming forward, so we need to be really clear, if there is a spatial development strategy coming forward and local plans coming forward, about how they will interact, how they will be democratically consulted on and agreed, and where the primacy of decision making is. That is what we expect more detail on in the secondary legislation and consultations to come.

James Stevens: There is a risk, though, that the prospect of a spatial development strategy will slow down local plan making. That is something we are quite anxious about. That is what we saw in Greater Manchester. The promise of a spatial strategy for Greater Manchester meant that for about 10 years, I think nine of the 10 constituent local authorities did not bother producing a local plan, so the Government need to be very clear. It is set out in the explanatory notes to the Bill, but the Government need to be very clear that local plan production must not stop under any circumstance.

--- Later in debate ---

[Amanda Martin]

Q Minister Pennycook, how will this help SMEs, obviously when we have unlocked that grid?

Matthew Pennycook: There are a variety of ways in which the Bill will help SMEs. It is probably worth my saying, because we have had a variety of questions on issues that are not directly within the scope of the Bill—the new towns taskforce and programme, and build-out rates where the Government have taken action and are exploring what further steps we can take—that this is not the totality of the interventions that we are introducing to support SMEs.

However, to go back to Mr Murphy’s question, a good example would be the nature restoration fund. We know that nutrient neutrality and diffuse constraints of that kind are particularly affecting SME house builders in those sensitive river catchments, so there are a number of ways in which the provisions in the Bill will directly benefit small and medium house builders.

[Olly Glover]

Q Recent Government announcements on housing targets—around 1.5 million, but only 18,000 will be social homes—have led some to ask whether the Government are doing enough to promote affordable and social housing. Does the Bill go far enough, particularly in relation to spatial development strategies, to mandate more affordable and social housing provision?

Matthew Pennycook: To correct you on a point made there, I think the figure of 18,000 that you referenced is solely what we think could be delivered through the £2 billion we secured recently and announced as a down payment on the future grant funding through the successor programme to the affordable homes programme. It is not 18,000 affordable homes as social out of 1.5 million—that would be completely unacceptable. We are trying to, through all of our reforms, deliver the biggest increase in social and affordable house building in a generation.

[Olly Glover]

Accepted.

Matthew Pennycook: In terms of the top-up, we have already allocated £800 million to the affordable homes programme since coming into office. We have also pulled forward £2 billion as a down payment. A significant proportion of the homes coming through those funding routes are social rented homes—almost half, but I am happy to provide the Committee with the specific figure. So we are getting a huge uplift coming through, and the successor grant programme will give particular priority to social rented homes coming through.

Where I think spatial development strategies can add to what we see coming through is that these will not be big local plans—let us be very clear. They need to be pretty high-level documents that make decisions about where housing growth and infrastructure provision is best sited and delivered on a sub-regional basis. That will allow groups of local authorities to take a far more sophisticated approach to, for example, bringing forward large-scale new communities in strategic locations that allow them to meet housing targets in a more sophisticated way. Through other measures that we are introducing—the CPO measures in the Bill are a good example—we will capture more land-value uplift and deliver more social and affordable homes.

[Ellie Chowns]

Q To Minister Pennycook, I welcome your confirmation that you recognise that environmental, social and economic goals can be achieved together, and are not automatically or even frequently in contradiction with each other. Likewise, I welcome your confirmation that, as it says in the Bill, the purpose of the Government in bringing forward the Bill is to retain the existing level of environmental protections.

Given that commitment from the Government, given Richard Benwell’s observation that there are risks that could be addressed through amendments and given Marian Spain’s comments—that the Bill needs robust safeguards and that drafting amendments may make it more robust—I return to the question that Mr Murphy asked. Can you confirm that you retain an open mind and that you may consider tabling further Government amendments in response to the concerns raised, so that the Bill does what you are saying it does on the tin?

Matthew Pennycook: I appreciate the question. To reiterate—and this is where I slightly disagree with Mr Benwell and others—we are very clear that the Bill will not have the effect of reducing the level of environmental protections, in terms of existing environmental law. We are very clear about that, and confident in the safeguards that exist in the Bill.

I am happy to look at any amendment, and we will in the normal course of the Bill Committee; we will debate each of them in turn and I will keep an open mind about any that we think is feasible, workable, aligns with the objectives of the Bill and delivers what we want to see—absolutely. We will debate all of those in due course. As you rightly made clear, we tabled a package of Government amendments yesterday.

To bring it back to the specific point, some of those amendments on removing the statutory requirement for pre-applications consultation in relation to national significant infrastructure projects were tabled partly because we were getting feedback through the working paper, and also because there were a number of calls on Second Reading for us to specifically look at that area of reform. As you would expect in the normal course of the Bill, we will respond to challenge, criticism, scrutiny and any amendments, which we will debate in due course.

Planning and Infrastructure Bill (Fourth sitting)

Olly Glover Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 29th April 2025 Public Bill Committees

[Paul Holmes]

From a sedentary position, the Minister says, “Just”, under his breath. It was not me who went to the BBC and leaked a report saying that the Government were going to give more money than they are now proposing; that has been reduced by his amendment, so, yes—“just”.

Furthermore, the Government have abandoned a number of reforms, including a review of the presumption in favour of overhead lines, stronger protection for prime agricultural land against large solar developments, and enhanced safety measures for battery storage facilities. Expanding and improving the electricity system is necessary, but it must be done in a way that balances affordability, reliability and community concerns. We are concerned that the clauses in the Bill remove this transparency and add costs, but will not deliver the streamlined or more rapid benefits to the system that the Minister outlined.

[Olly Glover (Didcot and Wantage) (LD)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mr Twigg. I rise to speak to new clause 19. First, the Liberal Democrat members of this Committee support a lot of what the Government are proposing in this part of the Bill. Creating electricity grids of the future is a critical route to decarbonising and has the potential to reduce consumer bills.

It is much to the UK’s credit that we are making good progress in efforts to decarbonise our electricity generation. Wind and solar in particular account for a growing share of our power generation. However, the transition from one-way transmission of electricity from a small number of very large power stations to a more distributed and multi-directional movement of power creates some challenges. We are going to need major upgrades of our electricity grid to accommodate the growing number of solar installations, as an example, more of which my hon. Friends and I would like to see on new and existing buildings. Making further progress will help our national energy security and reduce consumer bills at a time when energy inflation and the cost of living are still significant problems.

There are examples where cost and/or process have acted as barriers to the ability to feed surplus solar energy into the grid, or to the commissioning of new clean and renewable electricity production. Local energy grids have the potential to benefit communities and use the energy much closer to its source of generation. Therefore our proposed new clause would go further than the Government in the current Bill. It requires the Secretary of State to, within three months of the passing of this Bill, lay before Parliament a plan for how the Government will facilitate the creation of local energy grids and deal with the cost and time of grid connections. I hope the Minister and hon. Members on the Government Benches will embrace this amendment as a way to help continue our country’s journey towards becoming a clean, renewable energy superpower.

[Michael Shanks]

I will first respond to a few points in the debate generally. My hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow East—across the Clyde from my constituency—made the absolutely right point that sums up what this connections reform process is all about: the absence of reforming the queue is driving away investment. Reform is critical for investment in our generation capacity and for how we connect demand projects that will be so important for unlocking economic growth. With more than 750 gigawatts currently in the queue to connect in the UK, the truth is there is no scope for that to happen without some radical reform of the queue. The Conservative party, when in government, recognised that that was a challenge and had already set about some reforms to make that happen.

We think we need to go even further. The shadow Minister, in a ray of honesty, said he was glad he was not the shadow Energy Minister. Based on the script on net zero, I think we are all fortunate that he is not the shadow Energy Minister, frankly, but it is the same script we are hearing from everyone at the moment.