Planning and Infrastructure Bill

Baroness Coffey Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 25th June 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Coffey (Con)]

My Lords, it takes a lot to shock me, but this Bill did, and still does. It will take a lot of amendments to get it right. I was particularly distraught at Part 3. I am conscious that in the previous Parliament, as my noble friend Lady Scott of Bybrook mentioned, some of the amendments to LURB that were rejected by this House were much smaller in scale than in Part 3, which can only be considered a complete and utter assault on our natural environment.

In thinking about aspects to be addressed, there are plenty of briefings that I am sure we will all share. However, we need to go through the Bill very carefully and properly understand it, instead of listening to mantras designed to push the Bill forward. There is no doubt that we want more homes built. However, as the noble Lord, Lord Best, mentioned, it is finances that are stopping a lot of houses being built.

There are 700,000 empty homes in this country—not second homes or holiday homes but empty homes. A million planning consents are still available for homes to be built, over 250,000 of which are in London. What is stopping them? It is about financing and continuing to make the most money. I am not criticising that, but simply trashing lots of the countryside and trashing nature will not necessarily deliver the infra- structure and the homes that people in this country need.

I say this, because I looked at the human rights memorandum carefully and there is a lot in it that talks about compulsory purchase “in the public interest”. I shall declare one interest: I still live in Suffolk, and I still live pretty close to some proposed energy infrastructure. I am not a nimby; I was actually very active in supporting Sizewell C, as long as it dealt with aspects of environmental regulation, which it did satisfactorily. But I am not clear how the Bill will address one of the two projects there that come to mind.

People are concerned that it has taken so long to get a variety of projects going. I understand why, but one of the key issues for Sizewell C was that, all of a sudden, due to a High Court ruling, the local water company said that it could not guarantee that it could supply the water. That was one of the things that massively derailed the construction of Sizewell C at that point, even when it started to come up with creative solutions. For example, we have a water shortage in East Anglia, and a lot of farmers and food security would be affected by the fact that they would not be able to get the water that they were used to—and they are pretty good with their water in East Anglia; they have high productivity. So it was suggested that a reservoir should be built, because Sizewell C needed it and farmers could use it as well, but Ofgem said no. I hope that we get to a situation whereby the Bill starts to allow those sorts of creative solutions instead of some of the challenges that it will bring, as we struggle to reach the targets already set in primary legislation.

Part 2 is an affront to democracy, and I shall give another local example. There is no doubt that building housing on any greenfield—not necessarily green belt, but greenfield—often tends to be controversial locally, but I give credit to the councils that try to get this balance right. What worries me about removing decisions from local councillors and giving it to planning officers is that we now have even more housing targets going into the countryside. There are situations where, for example, plans set a density for a 2,000-house development, and then officers recommend outline planning where the density is only one-third of what it should have been in the plan. It does not take too much of a brain to work out that, to meet the rest of the housing, they will have to use three times the amount of land.

There are many clauses that I shall examine very carefully—not only Clause 89, with its extensive Henry VIII powers, Schedule 5 on compulsory purchase, or Clause 91. By the way, we can all be happy: that provision does not apply to Crown land. Why not? It should be the first considered for compulsory purchase for any nature development.

It is also wrong that Natural England gets so many powers. This is not about Natural England itself, but it should be in the hands of the Secretary of State who should devise these. If they choose to delegate to Natural England then that is a different matter, but the Secretary of State and Ministers are accountable to Parliament while Natural England is not directly accountable. That is what we need to fix.

There are a variety of issues to do with water, but I hope that the Government will be open to a variety of permitted development rights, particularly with ponds and helping our farmers, and where they are about sustainable drainage. However, we should bear in mind that a brand new reservoir has not been built in this country in a long time—and I do not really understand why Thames Water is dragging its feet over in Abingdon. Let us take Abberton, over in Essex: 10 years ago, its capacity went up by 60%. So stuff is happening in this country, and we should not just try to use every bit of nature as an excuse for why certain things are not happening. The A14 was built ahead of time and below budget.

I am very sorry, I shall press the case for a lot more social housing, but not at the expense of trashing what we hold precious in this country.