Planning and Infrastructure Bill - an overview

The government is focused on achieving sustained economic growth to improve prosperity and living standards for working people, and its mission is to restore economic stability, boost investment, and reform the economy to increase productivity.

In order to achieve this agenda, the government has introduced ‘significant’ reforms to the planning system, such as the revised National Planning Policy Framework in December 2024 and now the much-awaited introduction of the Planning and Infrastructure Bill (“the Bill”). The government’s objective is to deliver the country's housing and infrastructure needs.

The Bill has 5 key objectives:

1. Faster and more certain infrastructure approvals: To streamline the process for Nationally Significant Infrastructure Projects (NSIPs) such as energy, roads, and public transport, accelerating planning decisions and reducing judicial review challenges against those decisions. 
2. Strategic nature recovery: introducing a Nature Restoration Fund to balance development with environmental recovery, allowing growth while improving nature conservation.
3. Improved planning decision-making: Ensuring local planning committees are effective and resource-efficient, supporting community involvement in development decisions without hindering progress.
4. Unlocking land for development: Speeding up land assembly and development, ensuring fair compensation for landowners and supporting public sector development corporations.
5. Cross-boundary strategic planning: promoting strategic, sub-regional planning through Spatial Development Strategies to address broader development and infrastructure needs.

Infrastructure changes

A reform to the NSIP regime with several key changes to improve speed and certainty to make the NSIP process more efficient and adaptable to future needs, as follows:

1. Streamlined Planning Process: implementing reforms to keep national policies updated, simplify consultations, and reduce judicial review challenges where cases lack merit. It removes the paper permission stage of National Policy Statements (NPSs) and Development Consent Orders, and it eliminates the right to appeal for cases deemed entirely without merit at the oral permission hearing. 
2. National Policy Statement (NPS) Updates: A requirement for NPSs to be updated every 5 years and introduce a streamlined process for amending them, incorporating legislative changes, new policies, or court decisions.
3. Flexibility in Consenting: The Secretary of State will have the power to direct projects away from the NSIP regime if another consenting route is more appropriate (details to be introduced).
4. Improved Consultation Requirements: A simplification to the consultation reports, focusing on concise summaries and removing unnecessary requirements, while ensuring meaningful engagement and introduces a duty for statutory consultees and local authorities to follow guidance to narrow disagreements before applications are submitted.
5. Encouraging Proactive Engagement: Changes will remove disincentives for stakeholders to engage early in the process and clarify rules to allow costs to be awarded if a project is withdrawn before the preliminary meeting.

Key changes to Transport and Works Act 1992

The reforms to the Transport and Works Act 1992 (TWA92) aim to streamline the consenting process for new transport infrastructure projects (railways, tramways, guided transport, and inland waterways) in England and Wales. These reforms aim to reduce administrative burdens and improve the efficiency of delivering transport projects, and the changes include:

1. Cost Recovery: Allowing statutory consultees and local authorities to recover costs for providing advice or services, improving resource allocation and ensuring timely input.
2. Statutory Deadlines: Introducing set deadlines for application determinations to provide certainty.
3. Additional Authorisations: Enabling the inclusion of more authorisations to simplify multiple processes.
4. Model Clauses: Replacing model clauses with more flexible guidance for easier updates.
5. Legislative Clarifications: Making technical amendments to ensure the system is effective and proportionate.

Keys changes to Highways Act 

Changes are proposed to the Highways Act 1980 to improve the efficiency of delivering road infrastructure schemes and making sure processes within the Highways Act 1980 regime are fit for purpose and proportionate. Changes include:

1. Temporary Possession of Land: Establishing powers to enable temporary possession of land to better frame land negotiations and reduce time taken to do this
2. Cost Recovery: Enabling cost recovery for defined statutory consultees and local authorities when providing advice or services relating to orders and schemes, to encourage quality and timely inputs into the process.
3. Statutory Deadlines: Introducing set deadlines for the Secretary of State's decision stage of the process and aligning objection periods with other planning systems for greater certainty to stakeholders.
4. Simplifying Orders and Schemes: Removing the need for statutory instruments for certain orders and schemes and allowing strategic highway companies to manage trunk road decisions directly without the need to go to the Secretary of State.

Planning changes

Planning fees changes

An introduction of a new power for the Secretary of State to allow Local Planning Authorities (LPAs) to set their own planning fees to fully recover the costs of planning applications. This change aims to ensure fees are sufficient to cover costs and that fee income is used specifically for planning functions rather than used by Local Authorities as a whole. Safeguards are included to prevent excessive fee increases, giving the Secretary of State the power to intervene if necessary. 

However, it is unclear at this stage if LPAs are able to recover external fees needed as a result of a lack of internal resource, e.g. ecology consultants – the details are being brought forward in future regulations.

Planning Committee Reforms

A proposed national scheme of delegation to be clear on which planning decisions should be made by planning officers and which should be made by planning committees. This proposal will ensure greater consistency and certainty across England regarding decision-making responsibilities. Additionally, the Bill will enable regulations to set committee sizes to promote effective debate. It also introduces mandatory training for planning committee members to ensure consistent understanding of key legal areas relevant to their decision-making.

These reforms seek to provide a legislative framework for what is a standard procedure in practice across LPAs and as such the authors of this article do not consider that these changes will provide radical change to increase efficiency in the planning process.

Spatial Development Strategies

The introduction of a system of Spatial Development Strategies (SDS) across England to address cross-boundary issues for example housing needs, which cannot be met without planning for growth on a larger scale. Except for London, most of England currently lacks a strategic plan. The SDS system, modelled after London's existing system, will require combined authorities, county councils, and unitary authorities to prepare SDS for their areas. Additionally, the government can establish strategic planning boards to create SDSs on behalf of certain authorities. Local plans must align with the SDSs, while London will continue using its own system under the Greater London Authority Act 1999.

New Development and Nature Recovery

The current system for discharging environmental obligations related to protected habitats and species often lacks strategic coordination, causing delays in development (e.g. nutrient neutrality). Mitigation measures for environmental impacts can take months or even years to secure, which can block or slow down projects.

The Bill introduces a Nature Restoration Fund (NRF), as an alternative approach for developers to meet certain environmental obligations relating to protected habitats and species. It allows Natural England (or another designated delivery body) to bring forward Environmental Delivery Plans (EDPs), that will set out the strategic action to be taken to address the impact that development has on a protected habitat or species and, crucially, how these actions go further than the current approach and support nature recovery. Where an EDP is in place and a developer utilises it, the developer would no longer be required to undertake their own assessments, or deliver project-specific interventions, for issues addressed by the EDP. 

It is believed that this approach will facilitate a more strategic approach to the discharge of environmental obligations and result in improved environmental outcomes being delivered more efficiently. 

Development Corporations changes

The Bill aims to strengthen development corporations to promote large-scale housing and community development across England. 

Further legislation will be required to strengthen development corporations to make it easier for central and local government to deliver large-scale new communities through the creation of a clearer, more flexible, and robust framework for the operation of development corporations to unlock more housing across the country, coordinating this with much-needed infrastructure for sustained economic growth.

These corporations are crucial for delivering complex regeneration projects and housing developments. Key measures include:

1. Increased Flexibility: greater flexibility for development corporations in terms of the variety, extent and types of the geographical areas over which they can operate.
2. Sustainability Focus: Ensure development corporations have due regard to sustainable development and climate change mitigation and adaptation.
3. Infrastructure Expansion: Ensure development corporations have due regard to sustainable development and climate change mitigation and adaptation.
4. Improved Collaboration: A new duty for development corporations to cooperate with local transport authorities to ensure that new towns are seamlessly integrated into the wider spatial plan for the area. Where appropriate development corporations will be able to exercise transport planning functions to achieve this goal. 

Compulsory purchase

The government wants to encourage acquiring authorities to make greater use of their compulsory purchase powers to support the delivery of growth and regeneration. However, unrealistic expectations on levels of compensation can delay land assembly for much-needed regeneration projects, housing and infrastructure by compulsory purchase. This can make the building of homes, transport links and schools more costly and slows down the delivery of critical infrastructure.

The Bill proposes reforms to make land assembly more efficient, including:

1. Simplified Processes: Allowing electronic statutory notices, simplifying newspaper notice requirements, delegating more decisions, and enabling quicker vesting of land/properties and changes to the loss payments regime.
2. Cost Savings: A more streamlined and efficient process will also enable authorities to make greater use of their compulsory purchase powers, with associated cost savings realised through faster acquisition decisions.
3. Removing 'Hope Value': Extending the power to remove value from land based on the potential for planning permission (‘hope value’) for town/parish councils using CPOs for affordable or social housing projects.

In summary

Despite the government’s promise to overhaul the planning system, yet again we merely see a tinkering around the edges rather than any reforms which will have a significant impact on the delivery of much-needed housing and infrastructure. There has been a real opportunity missed to simplify a very complex planning system, with much of the detail still to be established through the introduction of secondary legislation.

Whilst reforms are welcomed by the industry, the government hasn’t gone far enough in addressing the systemic failures in the planning system which in turn stifles growth.