‘The Planning and Infrastructure Bill isn’t tinkering around the edges. It is driving a coach and horses through the current system’

The Planning and Infrastructure Bill published on Tuesday this week is one of the most far-reaching pieces of legislation from any government in recent years. Credit to Angela Rayner, who has continued to deliver on this side of her brief. Whether I would say the same about her proposals on workers’ rights is another matter, but credit where it’s due.

We all know the current planning system is broken and her Bill isn’t tinkering around the edges. It’s driving a coach and horses through some of the most significant features of the current system, not least of which is taking away the current powers local councils have over consents.

Under the Bill, councillors will not be able to block smaller applications, assuming they are otherwise compliant. The talk is of schemes of up to a hundred homes, but I suspect the eventual figure will be lower. This is huge. Most local councillors will tell you the ability to disallow developments of which they disapprove is one of the reasons, if not the main reason, they bothered to sign up in the first place, and of course this applies across the political board.

Labour has the most councillors at least until the May elections, with the Tories not far behind. But when it comes to this sort of change, it’s the Labour councillors who will feel the heat from angry locals. All that said, this is a big step forward if only because in so many cases consents have been refused when officers have recommended approval for reasons that have nothing to do with helping to provide housing.

NIMBYism is alive and always will be and, let’s face it, if we want to build more than a million homes during this parliament, we need to get a move on. The target is already a distant aspiration rather than a realistic outcome. Elsewhere MHCLG is quoted as saying that they want to modernise how planning committees work, “making sure they’re focused on key applications for larger developments rather than small-scale projects or niche technical details”.

We recently saw the secretary of state remove statutory consultee (statcon) status from three of the current 25 consultees, including Sport England, which appears to have objected to the use of a playing field for development where the school to which the site was connected had actually closed.

More relevant is that councils complain of statcons which submit automatic holding objections that are later withdrawn. Again, there is an argument about who should have the right to be consulted on an application, but the system has got out of hand and the Bill intends to put that right.

Among other measures, the one that really caught my eye is the so-called reform of CPO powers. Anyone familiar with this legal minefield will know that the bar is pretty high when a developer wants to acquire land from an unwilling seller and that is surely right. If an Englishman’s home is indeed his castle, then taking it away from him against his will is not something to be allowed easily in a democracy.

But the secretary of state wants to amend CPO powers to allow land to be taken, I suspect mostly from farmers, when Savills reports that as of the end of 2024, the value of Grade 3 Livestock land in England was about £7,000 per acre, but as an acre of developable land on which 10 single family homes could be built, a 4-acre site in Worcestershire was sold in 2023 for £6m.

We all know this, but Rayner wants to limit the price the farmer will get after stripping out what she regards as excessive profit. Some would say it amounts to theft given that farmers are already up against it under this government’s taxation proposals. If you think tractors in Westminster was a sign of their anger, I suspect when the first case here makes the news, you ain’t seen nothing yet.