As previously flagged, The Planning and Infrastructure Bill, which was laid before parliament on 11 March, is “central to the government’s plan to get Britain building again and deliver economic growth” and signals the “biggest building boom in a generation“.
There is much in the Bill that will be relevant for our clients, including the creation of environmental delivery plans (EDPs) to be prepared by Natural England and the introduction of a “nature restoration levy” to establish a nature restoration fund to pay for them. The Bill gives Natural England compulsory purchase powers to acquire land and rights over land for the purposes of administering and implementing EDPs.
Other measures include the extension of compulsory purchase powers to Parish and Town Councils and the right to remove “hope value” where CPO powers are being used to facilitate affordable or social housing provision. As drafted the Bill suggests that the ability to remove hope value will apply where all or part of a housing scheme includes affordable housing alongside other development that may include open market housing. Those provisions will, no doubt, be closely scrutinised as the Bill progresses through its parliamentary stages.
In a related move, in her letter to all local authority chief executives to inform them of the introduction of the Bill, the Deputy Prime Minister and Secretary of State for Housing, Communities & Local Government, the Rt Hon Angela Rayner MP, drew their attention to a written ministerial statement (WMS) dated 10 March concerning reform of the statutory consultee system that applies to planning applications. As the WMS says:
“The concerns expressed by local planning authorities and developers in relation to the operation of the statutory consultee system are wide-ranging. They include statutory consultees failing to engage proactively; taking too long to provide their advice; re-opening issues that have already been dealt with at the plan-making stage; submitting automatic holding objections which are too often subsequently withdrawn at a very late stage in the process; and frequently issuing holding responses that allow statutory deadlines to be met while seeking over-specified levels of information from developers over longer timeframes. The final advice that statutory consultees provide can also often seek gold-plated outcomes, going beyond what is necessary to make development acceptable in planning terms.”
Those concerns will be all too familiar to our clients and the proposals to streamline the system and, potentially, to reduce the number of statutory consultees are welcome.
