Planning and Infrastructure Bill – a last letter to our supporters

As the Planning & Infrastructure Bill enters the House of Commons for the final time on 8 December, please see our review of this fairly disastrous piece of legislation and the journey it has taken to get to this point. Whilst we can celebrate some small wins, and know that we fought hard for larger ones, we are still disappointed with this government’s dismissive attitude to our countryside and local democracy.

This bill was tabled by the government with the aim of streamlining the planning system to speed up the provision of housing and infrastructure. CPRE joined with other like-minded groups to challenge the provisions in the bill which would weaken environmental safeguards and reduce local democracy.

In the House of Lords significant amendments were made to tackle these issues and others, including emphasising brownfield first and protecting chalk streams. These amendments then returned to the House of Commons where they were debated further. Before this debate took place, we wrote to all MPs in Sussex asking them to support the relevant amendments made in the Lords and drawing their attention, in particular, to the importance of chalk streams to Sussex.

We were very pleased that one of our MPs spoke up in the debate regarding negative impacts on the environment: John Milne (LibDem Horsham.) All the amendments made by the Lords were voted down when the bill returned to the Commons though some concessions were made by the government in the process.

The bill then returned to the Lords in a parliamentary process known colloquially as ‘ping pong’. This meant that the Lords could not insist on their original amendments but could return to the Commons amended versions of them. However, in the debate the government made further concessions and so the Lords withdrew their objections instead. The bill will therefore shortly return to the Commons for one last time before receiving Royal Assent.

On environmental safeguards, the government’s main concession was on the controversial scheme known as Environmental Delivery Plans (EDPs). This would require developers to pay into a national pot, a nature recovery fund, administered by Natural England for environmental benefits, rather than delivering benefits more locally. A number of changes were promised restricting the use of EDPs. A final concession also confined their use for the moment to cases where development was constrained because of nutrient pollution. Only if monitoring demonstrated the system is working would it be applied more widely.

On local democracy the government made some concessions, including that the Parliament should have greater scrutiny over regulations concerning which planning applications should be determined by officers rather than local councillors. We were pleased by the change that would allow local planning authorities to set their own fees and ring fence the additional income for their planning service.

On brownfield first and chalk streams the government has said that the forthcoming redraft of the National Planning Policy Framework will take account of the concerns expressed. It has promised that this will explicitly encourage local planning authorities to accommodate more development on brownfield land and that brownfield will be regarded as the first port of call for development. Chalk streams will be recognised as being of high environmental value and that that must be taken into account by local planning authorities. It is also promised that the forthcoming White Paper on Water will deal with issues around pollution and extraction from chalk streams and rivers.

Both these documents are promised before the end of the year: we will be scrutinising them very carefully on your behalf.