Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
The UK’s housing minister has said that new planning rules to be outlined next week aim to halve the time it takes to get approval for major infrastructure projects such as wind farms and power stations.
Matthew Pennycook said the new Planning and Infrastructure bill would “streamline” the process and cut its length from the current average of four years.
The legislation, due to be presented next week, aims to reduce the bureaucracy around applications for nationally significant infrastructure projects — or NSIPs. It will also curtail protesters’ ability to launch multiple judicial reviews and allow developers to pay into a new “nature restoration fund” to avoid ecological delays to projects.
The new rules will be a “radical evolution” in the way the country approves infrastructure projects and would add billions of pounds to the UK’s economy, he told the Financial Times. Ministers want 150 nationally significant infrastructure projects to be approved this Parliament, as part of measures intended to kick-start the UK’s sluggish economy.
Delays to several high-profile projects have highlighted the problems of the UK’s planning system, from the 300,000-page planning document for the Lower Thames Crossing, to the now-infamous £119mn bat tunnel on the HS2 line.
“A lot of the bill is focused on making the consultation requirements around NSIP more proportionate and more streamlined,” he said.
Currently, “applicants are forced into really onerous consultation requirements, a good example is often they are forced to consult on financial compensation before an application has even gone in.”
He added: “I think the aim would be, in most cases an NSIP application should be able to be determined in less than two years.”
The Labour government has set out five major priorities including the delivery of 1.5mn new homes and producing most of the country’s electricity from low-carbon sources by 2030.
Both targets are hugely challenging. The number of new homes given planning permission in England last year fell to the lowest since 2014.
“Our housing target is incredibly stretching, I’m under absolutely no illusions about the scale of the challenge it involves,” Pennycook said.
“I think it’s entirely legitimate to blame the previous government . . . they exacerbated to an enormous degree by the policy changes they made — including slashing mandatory housing targets — so the impact of that is still feeding through.”
Labour hopes to oversee a generation of new towns providing hundreds of thousands — or even millions — of homes. But Pennycook admitted that this would take “decades to come”.
In the shorter term, ministers want to drive housebuilding faster. A revamp of the National Planning Policy Framework last summer — forcing councils to reinstate housing targets and introducing a new “grey belt” zone within the greenbelt — was the first major step. Next week’s planning legislation will be the second.
Earlier this week, Pennycook used the new powers to force South Tyneside Council to accept its own local plans — including 1,200 new homes — despite councillors rejecting the proposals repeatedly.
“We’ve been really clear that we are willing to use all the intervention powers at our disposal,” Pennycook told the FT.
Measures included in the legislation include cutting the number of judicial reviews into a project from three to two. Pennycook said multiple judicial reviews were why approval takes “four years on average and some take much, much longer”.
A new approach to ecological compensation also aims to avoid any future “bat tunnels”, he added. Instead of dealing with individual councils and having to offset harm on a site-by-site basis, developers will pay into a Nature Restoration Fund before pressing on with their project.
The bill would also force local councils to work together and agree to build homes through “spatial development strategies”.
Another measure, introduced last autumn, allows councils to seek compulsory purchase orders, or CPOs, for land based on its existing value, rather than the higher “hope value” that is often used when giving planning permission.
However, no authority has yet used this power, Pennycook said, adding he would “encourage your readers to come forward with sites”. The bill will contain further details on the CPO process.
The bill will allow a raise in planning fees that “have not kept pace with inflation”, and will force councillors sitting on planning committees to receive training. It will also ensure that “national policy statements” covering sectors such as aviation or water are updated every five years.
“You go around the country and people say nothing works . . . and this bill will fundamentally change how we build things in this country,” he said. “It is a radical evolution of the current system.”
