King’s Speech: Planning and Infrastructure Act aims to ‘get Britain building’

The King’s Speech (105 pages / 589 KB), which outlines the UK government’s legislative priorities for the year ahead, contained planning reforms via the Planning and Infrastructure Bill.

Planning expert Jamie Lockerbie said that there is high demand for infrastructure development in the UK, such as energy infrastructure in line with aims of net zero emissions by 2050. There is also demand for more, affordable housing across the country, he said.

The National Infrastructure Commission raised concerns that failure to accelerate infrastructure delivery plans in the next five years could constrain economic growth and threaten climate targets. Meeting infrastructure needs is therefore a priority for the government in the coming years, with economic and environmental impacts key considerations, he said.

"The government said it will ‘get Britain building’ but did not expressly mention the return of mandatory house-building targets. It did, though, refer to a new partnership between the government and business and working people, and the prime minister’s notes to the speech refer to ‘increasing local planning authorities’ capacity.”

The Planning and Infrastructure Bill will set out to unlock more housing and infrastructure across the country, supporting economic growth as well as the environment. The new legislation will help speed up and streamline the planning process, as well as increasing the speed of major development projects in alignment with government industrial, energy and transport strategies. This includes upgrading the national grid and boosting renewable energy.

Robbie Owen, planning law expert at Pinsent Masons, said: “Further reforms to streamline the delivery process for critical infrastructure will be welcomed in principle, though no detail has been provided as to quite how the consenting process for major infrastructure projects will be simplified. This comes off the back of a number of reforms now in place following the 2020 National Infrastructure Strategy, some of which have arguably made the process more complex.”

The Bill will aim to make improvements to the planning systems at local level. This will include the modernisation of planning committees as well as increasing local planning authorities’ capacity to deliver an improved service.

The government say that the Bill will also enable National Policy Statements (NPSs) to come forward, establishing a review process for them to be updated every five years, giving increased certainty to developers and communities. 

Owen said: “And yet that is what the current legislation already enables and establishes. It is imperative that NPSs actually are brought forward in a timely fashion and then, whenever necessary, reviewed and updated but this has simply not happened routinely over the last five years at least.  This out-of-date NPS landscape has caused all sorts of delays with the consenting of projects, largely through judicial reviews which the bill does not appear to be tackling.”

The Bill also sets out to further reform compulsory purchase compensation rules to ensure landowners are paid fair but not excessive compensation where important social and physical infrastructure and affordable housing works are launched. This will allow more sites for development to be unlocked while enabling more effective land assembly to speed up the housebuilding and delivery for more affordable housing.

The use of development to fund nature recovery will also be introduced by the Bill. The government has committed to work with nature delivery organisations, stakeholders and the sector over the summer to take positive steps for the environment.

However, Lockerbie said: “Given it looks like there will not be significant amounts of new money to go into state spending, it seems inevitable that much of the actual delivery of the much-discussed 1.5 million new homes will fall to public and private partnerships - most likely between local authorities and other state bodies and private sector developers.”