UKGBC responds to publication of Planning and Infrastructure Bill

We welcome the Bill that can help promote strategic planning and clean energy, while ensuring strong environmental standards for sustainable, healthy communities.

Anna Hollyman, UKGBC’s Co-Head of Policy & Places said:

Every planning decision is an opportunity to create greener, safer and healthier communities. This bill indicates a welcome move towards longer-term strategic planning, investment in planning capacity and an acceleration towards clean energy. However, communities must have a meaningful voice in ensuring developments meet their local needs, and ‘streamlining’ environment assessments must not be code for weakening standards.  

The planning system must work in harmony with nature and communities, not against them. The bill must prioritise the creation of climate safe, nature-rich, healthy and thriving communities up and down the country.

The government’s new planning and infrastructure bill is a crucial opportunity to ensure all planning strategies and decisions contribute towards, not pull against, the Government’s ambitions and legal obligations to achieve a zero-carbon future, protect households, communities, businesses and the wider society from climate impacts and restore nature.

A clear national legal priority needs to be established for climate and nature restoration in the way that ‘historical significance’ is given particular weight in planning decisions. The Planning and Infrastructure Bill is the opportunity to write this into law and avoid years more delays, challenges and public concern about planning decisions not fit for our future – protecting and integrating biodiversity and, community engagement and empowerment, should be priorities for all new developments.

net zero homes
Planning committees

There is little evidence that planning committees are a major barrier to housing delivery, with the majority of decisions made by planning officers ahead of committee consultation. The proposals to make these more efficient with mandatory training for committee members makes sense. However, to maintain public trust and community wellbeing, significant and controversial developments (especially) should be subject to democratic oversight, ensuring transparency and engagement with communities who will likely be most affected.

Nature restoration fund

The Bill risks undermining the Government’s commitment to support wildlife recovery alongside development. The Nature Restoration Fund will be an important finance stream for larger strategic interventions on nature, but clear limits and boundaries for payments must be put in place to ensure developments always avoid and minimise impact first, and can only compensate for harm which is unavoidable. The new finance unlocked by the Nature Restoration Fund must be seen as additional rather than replacing any existing government funding for nature protection and restoration, and tackling nutrient pollution.

Existing onsite requirements (biodiversity net gain) must be maintained in addition to the wider strategic action the fund will take on nature protection and nutrient pollution. This will protect the existing market for nature investments and ensure developments are not barren of nature and the multiple health, wellbeing, and community benefits it brings.

Strategic planning

A more strategic planning system is welcome for improved spatial development strategies and collaboration between local authorities across the country. This must work in partnership with the land-use framework (currently out for consultation) to ensure nature recovery and adaptation are included in spatial development plans.

NSIP regime

The proposed changes to speed up the process for Nationally Significant Infrastructure Projects (NSIPs) will override local planning systems, and risks dismissing local communities’ perspectives on development. Communities must be able to feedback on evidence from developers and remain meaningfully engaged in the process. Ministers should work with the planning inspectorate and safeguarding processes so that adequate protections are put in primary legislation, to prevent projects damaging the environment and local communities.
National Policy Statements should be aligned with the UK’s legal commitment to net zero by 2050 and the Climate Change Committee’s advice, including limits on the embodied carbon of development.
Spatial planning must be a crucial part of the planning regime going forward, with energy plans and the forthcoming Land Use Framework, to require a national spatial strategy to balance environmental, economic, and housing priorities.

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