King’s speech highlights legislative plans to ‘get Britain building’

The King’s speech highlights plans to ‘get Britain building’ by speeding up and streamlining the planning process. 

His Majesty King Charles III outlined the new Labour government’s legislative proposals in Parliament last week, which includes the Planning and Infrastructure Bill and its aim to ‘accelerate the delivery of high-quality infrastructure and housing’. 

As the government explains in the briefing notes published with the speech, the demand for major infrastructure is high.

"The National Infrastructure Commission state that failure to accelerate infrastructure delivery plans in the next five years could constrain economic growth and threaten climate targets," explains the briefing notes.

"Meeting the UK’s infrastructure needs will require a change in government decisions over the next 10-15 years, alongside considerations on the environment and community impacts."

The Planning and Infrastructure Bill, which will apply to England and Wales with some measures also extending and applying to Scotland, aims to achieve this by improving planning at the local level.

As the government argues, reforming the planning system to improve decision making and performance – through modernising planning committees so local authorities have greater capacity to deliver – will enable more homes to be built of all tenures and accelerate the delivery of infrastructure. 

Significantly, the government says this legislation will streamline the delivery process for critical infrastructure in alignment with its industrial, energy and transport strategies, including accelerating upgrades to the national grid and boosting renewable energy. 

Through its legislative proposals, the government is also committed to undertaking further reforms to compulsory purchase compensation rules. This move is designed to ensure that compensation paid to landowners is fair, but not excessive where important social and physical infrastructure and affordable housing are being delivered. 

"The reforms will help unlock more sites for development, enabling more effective land assembly, and in doing so speeding up housebuilding and delivering more affordable housing, supporting the public interest," says the briefing notes. 

The government has also said it will use development to fund nature recovery where currently both are stalled. 

On this, the new administration has said that it will work with nature delivery organisations, stakeholders and the sector over the summer to determine the best way forward. 

"We will only act in legislation where we can confirm to Parliament that the steps we are taking will deliver positive environmental outcomes," said the government. "Where we can demonstrate this, the bill will deliver any necessary changes."

In the key facts section for the bill, the government says timescales for planning decision-making are growing. 

"Only 9% of Local Planning Authorities (LPAs) are determining more than 70% of non-major applications within eight weeks," it claimed.

"Only 1% of LPAs determine more than 60% of major applications within the statutory 13-week period. This bill will look to help reverse this trend, boosting capacity at a local level and speeding up decision-making, which will in turn help to accelerate a future pipeline of housing delivery."

Commenting on the Planning and Infrastructure Bill, Robbie Owen, Partner at Pinsent Masons LLP and a planning law expert, 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."

Jonathan Werran, chief executive of Localis, an independent, cross-party not-for-profit think tank, described the government’s plans as a potential "gamechanger for housing supply".

"We urgently need planning reform to support good growth, but this needs to be balanced with the desperate need for some immediate stability to minimise disruption to developments and plans that are in progress," he told the Local Government Chronicle. 

"We have had four years of constant change which has led to the current stalemate across many parts of England and has resulted in poor outcomes as far as relatively few numbers of new homes built annually compared to need.

"Any reforms to planning will also have to be fully integrated with the government’s infrastructure priorities and will need to be supported by better resources for local authorities to deliver on the ground the manifesto ambition of 1.5 million new homes over the lifetime of the parliament."

The Planning and Infrastructure Bill also aims to give developers and communities greater certainty by enabling National Policy Statements (NPSs) to come forward, "establishing a review process that provides the opportunity for them to be updated every five years".

Owen, however, argued that this is no different to what the current legislation allows. As a result, he says it is imperative that NPSs are brought forward in a timely fashion and then, whenever it is necessary, routinely reviewed and updated.

"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 King’s speech also mentions the new government’s plans to pursue sustainable growth by encouraging investment in industry, skills and technologies. 

As part of this, the Labour administration has announced the Skills England Bill, which reforms the apprenticeship levy and establishes a new body – Skills England – in phases over the next nine to 12 months, taking over the functions of the Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education. 

Bringing together businesses, training providers, unions, Mayoral Combined Authorities and national government, one of the new body’s roles will be to identify the training for which the Growth and Skills Levy will be accessible.

According to the government, the volume of skills shortage vacancies in England more than doubled between 2017 and 2022 from 226,500 to 531,200.

With construction identified as one of the priority industries where skilled workforces are required, the government argues the body will help give businesses "more flexibility to spend levy funds on training for the skills they need".