The King’s Speech reveals Planning and Infrastructure Bill

The King’s Speech last week laid out the foundations for how the newly formed Labour government intends to ‘get Britain building again’ with a legislative agenda focused on growth and improving living standards.

Ahead of the King’s Speech, the Prime Minister vowed to ‘take the brakes off Britain’ and speed up the delivery of housing and infrastructure projects by reforming existing planning laws which will ‘force councils to quickly identify enough land to meet their predicted future housing needs’.

Sir Keir Starmer outlined the government’s approach which will see councils held to account over housing under-delivery and councils that ‘fail to produce timely plans will see ministers step in and impose house-building blueprints on them’.

Starmer has repeatedly pledged his government would put spades in the ground and deliver 1.5 million new homes in the next five years starting with ‘removing the power from local people to block new homes’ and declared local people would only decide ‘how, not if’ developments are built.

On nationally significant infrastructure, Starmer has said Ministers will enforce tighter rules that are ‘likely to see onshore wind farms as well as laboratories and data centres classed as nationally significant’ with their own planning process.

The King’s Speech covered 35 draft bills including a Planning and Infrastructure Bill which aims to:

• Streamline the delivery process for major infrastructure including accelerating upgrades to the national grid and boosting renewable energy.
• Simplify the consenting process for major infrastructure projects.
• Reform compulsory purchase compensation to ensure payments to landowners are ‘fair but not excessive’ where important social and physical infrastructure and affordable housing are being delivered.
• Modernise planning committees to improve local decision-making and ‘increase planning authorities’ capacity’.
• Use development to fund nature recovery in what it claims to be a ‘win-win outcome for the economy and for nature’.

The Planning and Infrastructure Bill will refocus development decisions on how, not if new homes and major projects are built, and streamline delivery for national infrastructure. The goal is to accelerate delivery.

We now await detail of the Planning and Infrastructure Bill’s content at the Second Reading in the House of Commons (the bill is now one of 35 bills in a Parliamentary queue) and an imminent announcement from government on suggested changes to the NPPF should help lift the ‘major brake’ on the UK economy and housing in particular.

Let’s hope interest rates start to fall soon as that will also be a key determinant of future demand.