Planning and Infrastructure Bill: the key headlines
On 11th March 2025, the Government introduced the Planning and Infrastructure Bill, aiming to expedite housing development and major infrastructure projects. The Bill sets a target of constructing 1.5 million homes by the end of this parliamentary term and seeks to streamline the approval process for over 150 significant infrastructure initiatives, including roads, railways, and renewable energy projects.
Key provisions of the Bill include:
Planning:
• The Bill includes provisions that will allow local planning authorities to set their own planning fees (capped at cost recovery).
• A ‘national scheme of delegation’ for planning decisions in England will be introduced, that will set out which planning functions should be delegated to planning officers for a decision and which should go instead to a planning committee or subcommittee. Committee members will be required to undertake mandatory training before they can take planning decisions. It is hoped that this ‘national scheme of delegation’ will help provide a greater degree of certainty in decision making.
• The Bill introduces Strategic Planning Authorities (‘SPAs’), these will be strategic planning boards, combined authorities, combined county authorities, upper-tier county councils or a unitary authority (for areas in England). SPAs will be required to prepare a Spatial Development Strategy (‘SDS’), which will form part of an authority’s development plan. The Bill sets out various requirements for SDSs and they will be required to contribute to climate change mitigation, and take account of any local nature recovery strategy. The Bill sets out the procedure for the preparation and adoption of SDSs, and gives the Secretary of State powers to intervene.
Infrastructure:
• National Policy Statements (‘NPS‘) to be reviewed and updated every five years, with a more streamlined process for parliament to make changes to NPSs where needed outside of the formal review process;
• Changes to the pre-application and acceptance stages for Development Consent Order (‘DCO’) applications, intended to make consultation requirements more proportionate.
• Reforms to the judicial review process as it relates to NSIPs, including the removal of the paper permission stage for challenges to NPSs and DCOs, and limits on appeals in cases deemed totally without merit.
• Provisions to allow renewable energy schemes on forestry land and to give financial incentives to the both the development of long-term energy storage schemes, and separately, to local communities to accept the development of pylons or other “energy transmission infrastructure” in their area.
Nature Restoration:
• The Bill establishes the Nature Restoration Fund, an alternative approach for developers to meet certain environmental obligations relating to protected sites and species.
• It allows Natural England (or another designated delivery body) to bring forward Environmental Delivery Plans, which would set out conservation measures to be carried out at a strategic level within an area. The measures would be funded by a ‘Nature Restoration Levy’ paid by developers.
Development Corporations:
• The Bill seeks to enable greater flexibility for development corporations in terms of the variety, extent and types of the geographical areas over which they can operate.
• It also seeks to update and standardise the types of infrastructure development corporations can deliver, including heat networks.
• Improve collaboration between development corporations and local transport authorities, through a new duty to cooperate, which will ensure that new towns are seamlessly integrated into the wider spatial plan for the area. Where appropriate, the Bill will ensure that development corporations are able to exercise transport planning functions to achieve this goal.
Compulsory Purchase:
• Allowing statutory notices related to CPOs to be delivered electronically.
• Simplifying the information required in newspaper notices.
• Increasing delegation of decisions to streamline the CPO process.
• Enabling quicker vesting of land and properties.
• Reforming the loss payments regime to improve efficiency and cost-effectiveness.
Conclusion
The Bill is a lengthy complex document that sets out a number of provisions that will have implications on the planning system, particularly through the introduction of an additional strategic tier of planning. Proposed changes to regularise determination of planning applications will hopefully provide applicants and developers with a greater degree of certainty that their applications will be positively determined and may therefore encourage investment in this respect. Proposals for infrastructure and DCOs offer potential for a more streamlined approach to enabling major infrastructure projects to come forward. Please do contact one of our team members if you would like to know more about the new Planning and Infrastructure Bill.
Article prepared by: Raveen Bhamra & Jeannie Banks. Please contact the Firstplan team at info@firstplan.co.uk.