This week (11 March) the Planning and Infrastructure Bill will be presented to Parliament.  

The Bill is designed to enable significant measures introduced to speed up planning decisions and remove blockers and challenges to the delivery of developments such as roads. 

The Bill is designed to support economic growth, connectivity and energy security, whilst also delivering for the environment. The Bill is designed to deliver a major boost to the economy and create jobs as houses and infrastructure are built. 

This Bill comes alongside wider planning reforms including the new National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) and is at the heart of the government’s Plan for Change missions. 

CIHT offers its ongoing support to the government in the planning reform process. It 

is important that the opportunity presented by this update to the NPPF is fully utilised to ensure the planning system functions to support sustainable development that 

promotes economic growth, public value and greener development. 

Key Measures of the bill include:  

Planning Committees  

• Streamlining planning decisions through the introduction of a national scheme of delegation that will set out which types of applications should be determined by officers, and which should go to committee, have controls over the size of planning committees, and mandatory training for planning committee members. 

Strategic Planning  

• Introduction of a system of ‘strategic planning’ across England known as spatial development strategies, which aims to boost growth by looking across multiple local planning authorities for the most sustainable areas to build and facilitating join-up between development needs and infrastructure requirements.  

• These plans will be produced by mayors, or by local authorities in some cases, and will seek to ensure the level of building across the country meets the country’s needs. 

National Significant Infrastructure Projects (NSIP)  

• The Bill aims to introduce a more efficient NSIP regime that will deliver infrastructure projects faster. It indicates that the consultation requirements for projects – such as roads, will be streamlined and national policies against which infrastructure applications are assessed are updated at least every five-years.  

• Other changes will be made to the Highways Act and the Transport and Works Act in an attempt to reduce bureaucracy so transport projects can progress quicker. 

• The government will further overhaul the process by which government decisions on major infrastructure projects can be challenged. 

Electric Vehicle Charging Infrastructure 

• There are indications that there will be a streamlining of the process to install EV charging infrastructure to help meet UK net-zero ambitions 

Other measures included in the Bill: