Campaign Highlight: Planning and Infrastructure Bill laid in Parliament

To deliver these ambitions, the Bill introduces measures intended to speed up and streamline planning processes to accelerate the delivery of infrastructure and housing.

Key measures include:

•    National Significant Infrastructure Projects (NSIPs): the Bill intends to ensure a faster NSIP regime. The consultation requirements for projects will be streamlined. National policies against which infrastructure applications are assessed will be updated at least every five years. Other changes will be made to the Highways Act and the Transport and Works Act to reduce bureaucracy.

•    Strategic planning: the Bill will introduce a system of ‘strategic planning’ across England known as spatial development strategies, looking across multiple local planning authorities for the most sustainable areas to build and ensuring there is a clear join-up between development needs and infrastructure requirements. These plans will be produced by mayors, or by local authorities in some cases.

•    Development corporations will be strengthened to make it easier to deliver large-scale development.

•    Compulsory purchase reform: the compulsory purchase process will be improved to ensure important developments delivering public benefits can progress.

•    Nature restoration fund: this will enable the pooling of contributions to fund larger environmental interventions.

•    Planning committees: there will be a national scheme of delegation that will set out which types of housebuilding applications should be determined by officers and which should go to committee.

Logistics UK has long called for planning reform to enable goods to be moved in the most productive, strategic and green way, highlighting how bottlenecks in the UK’s logistics infrastructure, the slow pace of planning and delivery and lack of long-term plans create inefficiencies and inhibit private investment. To address this, the business group has called for the slow and inflexible nature of the planning system to be addressed to support the delivery of new logistics sites.

Logistics UK will continue to call for the creation of a national logistics transport network, backed by reforms to planning and alignment between national, regional and local plans, 30-year infrastructure strategies and five-year delivery plans. This must cover the whole of logistics, including warehousing, facilities, ports, airports and the key corridors that connect them to communities across the UK.