This week Parliament was debating the Planning and Infrastructure Bill 2025, something which will impact upon everyone. It does contain some sensible reforms but for rural communities, it is more of a threat than opportunity and Labour’s moral authority on planning is shot to bits by the fact that they propose to lower housing targets in London whilst massively increasing them in West Sussex which already takes more than its fair share.
Whilst I want to see the detail of Labour’s plans, I have received hundreds of emails from constituents expressing concerns about its environmental impact and its effect on sustainability and climate. They are concerned about weakening protection for nature and rare species and create a conflict of interest by allowing developers to pay major landowners (e.g. the National Trust and Woodland Trust) elsewhere instead of protecting individual sites from development.
The Bill’s move to centralise planning decisions will remove the right of elected councillors to vote on many local planning applications. This is not just a technical change; it strips away the local knowledge, accountability, and nuance that elected representatives bring to the table, and instead hands power to unelected officers, often unfamiliar with the local area who can be extremely hard to get hold of or to have a conversation with.
Finally, one thing that is not in the Bill are provisions to ensure there is a genuinely equal set of planning rules for everyone. Recent events at Lurgashall show the need for this. All discrimination is wrong but when you hear about people talk about reform or even leaving the ECHR – as the Conservatives propose – it is clauses like Article 8 and Article 14 of the ECHR that have given rise to what many regard as a ‘two-tier’ planning system in which Gypsy, Travellers and Roma people now have separate provisions to the ones which everyone else in the UK must abide by. Sadly, this government of north London lawyers seems unlikely to tackle the issue.
