Draft Planning and Infrastructure Act 2025 (Consequential Amendments) Regulations 2026
House of Commons · General Committees · 17 Jun 2026 · 46 speeches · Official Report
The Committee consisted of the following Members:
Chair: Christine Jardine
† Amos, Gideon (Taunton and Wellington) (LD)
† Bacon, Gareth (Orpington) (Con)
† Baker, Alex (Aldershot) (Lab)
† Brickell, Phil (Bolton West) (Lab)
† Forster, Mr Will (Woking) (LD)
† Griffith, Dame Nia (Llanelli) (Lab)
† Griffiths, Alison (Bognor Regis and Littlehampton) (Con)
† Jenkin, Sir Bernard (Harwich and North Essex) (Con)
† Kirkham, Jayne (Truro and Falmouth) (Lab/Co-op)
† Onn, Melanie (Great Grimsby and Cleethorpes) (Lab)
† Pennycook, Matthew (Minister for Housing and Planning)
† Poynton, Gregor (Livingston) (Lab)
† Reader, Mike (Northampton South) (Lab)
† Rhodes, Martin (Glasgow North) (Lab)
† Simmonds, David (Ruislip, Northwood and Pinner) (Con)
† Turner, Laurence (Birmingham Northfield) (Lab)
† Vince, Chris (Harlow) (Lab/Co-op)
Jack Edwards, Committee Clerk
† attended the Committee
Sixth Delegated Legislation Committee
Wednesday 17 June 2026
[Christine Jardine in the Chair ]
Draft Planning and Infrastructure Act 2025 (Consequential Amendments) Regulations 2026
I beg to move, That the Committee has considered the draft Planning and Infrastructure Act 2025 (Consequential Amendments) Regulations 2026. It is a pleasure to serve with you in the Chair, Ms Jardine. The draft regulations were laid before the House on 27 April. The Government were clear in their manifesto that housing need in England cannot be met without planning for growth on a larger-than-local scale. That is why we committed to introducing effective new mechanisms for cross-boundary strategic planning. To honour that commitment, we legislated for an England-wide system of strategic plan making in the Planning and Infrastructure Act 2025, which received Royal Assent in December last year. The Act inserted a new part 1A into the Planning and Compulsory Purchase Act 2004, placing a requirement on strategic planning authorities-be they mayoral or non-mayoral strategic authorities, or upper-tier county councils and unitary authorities-most of which, but not necessarily all, will be grouped together to prepare a document called a spatial development strategy, or SDS. An SDS will form part of the development plan that local planning authorities must determine planning applications in accordance with, unless material considerations indicate otherwise. Local plans produced by local planning authorities will be required to be in general conformity with the relevant spatial development strategy. SDSs, as we discussed throughout the progress of the Bill in Committee, are not big...
It is a pleasure to serve with you in the Chair, Ms Jardine, for the first time. I welcome the opportunity to sit opposite the Minister-I appreciate the remarks that he has made-and to address this draft statutory instrument on behalf of His Majesty’s Opposition. The Planning and Infrastructure Act was a mammoth undertaking and has in many ways transformed how our planning system operates. In this House and in the other place, one of the key areas of concern for the Opposition when the Bill was being debated was local consent, democracy and control. The Opposition keenly recognise the importance of getting Britain building-we share that desire with the Government-be it more homes, more transport links or more new infrastructure. However, we acknowledge that that requires change in how the issues are addressed. For too long it has been too expensive, too cumbersome and too controversial to see major housing and infrastructure projects through to complete realisation. That is why the overarching ambition to streamline the planning process is welcome and is something that we in the Opposition are sympathetic to. Although the regulations are, according to the civil servants who wrote the accompanying explanatory notes, “consequential and/or minor and technical in nature”, they continue a worrying trend of centralisation that I hope the Minister will comment on in a moment. Through the regulations, the Government will make England-wide the system of spatial development...
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Jardine. I have some quick questions that I probably ought to have raised in an intervention. They relate to regulation 3, which will impact the Marine Management Organisation. What additional burdens will the regulation put on the MMO? Have discussions been had with the MMO about adding the new strategic planning authority to the list? It does not sound as though there will be many new burdens, but has that definitely been checked? Might additional costs be incurred by the MMO as a result? Also, what would the relationship be between the MMO and the strategic planning authority? Would either have a veto over plans that are put forward? I just want to get a sense of what the Minister anticipates the relationship between the strategic planning authority and the MMO will look like.
It is a pleasure to serve with you in the Chair, Ms Jardine. It is not the first time I have done so as part of a Committee to discuss planning regulations-I am sure, Ms Jardine, that you look forward to debating these as much as I do. The Liberal Democrats are sympathetic to the need for strategic planning and welcome its being rolled out for strategic authorities; we made that point during the passage of the Bill. However, we also made the point that we should not load this requirement on to hard-pressed unitary authorities. For example, my local authority in Somerset is struggling to begin an enormous and expensive local plan exercise, under which it would be required to find a 46% increase in the number of housing plots in Somerset, which is 75,000 plots all together. It is not reasonable to, at the same time, expect county councils or unitary authorities, acting on their own, to begin work on a spatial development strategy. I understand that in the regulations there is a provision for authorities to combine to achieve that-indeed, Somerset council is trying to combine. It is part of the Wessex partnership, but the partnership’s bid for mayoral status was pushed back by the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, so it is unable to form a mayoral strategic authority. Therefore, Somerset council, like many other county councils and unitary authorities around the country, will be expected to undertake the work. Although we support the spirit of there being...
I am grateful for the opportunity to say a few words. Can we first admit that the Government’s policy of building all these houses is not going terribly well, and that it is not a great success strategically? Nobody in the house building industry or in local government believes that the Government will achieve their target. I do not hold the Minister himself responsible for this confusion, but the question at the centre of my remarks is: what do we mean by the word “strategy”? I have worked on this subject during my time as a Member of Parliament. I chaired the Public Administration Committee-and then, the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee-for nearly 10 years, during which we produced a stream of reports about strategic thinking and strategy in Government. At the end of the last Parliament, the Liaison Committee, which I chaired at the time, produced a report about how Select Committees could help and enable Government to have more strategic thinking behind their policy and implementation, and we recommended a definition for strategy. In this Government’s response to the report, they said that they would adopt that definition, but I do not see any evidence that they have. These spatial strategies are, in truth, plans, not strategies. A strategy is an active process-a doing word. When someone creates a strategy, they do lots of planning, and lots of plans will go into it, but a strategy constantly evolves in the light of events and changes in...
The Chair
Order. Sorry to interrupt, but we need to stay within the scope of the regulations; talking about individual strategies and individual constituencies goes beyond that. Could we stay within the scope of the regulations, please?
I think I am within the scope of the regulations, Ms Jardine, because the amendments relate to the use of the term “strategy” in the primary legislation. I do not think I am out of order, but I will not dwell on the matter or test your patience. I have made the point.
The Chair
Order. If you could wrap up and ask your question, that would be helpful.
I am making a speech, which I am entitled to do. In the case I mentioned, where there is supposedly a strategy, we seem to be planning to build a garden community without the crucial link road being in place before the house building starts. That is a big problem. Will the Minister take back to the Department the question of whether the Government agree about what “strategy” means? Are they integrating the much more agile definition of strategy into the way they operate, so that we get better public policy outcomes? That is what the whole process was intended to achieve. Incidentally, the Minister might draw on the national strategy playbook drawn up by the Cabinet Office in the first 12 months of this Government, which is apparently being implemented across Government. I do not feel that this type of reform is reaching into the entrails of his Department, which is responsible for so much that requires strategic thinking.
I thank right hon. and hon. Members for their considered contributions and questions, which I will try to address in turn. It is first worth making clear that the two minor and consequential amendments before us do not implement the new strategic plan-making system. We will bring forward a package of statutory instruments in the autumn to switch on the main provisions of that system. As I made clear in my speech, the two minor and consequential amendments do two very simple things. One provides for the Lord Chancellor to make examination rules. The final content will be clear when we lay those rules, which we intend to do in the autumn; they will be largely technical and procedural in nature. The other simply requires marine plan authorities to notify strategic planning authorities as well as local planning authorities that they intend to make a marine plan. I hope that that clarifies what the two amendments are about. On the points made by the shadow Minister, the hon. Member for Orpington, I do not want to relitigate all the debates we had in Bill Committee; I well understand the concerns expressed by Opposition Members about local input. It is important to reiterate a couple of things. Spatial development strategies will not allocate individual sites. As I said, they are high-level frameworks for housing growth and investment-they are not big local plans. Local plans will have to conform with them, but local planning authorities still have to develop local development...
The Opposition are grateful to the Minister for the Government’s shift on prioritising brownfield. I seek clarification. The Minister touched on the preparation of marine plans. How do those engage the role of the Crown Estate, which owns the seabed and foreshore around the coastline of the UK? Let me pick up the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Harwich and North Essex. If, for example, an infrastructure project required the extraction of gravel, the construction of a new port, access to ferries or the construction of a bridge, all those could engage the Crown Estate. Have the Government considered that?
We have, to the extent that marine plans impact on spatial development strategies; I will outline the relationship when I respond to the questions asked by my hon. Friend the Member for Great Grimsby and Cleethorpes. To be clear, the regulation power that we are talking about is a simple notification requirement on SDSs to ensure joined-up plan making. The Crown Estate is involved with marine plans, obviously, and I will set out how many there are across the country and how that relates, but this is a simple change in scope. I touched on brownfield land. I want to make clear where the democratic input comes from and who has to produce spatial development strategies: combined authorities, both mayoral and non-mayoral; combined county authorities, both mayoral and non-mayoral; upper-tier county councils; and unitary authorities. All will have a duty to produce a spatial development strategy. Those authorities, as I said, are known as strategic planning authorities. The Government, however, will be able to group any of those authorities together to jointly produce a spatial development strategy, through a committee known as a strategic planning board. In those areas where, for example, a mayor is not in place and there is not an obvious geography to take forward an SDS, a combination of authorities will be put together to come up with an SDS through a strategic planning board. Each authority will have a voice on the planning board. I should touch on the geography of an SDS. As...
Will the Minister give way?
The right hon. Gentleman will forgive me if I do not take a sideline into a philosophical discourse on the meaning of a strategy or of a report that I do not think he named and I do not think pertains to my Department. We are introducing a system of strategic planning, on which I think there is widespread consensus across the House. The removal of any effective mechanism for cross-boundary co-operation has caused a variety of issues. The duty to co-operate does not work effectively and we have to put it back in place. The draft regulations allow us to do that. On that basis, we will have a series of SDSs that provide a high-level housing growth and infrastructure framework.
rose-
If the right hon. Gentleman’s intervention is about the actual regulations that we are debating, I will give way.
It is about the draft regulations, because they include the word “strategy”. The Minister cannot escape the consequences of that. The report to which I referred was a Liaison Committee report-
The Chair
Order. The strategy was debated during the progress of the Bill through Parliament. It is not consequential to the draft regulations.
It is a whole of Government report.
If the right hon. Gentleman wants to write to me about the whole of Government report that he cites-I do not think that he has mentioned the title-I will happily consider some of the lessons learned from it and how they might apply to my Department. On that basis, I commend the draft regulations to the Committee. Question put and agreed to.
Committee rose .