The recently published Planning and Infrastructure Bill represents a significant shift in how Britain approaches development, environmental protection, and land use. Whilst the Labour government trumpets these changes as vital for accelerating housing development and infrastructure projects, the bill betrays a profound failure of imagination in how we might simultaneously address our housing crisis and environmental challenges.
At the heart of the bill lies a fundamentally flawed premise—that we must choose between meaningful environmental protection and development. This binary thinking manifests most clearly in the provisions enabling Natural England to seize land for nature restoration projects whilst simultaneously stripping it of powers to demand that developers reduce environmental harm before construction.
Instead of integrating nature into our built environment—creating developments that enhance rather than damage biodiversity—the government has opted for a crude system of environmental offsetting. The developer pays into a fund, continues with environmentally damaging practices, and Natural England attempts to “restore nature” elsewhere. This approach reveals a startling lack of vision about how our towns and cities might evolve.
Similar schemes internationally have demonstrated serious shortcomings. Australia’s biodiversity offsetting mechanisms have been criticised extensively for failing to deliver equivalent environmental outcomes to those lost through sprawl and urban development. Rather than leading to genuine environmental improvements, offsetting often becomes a mechanism to legitimise habitat destruction.
The bill’s provisions to strip local councillors of powers to block all but the largest developments represents another failure of imagination. Rather than envisioning ways to improve local democratic decision-making and community involvement in planning, the government has chosen to centralise power (a key labour tenant).
The irony should not be lost on anyone: a government elected on promises of strengthening communities is now reducing community input into decisions about local development. Training for planning committee members would indeed be valuable, but this could be implemented without removing democratic oversight.
This centralisation reflects a deeper inability to imagine planning systems that are both efficient and democratic. Countries like Germany and the Netherlands have demonstrated that strong local planning powers need not impede development when coupled with clear national frameworks and adequate resourcing.
The expanded compulsory purchase powers granted to both Natural England and local authorities reveal perhaps the most significant imaginative failure. These powers focus on seizing land—potentially from farmers, allotment holders and other landowners—rather than addressing the real barriers to development. There seems to be no recourse either for those who lose their land as part of the new greenfield destruction.
Land banking by developers, who hold planning permission for hundreds of thousands of homes without building them, represents a far more significant obstacle to housing delivery than land availability. The bill’s silence on this issue is deafening. The government could have explored mechanisms to ensure that planning permissions result in actual homes—perhaps through escalating council tax on undeveloped land with permission or “use it or lose it” provisions.
Furthermore, the notion that compulsory purchase powers should be strengthened by reducing compensation rates from £75,000 to £25,000 betrays a callous disregard for the disruption faced by those whose land is seized. This approach risks creating significant opposition to development rather than building consensus.
Whilst the bill includes measures to speed up infrastructure projects, it fails to imagine how these projects might fundamentally change to meet our climate obligations. The focus remains on accelerating traditional infrastructure rather than reimagining what infrastructure means in a climate emergency.
The provisions for people living near pylons to receive electricity bill reductions represent a small step toward community benefit, but fall far short of genuine energy democracy. Models from Denmark and Germany, where community ownership of renewable energy infrastructure creates widespread support for development, offer far more imaginative approaches with places like the far north of England now subsidising energy users like the south but pay the same amount.
A truly imaginative planning bill would have moved beyond false binaries of environment versus development, democracy versus efficiency, and centralisation versus localism. It might have:
- Required all new developments to incorporate nature—through green roofs, urban forests, and wetland features—rather than seeking to offset damage elsewhere
- Strengthened local decision-making whilst ensuring it operates within clear national frameworks for both housing delivery and environmental protection
- Created mechanisms to unlock already-permitted land for development rather than seizing new land
- Reimagined infrastructure to prioritise distributed, community-owned renewable energy systems
- Developed systems for genuine community participation in planning decisions rather than tokenistic consultation
Such approaches would require more sophisticated thinking and would challenge powerful interests in the development industry. They would demand that we reimagine our relationship with land, nature, and community. The current bill, by contrast, represents planning through the rearview mirror—applying 20th century solutions to 21st century challenges.
The poverty of imagination in the Planning and Infrastructure Bill transcends the tired debate between “Not In My Back Yard” and “Yes In My Back Yard” positions. The real failure lies not in choosing sides in this debate but in failing to reimagine the terms altogether.
What if our back yards—both literally and metaphorically—became places where nature and development coexisted? What if planning processes genuinely engaged communities rather than either being captured by developers or circumventing the communities altogether?
These questions remain unanswered by a bill that prioritises speed over substance and quantity over quality. As it stands, the Planning and Infrastructure Bill represents not bold reform but a failure to imagine the integrated, sustainable, and democratic planning system that Britain desperately needs.
For key statistical claims:
- “Around twice as much new transmission network infrastructure will be needed by 2030 as has been built in the past decade” (lines 75-76)
- “Data shows that over half – 58% – of all decisions on major infrastructure were taken to court” (lines 67-68)
- “The stretched [planning] system currently running at a deficit of £362 million in the recent year” (lines 39-40)
- “Communities could get £200,000 worth of funding per km of overhead electricity cable in their area, and £530,000 per substation” (lines 81-82)
