The King delivered his speech in the House of Lords on Wednesday setting out the Government’s agenda for the next parliament. At the heart of the agenda is reform to the planning system which will come forward in the form of a new Planning and Infrastructure Bill ‘to accelerate the delivery of high-quality infrastructure and housing’ and to devolve powers to elected mayors and combined authorities. 

There are a number of key takeaways from the King’s speech:

• Speeding up the planning process
  The new Planning and Infrastructure Bill will ‘speed up and streamline the planning process’ to build more homes of all tenures and ‘accelerate the delivery of major infrastructure projects’ and will enable democratic engagement with how, not if, homes and infrastructure are built – the major brakes on the planning system will be addressed to support sustainable growth.
   
• Reform of compulsory purchase compensation rules
  The Bill will also reform compulsory purchase compensation rules to ensure that compensation paid to landowners is ‘fair but not excessive where important social and physical infrastructure and affordable housing is being delivered’. The reforms are intended to ‘help unlock more sites for development, enabling more effective land assembly, and in doing so speeding up house building and delivering more affordable housing, supporting the public interest’.
   
• Modernising planning committees
  The Bill will 'modernise' planning committees ‘in a bid to improve local decision making’ (although no further details have been provided) and will increase local planning authorities’ capacity. This is intended to ‘improve performance and decision making’ and provide ‘a more predictable service to developers and investors’.
   
• Using development to fund nature recovery
  The Bill will use ‘development to fund nature recovery where currently both are stalled, unlocking a win-win outcome for the economy and for nature’. The Government will work with ‘nature delivery organisations, stakeholders and the sector over the summer to determine the best way forward’. This will come forward in the form of legislation so that the government can ‘confirm to Parliament’ that the proposed steps will deliver ‘positive environmental outcomes’. 
   
• Simplified consenting process
  The Government will also ‘simplify the consenting process for major infrastructure projects and enable relevant, new and improved National Policy Statements to come forward, establishing a review process that provides the opportunity for them to be updated every five years, giving increased certainty to developers and communities'.
   
• New planning powers
  The Government will legislate to grant new planning powers to mayors and combined authorities to ‘work across local authorities in their area to identify the most promising sites for development’. This will also include ‘enhanced powers over strategic planning, local transport networks, skills, and employment support’. The Government will also ‘introduce new powers and duties for local leaders to produce Local Growth Plans’.
   
• Devolution as the default setting
  The Bill will make it easier to create new combined and combined county authorities by making devolution the ‘default setting and establish a simpler process for creating new combined and combined county authorities’ and will establish a ‘legislative foundation upon which to widen and deepen devolution, with a weighting towards creating advanced mayoral settlements where there is the capacity and ambition to do so’.
   
• Unblocking local decision-making
  The Government will ‘unblock’ local decision-making by ‘improving and unblocking local decision-making through more effective governance arrangements’, ensuring mayors and combined authorities can get on and deliver for their areas. 
   
• Right to buy
  The Bill will also provide local communities with ‘a strong new ‘right to buy’’ for ‘valued community assets, such as empty shops, pubs and community spaces”’, which ‘will help to revamp high streets and end the blight of empty premises.’
   

A measure not mentioned in the King’s Speech was the party’s proposal to deliver new towns across England. This was first proposed at last year’s annual party conference in Liverpool, making it the centrepiece of the plan to deliver 1.5 million homes this parliament. This proposal was revisited by now deputy prime minister Angela Rayner who advised that Labour would publish a list of new town sites within its first 12 months of government, appoint an ‘expert independent taskforce’ to help it choose the locations and aim to start building the homes within its first term. The proposal was also included in the party’s election manifesto. It is likely that this will come forward in a separate piece of legislation with the working title of a 'towns Bill”.

There is currently little detail about how the government intends to achieve a number of the planning reforms set out in the King's Speech. We will have to wait for the publication of the new Planning and Infrastructure Bill as the devil will, as always, be in the detail. 

If you have any questions or wish to discuss the proposed reforms please contact the planning team.