Our response to the new Planning and Infrastructure Bill

The government has published the Planning and Infrastructure Bill as part of its commitment to ‘get Britain building.’

The new Planning and Infrastructure Bill, published today, is a brilliant opportunity to ensure key infrastructure and genuinely affordable rural homes are built in the right places.

However, delivering this requires transforming the housing market alongside planning reform. Without it, more unaffordable, car-dependent developments will spread across our countryside.

Big housebuilders dominate UK housing supply, delivering poor-quality, identical homes at a painfully slow pace. Meanwhile, the tired ‘builders and blockers’ rhetoric falsely pits climate and nature against economic growth. More must be done to force the big housebuilders to deliver on their promises and permissions, rather than simply blaming the planning system.

This bill is a chance to create a new generation of sustainable homes. The government should start with the 1 million homes that already have planning permission but remain unbuilt, then build on shovel-ready sites that could deliver 1.2 million more.

The brownfield passports in this bill could support development on previously used land if they incentivise more affordable, high-quality homes. However, without meaningful delivery targets, many of these potential homes will remain unbuilt.

CPRE believes investing in local green spaces or improving community infrastructure is the best way to compensate communities for nearby energy infrastructure.

Direct payments to individuals raise issues of fairness, potential legal challenges, and the difficulty of pricing the loss of a landscape.

CPRE supports the changes to compulsory purchase orders to ensure land can be bought at existing value rather than ‘hope value’. This will deliver more genuinely affordable and social rented homes on previously developed land. However, these powers shouldn’t be used to enable the development of green field sites, including farmland and local green spaces.