Speeding Up Infrastructure Delivery

The Government has announced further amendments to the Planning and Infrastructure Bill to ‘get Britain building faster’. The Bill, which is expected to become law by the end of this year, aims to streamline the planning system to support the Government’s ambition to deliver 1.5 million homes and make decisions on 150 major infrastructure projects by the end of this Parliament.

Construction is at the heart of the Government’s plans to kickstart economic growth, and the amendments to the Bill, which are currently being considered by the House of Lords, include: 

• Stopping planning permissions from being timed out for approved major housing schemes facing lengthy judicial reviews
• Ministers being able to issue ‘holding directions’ to stop councils refusing planning permission whilst they consider using their ‘call-in’ powers to approve a decision
• Speeding up the approval process for large reservoirs by allowing non-water sector companies to build reservoirs that are automatically considered as Nationally Significant Infrastructure Projects
• Making it easier to gain approval for onshore windfarms.

The Chancellor has also outlined new proposals to reduce the length of time that judicial reviews take for Nationally Significant Infrastructure Projects, which is currently over a year. Only four of the 34 infrastructure projects that have faced judicial reviews since 2008 have been upheld, and the proposed measures should reduce the time taken by around six months.

Building on the discussion with the Chief Secretary to the Treasury at the Build UK AGM last month, a group of members joined a roundtable at HM Treasury this week to provide feedback directly to NISTA on the new Infrastructure Pipeline. The meeting focused on how the pipeline could be used to support business planning and the data that should be included in the next iteration of the pipeline due to be published in early 2026.