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UK chancellor Rachel Reeves has told officials to draw up plans for another big overhaul of Britain’s planning rules, in an effort to speed up delivery of “critical” national projects such as a third Heathrow runway.
Reeves’ allies say the chancellor believes the government needs to go further than the current planning and infrastructure bill, which is in the House of Lords, including further scaling back judicial reviews.
The chancellor, who wants to see “spades in the ground” at Heathrow airport by 2029 and planes taking off from a new runway by 2035, is under pressure ahead of her Autumn Budget to prove she has a plan to boost the UK’s growth rate.
“She has asked officials what a second planning bill might look like,” said one ally, referring to potential legislation in the next King’s Speech to speed up projects such as airports, roads, green energy schemes and data centres.
“The first planning bill is a major step forward, particularly in tackling housing barriers, but she wants to see if there’s more that can be done on big national infrastructure projects,” they said.
Speculation ahead of Reeves’ Budget will be dominated by questions about the taxes the chancellor will raise to fill a fiscal hole, which some economists reckon will amount to at least £20bn. One think-tank last week put the gap at more than £50bn.
To counter months of ominous economic commentary, Reeves is seeking to show she has a plan to boost UK productivity, including earmarking some of the £113bn she has put aside for capital programmes.
“We have made this money available and we aren’t willing to see that used up in bureaucracy,” one government official said.
The government’s planning and infrastructure bill, which has been watered down by ministers in a bid to speed its passage through the Lords, contains reforms to the judicial review process but Reeves wants to go further.
The latest moves are aimed at both raising the bar for those bringing a judicial review to show they have the right to bring a review, and to ensure each decision faces only one review, according a person familiar with discussions between the government and Heathrow.
The changes are intended to prevent problems such as those that have dogged plans to build a Lower Thames Crossing road link east of London, which has been delayed by several judicial reviews, none successful.
“They’re trying to minimise the number that people would be able to bring; they’d have to be really well-founded,” the person said. “It reduces the potential to have five, six or seven rounds of judicial review.”
Only a single judicial review could be brought against any one decision under the envisaged reforms, according to the person.
This would aim to ensure projects do not face several legal challenges on different issues, such as potential environmental damage and the rules around compulsory purchase of homes to be demolished.
There would also be an effort to create narrower criteria for who can bring a review, to avoid what the government regards as time-wasting challenges.
“What the government wants to do is streamline so that it’s quicker, more reliable and less spurious,” the person said.
A paper by Freshfields, the law firm, said the cost of judicial challenges and legal delays to nationally significant infrastructure projects was “significant”, running to up to £121mn a scheme for large road projects.
Alistair Watson, planning partner at Taylor Wessing, said the first planning and infrastructure bill was watered down, so that it “doesn’t enable development and infrastructure in the urgent manner in which they are required”.
The planning bill did not introduce a policy test, so if the development was meeting a national and urgent need it could be granted planning permission more easily.
Permitted development powers — meaning express planning permission that does not need to be applied for — should also be expanded so it can be given to electric vehicle charging hubs, renewable energy and telecoms schemes as well as longer cabling and power connections.
The compulsory purchase powers also need revamping to speed up the acquisition of land, Watson added.
The government said the first planning bill was “turbocharging” housebuilding and the delivery of critical infrastructure, adding: “We have already made more planning decisions on major infrastructure schemes since the general election than in any other period.”
The spokesperson added the government wanted to improve the regime for big infrastructure projects to “fast-track planning decisions” on 150 schemes by the end of the parliament, but declined to comment on “speculation” on a new planning bill.
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