A Bill aimed at supporting infrastructure development and job creation by reducing red tape has been placed before the Commons.
The Growth and Infrastructure Bill will reduce regulations around superfast broadband installation and will speed up the planning system for large-scale business and commercial projects. It will also introduce the recommendations of the Penfold Review, removing ‘overlapping development consent regimes’ and reducing the number of Government agencies required to ‘sign off’ planning permissions.
Government writes
Boosting Britain’s infrastructure
• Energy projects can take many years to build. Currently if companies want to incorporate the most recent technology or to make their plant more energy efficient they may be prevented from doing so because consents issued under the old energy infrastructure system cannot be varied. This could unlock investment decisions across a range of technologies, bringing thousands of new jobs and billions of pounds of investment to the UK economy.
• The Bill will help clear the way for the UK to have the fastest broadband of any major European country by helping sweep away red tape, which in turn will allow broadband street cabinets and other infrastructure to be installed rapidly without requiring lengthy state approval across many local authority boundaries. This will cut the costs and bureaucracy incurred in giving workers and businesses access to high speed internet, and help much needed rural super-fast broadband roll out.
• The Government wants 90 per cent of people to have access to super- fast broadband and is investing £680 million in super-fast broadband. It is investing £530 million to take broadband to rural areas and a further £150 million on urban broadband. Approval to install broadband street cabinets and other infrastructure will still be needed in Sites of Special Scientific Interest.
Cutting excessive red tape
• Stalled sites will be unlocked by introducing common sense reforms that allow for affordable housing in Section 106 agreements to be reconsidered where the agreements are economically unrealistic – particularly those negotiated at the height of the unsustainable housing boom. This will help unlock some of the 75,000 homes already with planning permission that are currently stalled due to lack of commercial viability. This will deliver more housing, as currently the agreements mean no development, no regeneration and no community benefits. The Government is already inviting bids to provide up to an additional 15,000 affordable homes through the use of loan guarantees, asset management flexibilities and capital funding, and bringing 5,000 empty homes back into use using new capital funding of £300 million.
• Currently, applicants have to provide volumes of paperwork when submitting a planning application. The Bill will ensure a swifter planning system by making sure that information requests from councils are proportionate to the scale and nature of the development proposed and relate only to matters likely to be a material consideration in deciding the application.
• Applicants who wish to deliver nationally-significant business and commercial projects will have the opportunity to go through the infrastructure fast-track process; such economically essential development, like manufacturing plants or big leisure parks, will be decided within 12 months. Existing requirements to consult local communities are retained, as will democratic checks and balances.
• Planning is a quasi-judicial process: so justice delayed is justice denied. Measures will help speed up planning decisions by allowing applicants to opt for major applications to be swiftly decided by the Planning Inspectorate where councils have a very poor record in deciding applications. Unreasonable delay are unfair both to applicants and local residents, because of the uncertainty such delays create.
• Changes to the award of costs regime will encourage timely and positive decision taking. Planning Inspectors will have additional powers to initiate an award of costs between parties. Powers will allow Planning Inspectors to recover all or part of the Secretary of State’s costs for all types of appeals as a further incentive to good behaviour throughout the planning process from all a sides. The Bill will update compulsory purchase law, allowing inspectors to award costs when an inquiry is cancelled at short notice.
• Measures will make it easier for local authorities to choose, if they wish, to dispose of surplus land held for planning purposes, helping get more brownfield land back in to productive use.
• Councils will have more local discretion over when they review the planning conditions for mineral sites, rather than following rigid, centrally-set targets.
Removing overlapping consent regimes
• Currently there are many development consents that may have to be secured before a project can get underway, which can only be applied for separately to planning permission. The legislation will streamline the other development consents regime, simplifying a system that is less slow, complex and costly to business. These reforms were recommended by the Government’s ‘Penfold Review’.
• These include clauses on requests for right of way orders (to close or divert a public right of way for development), stopping up orders (to close or divert roads or footways), repealing requirements for power station operators to notify the Secretary of State when proposing to use gas or petroleum as fuel.
• Following a detailed consultation by DEFRA, the Bill will help stopping the misuse of town and village green applications that undermine planned development, whilst protecting its use to safeguard cherished community spaces and ensure the protection of genuine town and village greens.
• Technical changes will be made to the Special Parliamentary Procedure which is an additional consent on top of planning permission. The provisions remove an inconsistency between 2008 and 1981 legislation. Parliamentary safeguards will be retained for land with genuinely ‘special’ historic protection, such as National Trust land, allotments and common land.
Backing aspiration by creating more employee owners
• Help companies that want to create jobs introduce new employment contracts that give employees a stake in the firm with between £2,000 and £50,000 of shares in exchange some of their UK employment rights. This is particularly aimed at fast growing small and medium sized companies that benefit from a flexible workforce.
• Owner-employee status will be optional for existing employees in both established companies. New start-ups can choose to offer only this new type of contract for new hires. Companies recruiting owner-employees will continue to have the option of inserting more generous employment conditions in the employment contract if they want to. The aim is for companies to be able to offer the new type of contract from April 2013.
Providing tax stability for local firms and local shops
• An unpredictable business rate revaluation that could be costly to British firms will be put off until 2017. This will give businesses five years of tax stability and certainty so businesses looking to grow and improve the economy concentrate on delivering growth.
• Business rates are the third biggest outgoing for local firms after rent and staff costs. This decision will avoid local firms and local shops facing unexpected hikes in their business rate bills over the next five years. As business rates are linked to inflation, there will be no real terms increase in rates over this period. This reform will provide certainty for business to plan and invest, supporting local economic growth.
• These measures complement the local retention of business rates being introduced through the Local Government Finance Bill which will give councils new incentives to support local firms and local shops, and also complements the new power to introduce local business rate discounts, the automation of small business rate relief and the abolition of the unfair ‘ports tax’ all enacted through the Localism Act 2011.
Eric Pickles, said: ‘These common sense reforms will support local jobs and local firms. They complement the changes we are already delivered through the Localism Act, from streamlined planning guidance and, shortly, from the local retention of business rates.’
Planning Minister Nick Boles said: ‘The Growth and Infrastructure Bill will boost investment and local economic growth. It removes confusing and overlapping red tape, whilst ensuring democratic checks and balances and environmental safeguards remain in place. Britain is in a global race today with rising nations like China and Brazil. Countries like ours will only be able to compete if we make it easier for businesses to invest and quicker for infrastructure to get built.’
For the ‘Growth and Infrastructure Bill: Background notes’ see: LINK
Follow the progress of the bill, and get feed updates, here: LINK
Local Communities News: LINK
Search Planning Portal: LINK
