Sustained economic growth is central to the Government’s plan for change. It is the only way to increase the prosperity of our country and improve the living standards of working people.
Building and upgrading the right economic infrastructure—whether that be electricity networks, public transport links, renewable energy projects, roads, or water supplies—is essential to achieving that growth and delivering the Government’s long-term missions. Yet when it comes to infrastructure delivery, Britain today performs poorly against comparator countries. That needs to change.
That is why the Government moved quickly last year to lift the ban on onshore wind and expand the scope of the nationally significant infrastructure projects regime, enabling laboratories, gigafactories and data centres to be directed into the process. Last week, the Prime Minister announced plans to speed up the conclusion of legal challenges against development consent orders, including committing to legislate to ensure that meritless claims are given only a single permission attempt to seek a judicial review.
Yesterday, the Government published two interlinked working papers: the first, from His Majesty’s Treasury, set out the Government’s plan for their 10-year infrastructure strategy, which will be published alongside the spending review in June; the second, from the Ministry for Housing, Communities and Local Government, detailed our legislative proposals to streamline the consenting of critical national infrastructure—proposals which, subject to further work and the views expressed in response to the working paper, will be taken forward through the Planning and Infrastructure Bill. Copies of these documents will be deposited in the Libraries of both Houses.
The proposals in the latter paper are intended to help deliver the commitment that the Government made in their plan for change to determine applications for at least 150 major infrastructure projects by the end of this Parliament. This target is more than the total number of decisions made under the NSIP regime since it was introduced in 2011, and nearly triple the 57 decisions made during the previous Parliament. Delivering this ambitious commitment will require decisive action on several fronts.
We are not, however, starting from scratch. The NSIP reform action plan, published in 2023, laid the foundations for a better, faster, greener, fairer, and more resilient NSIP regime. The action plan was broadly welcomed by infrastructure developers and communities, and the implementation of many of its proposals is already under way. These include enabling public bodies to recover costs for their services, and the provision of new services on the part of the Planning Inspectorate to enhance its advice to applicants and fast-track examinations.
We now want to move further and faster—which is why our working paper outlines legislative proposals to deliver two key objectives: clearer and stronger national policy; and faster decisions under the NSIP regime. With respect to national policy statements, the working paper confirms that the Government will implement recommendations from the National Infrastructure Commission to require that each NPS is updated at least every five years. This is essential given that some NPSs, such as those for waste water and hazardous waste, have not been updated for over 10 years.