The National Infrastructure Commission has submitted a report to government recommending measures that might be taken to speed up the planning of nationally significant transport and energy projects.
Its recommendations include ensuring national policy statements are update every five years, creating a data platform to standardise effective environmental mitigation measures, and better compensation for those impacted by infrastructure development.
“A menu of benefits for hosting major schemes might include proximity based payments for households or funding for local projects,” the commission says.
It also says that onshore wind energy should not be left to the local planning system because hardly anything is getting through.
The report says: “In the next decade, the UK needs to consent and build transformational infrastructure including wind farms, electricity transmission lines, and reservoirs to achieve energy security and net zero, and build resilience to climate change. Into the 2030s, the types of schemes required will expand further, with the potential requirement for carbon capture and storage pipelines and a hydrogen network.”
The report goes on to note the importance of transport schemes for achieving regional economic rebalancing.
The report says that the planning system is currently too slow, partly because national policy statements – which guide the recommendations the Planning Inspectorate makes to ministers about whether schemes should proceed – have not been routinely updated.
To address this, the commission also recommends that national policy statements should be updated every five years.
The National Infrastructure Commission says that government should amend legislation to bring onshore wind back into the nationally significant infrastructure projects system as soon as possible: since planning decisions on onshore wind were returned to local authorities in 2016 – alongside tighter restrictions in the National Planning Policy Framework – the number of installations in England have decreased by more than 80%.
The commission reckons that its recommendations could the time it takes to get planning permission for national projects from four years to two and a half, and reduce the likelihood of legal challenge by ensuring better outcomes for the environment and local communities. For some schemes, consenting could be reduced to two years due to more strategic management of environmental impacts, it says.
“Improving the speed of the planning system for major infrastructure does not need to come at the expense of good decisions, which take communities and the environment into account,” the report says. “Longer decision making processes mean more uncertainty for communities while decisions are made. Similarly, inefficiencies in environmental data gathering and mitigation design slow down the process, but do not improve the environment.”
Angus Walker, partner at law firm BDB Pitmans, commented: “In an immediate clash with government policy, the commission recommends that onshore wind be brought back into the regime – a recommendation which I strongly agree with so that the benefits and adverse impacts of projects can be weighed up just like everything else.
“It also wants more ‘community benefit’ – which essentially means financial benefits for those in the immediate vicinity - for projects such as windfarms and solar farms but is suggesting this be done at a system level. This is a good move, since if it was up to individual developers to propose community benefits this would (a) give the appearance of them ‘buying’ permission, which runs counter to one of the basic principles of the planning system and (b) raise the expectation that everyone should do this and put pressure to increase the amounts over time.”
Marta Krajewska, deputy director of policy at Energy UK, said: “Bringing onshore wind into the nationally significant infrastructure projects (NSIP) system would demonstrate the government’s ambitions for onshore wind, putting it on a level playing field with other energy projects so that we’re making the most of our potential resources and delivering infrastructure that will enable willing local communities to benefit from new developments.”
Richard Benwell, chief executive of Wildlife & Countryside Link, said: “A central and standardised environmental data sharing platform is an excellent recommendation, which could help to reduce the ongoing and often unnecessary toll that major infrastructure takes on nature. If it were combined with local nature recovery strategies legally linked to the planning system, then it could represent a major step toward nature-positive planning.”
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