Planning reforms must go further to prevent judicial review acting as a costly break on major projects, infrastructure chiefs have warned.
Witnesses giving evidence to the Public Bill Committee told MPs the most critical weakness in the Planning and Infrastructure Bill legislation – which aims to accelerate the building of new homes and infrastructure – was its failure to clamp down on the delays caused by judicial review.
Sir John Armitt, former chair of the National Infrastructure Commission, said government recommendations to reduce the opportunities for judicial review did not go far enough and that “people will find ways” around them.
“Judicial review constantly acts as a brake, and influences those who are developing projects to try to cross that bridge before they get there: you put in more mitigation than ideally you would wish, which raises the cost, and you potentially finish up with a more expensive project than ideally you would have had,” he told the committee.
“That is the nature of people trying to second-guess what is going to be raised and how the judicial review will be handled.”
Armitt said he was unconvinced that proposals in the government’s planning reform working paper, published in January, would be enough to address the problem.
“Each year of judicial review is likely to potentially add a year to the process, and that is why it is difficult to see that these changes will benefit the overall process by more than six to 12 months, at the end of the day,” he said.
Robbie Owen, director of the National Infrastructure Planning Association, agreed the bill should be strengthened to tackle delays relating to judicial review and said the recommendations in the working paper were “really quite modest” and related largely to the permission stage of a review.
“Approximately 70 per cent of judicial review applications get permission and go forward, therefore we need to focus beyond the permission stage,” he told the committee.
He said the bill could be amended to allow Parliament to use a “simple one-clause bill” to confirm decisions to give development consent for projects of national priority.
“I think that is a very good way for Parliament, where it wishes, to express its support for a big, critical project,” he said.
Owen also called for a further streamlining of the Development Consent Order process to allow the standard process to be varied on a case-by-case basis, another idea that had been trailed in the working paper.
“I encourage you and your officials to have another look at that, because there is a justification for giving some degree of flexibility to reflect the nature and requirements of individual projects and how the standard process might need to be adapted to them,” he said.
Elsewhere in the discussion, he welcomed the announcement of reforms this week to cut the statutory pre-consultation period for major projects, with new guidance due to be published for applicants.
But he said more uniform guidance should also be given to public bodies on how to deal with applications relating to major infrastructure within their area.
“Response performances, if I can put it that way, from local authorities differ markedly across the country,” he said.
“Improved guidance could be given by ministers, not just to applicants about how they should go about their pre-application consultation and engagement, but to local authorities and other public bodies about how they should respond to proposals for national infrastructure.”