Afternoon summary
The government has agreed to ensure women and their partners are entitled to paid bereavement leave if they experience a miscarriage, PA Media reports. During the report stage debate on the employment rights bill, business minister Justin Madders said the government “fully accepts” the principle of bereavement leave for pregnancy loss and will work with MPs and peers to amend the bill. His commitment came in response to amendments tabled by Labour MP Sarah Owen, who chairs the women and equalities wommittee which recommended changes to the law.
Louise Haigh, the Labour former transport secretary, and Lib Dem Layla Moran both gave MPs detailed examples of ITN using NDAs (non-disclosure agreements) to cover up workplace harassment during the employment rights bill debate. They were backing an amendment that would ban firms from using NDAs to prevent workers from disclosing harassment, including sexual harassment. (See 4.14pm.)
Shabana Mahmood, the justice secretary, has said she remains willing to legislate to force the Sentencing Council to withdraw guidance issued last week that she claimed could lead to “two-tier sentencing”. She is meeting the council on Thursday. The council has defended its guidance, which was supported by the Ministry of Justice until the Tories attacked it as “two-tier” and suggested that legislation as proposed by Mahmood would undermine the independence of the judiciary. (See 12.40pm.)
The government has published its planning and infrastructure bill – one of the most important measures in its legislative programme. (See 3.15pm and 5.15pm.)
The Treasury has announced that “up to 300,000 people, including those with side hustles, will no longer need to file a self-assessment tax return” under new tax reforms.
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What industry insiders and experts say about the planning and infrastructure bill
My inbox today has been inundated with industry and expert comment on the planning and infrastructure bill. Here is a flavour of what they are saying.
Organisations in the housing or property sector are broadly positive.
This is from Richard Beresford, chief executive at the National Federation of Builders.
The Labour government is wasting no time in proving that their manifesto pledges on planning reform are real. Planning is a considerable barrier to growth and delivery, not just for housebuilders but for all construction projects, and it had a knock-on effect to the broader industry because clients spend so much of their budget on bureaucracy, not on project outcomes.
This is from Melanie Leech, chief executive of the British Property Federation.
There’s a lot to welcome in the latest stage of the government’s planning reforms. We called for strategic planning, easier brownfield development and a more certain local planning process in our planning manifesto ‘Building More, Building Better’ last year and it seems that government have listened.
Planning at the ‘larger-than-local’ level should mean that housing targets are allocated more sensibly, and that there’s better planning for employment uses …
Greater delegation of planning decisions to planning officers and the better functioning of planning committees will, when combined with wider local government reform, help to improve decision-making and better deploy resource in the system by freeing up committees to deal with larger, more complex developments.
And this is from Ed Griffiths, chief analyst for Barbour ABI, a construction research company.
There has been a planning logjam for several years and the government is clearly laser-focused on changing that picture. There are thousands of renewable energy projects in planning and connecting them to the grid is the huge challenge. This is a major step forward.
Planning lawyers have also welcomed the reforms (even if they can’t agree whether or not they amount to a radical overhaul).
This is from Trevor Ivory, planning partner at DLA Piper.
I’m glad to see the government has resisted overhauling the rulebook in the planning and infrastructure bill and will deliver what the industry has been calling for. This is a collection of sensible, targeted measures that could help delivery without the delay that comes from wholesale reform of the system.
And this is from Kylie Wesson, planning partner at Shakespeare Martineau.
The development industry is breathing a sigh of relief today. For too long committee practice has slowed and stagnated planning decisions, with little oversight, intervention or accountability around decisions. A radical overhaul and the introduction of the national scheme of delegation is not only long overdue, but absolutely necessary to meet the ambitious housing targets set by the government last year. With so many flaws in the system, the government will have its work cut out to rectify them all at once.
Environmentalists are supportive too.
This is from Ami McCarthy, head of politics at Greenpeace UK.
More renewables, faster delivery, cleaner energy, lower bills - what’s not to love? These welcome reforms will supercharge progress towards meeting the UK’s clean power targets, which will reduce our dependence on expensive gas and its volatile prices, as well as help slash emissions and tackle the climate crisis.
But free market enthusiasts see the government should be “overhauling the rulebook” and going much further.
This is from Kristian Niemietz, editorial director at the Institute of Economic Affairs, a libertarian thinktank.
Britain’s inability to build thing has long been the biggest drag on economic dynamism and prosperity, making us all poorer for no good reason. The system has become a playground for semi-professional obstructionists, for whom blocking things has become a way of life.
The planning reforms announced today contain several steps in the right direction, because they will close off some of the entry portals for lifestyle NIMBYism. But the emphasis is very much on “streamlining” the existing system, as opposed to overhauling it. If all goes according to plan, the planning bill will deliver a speedier and tidier version of the system we have. But what will stop that system from cluttering up again over time? What will keep the momentum going when the government runs out of steam, or is replaced by a less development-friendly one?
And this is from an article in the Economist, which champions free market liberalism.
[After the war] on the Labour government’s benches was a zeal for extending state control, including over property rights. And so they came to pass a landmark law [the Town and Country Planning Act 1947] – among the first of its kind – that prohibited all private development without explicit permission. No longer would land ownership confer the right to build; that power would rest instead with the local council …
[Labour MPs now see more building] as this government’s most plausible route to higher growth (and with it better-funded public services, or higher defence spending). They believe they are seizing it.
Yet talk to those more immersed in the absurdism of Britain’s planning system, and the story is rather different. “They are assuming the creators of the 1947 system were broadly right,” says John Myers of the YIMBY Alliance, a pressure group for home-building. “They have shied away from real reform and are trying to patch over what is broken,” says Christian Hilber of the London School of Economics. “They’ve not grasped the absolute obstacles to what they need to do,” says Paul Cheshire, also at the LSE.
Few question that the government is proposing many welcome changes. Set against the scale of the task, however, the Starmer team appears to be wasting its best shot at success.
The Economist argues that the government should be repealing the 1947 Act and introducing a zoning approach to planning instead (where any building in a particular zone is allowed, provided it complies with general, pre-determined rules). It cites Auckland as a good example of why this works.
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