The Government's latest proposed bill includes a raft of schemes that would improve how we fund, plan, manage and maintain our national infrastructure.
It says the Infrastructure Bill would provide a £3.9 billion boost to the economy over the next 10 years by:
- improving the funding and management of our major roads
- streamlining the planning process for major projects
- supporting house building
- making it easier and cheaper to register land and property
- helping communities become stakeholders in renewable electricity projects.
The bill would simplify and speed up measures introduced in the Planning Act 2008 for handling minor changes to existing planning permissions for major projects. It would also simplify the processes for more significant changes.
The bill would allow the examining authority, a group of inspectors who consider major applications, to be appointed immediately after an application has been accepted. It would also allow the panel to comprise 2 inspectors, speeding up the process and saving money.
The bill would allow certain types of planning conditions to be regarded as discharged if a local planning authority has not notified the applicant of their decision within a prescribed time period. This will reduce unnecessary delay and costs. The government response to the consultation on the procedural detail of this proposal has been published.
The bill would permit land to be transferred directly from arms-length bodies to the Homes and Communities Agency (HCA). This would reduce bureaucracy, manage land more effectively, and get more homes built.
The bill would make sure that future purchasers of land owned by HCA and the Greater London Authority (GLA) will be able to develop and use land without being affected by easements and other rights and restrictions suspended by the agency. Sometimes land owned by HCA and GLA has easements or rights and restrictions from its previous use. At the moment HCA and the GLA can suspend these, but not pass that suspension on. The bill would make sure that purchasers of this land would also benefit from the suspension.
The bill would also allow Land Registry to take on statutory responsibility for the Local Land Charges register and an extension of powers would also allow Land Registry to play a wider role in the property market. The consultation, including impact assessment, on these measures took place between January and March 2014 and the response and updated impact assessment were published in June 2014 and October 2014 respectively.
The bill would introduce measures to implement the government’s drive towards zero carbon homes as described in its recent response to the consultation that took place in 2013. A consultation paper with proposals for an exemption from zero carbon provisions for small sites was published on 18 November 2014.
The bill would also allow for changes to the RHI providing more flexibility in financing arrangements for renewable heating systems. This would, for example, allow households unable to afford a renewable heating system to have the cost met by a third party, who would then receive the RHI payments.
The bill would allow the RHI scheme to be administered by parties other than the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change or Ofgem. It would make some changes to the Parliamentary procedures which apply to secondary legislation relating to the scheme. A policy brief and impact assessment for these measures is available.
