The government is to use "design codes" to help smooth the passage of the Planning and Compulsory Purchase Bill through parliament.
These codes, which will lay down design standards in a masterplan, will allow planners to bypass the normally long-winded planning route.

The bill, which aims to improve the speed and efficiency of Britain's planning system, has received what regeneration minister Lord Rooker described as "a drubbing" in the House of Lords from peers who object to the lack of democratic accountability in some of the procedures.

The peers want the bill's regional spatial strategies to be set by elected regional assemblies rather than unelected regional planning bodies.

They also want county councils to be more involved in planning – unlike the government, which wants to dispense to some extent with the conventional planning system, in which they play a key role.

Rooker has been in talks with CABE and the Town & Country Planning Association over measures to help ease the passage of the bill, which goes into its third day of the report stage in the Lords next Tuesday.

Rooker is to offer a "bag of goodies", understood to include more detailed policy guidance on community codes, which set rigorous design standards for large urban developments. Coding could be adopted in existing supplementary planning guidance at regional and local level.

The use of measures to safeguard design quality such as coding could help the bill meet the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister's aim of achieving royal assent by Easter.

An ODPM spokesperson said the bill was still on course.