Housing minister denies government has tasked Tory peer with writing second planning bill

The housing minister has denied reports that a Conservative peer has been tasked with writing a second planning bill to block judicial reviews of major planning decisions.

Reports in The Guardian at the weekend claimed that the prime minister had asked Charles Banner KC, who was made a peer by Rishi Sunak, to write a new legislation which could limit the ability of environmental groups to oppose large infrastructure projects.

However, speaking at a Labour Housing Group fringe event on Tuesday afternoon, Matthew Pennycook flatly denied the report.

“Lord Banner has not been tasked with drafting the second Planning Bill,” he said.

“Nothing that I’ve seen suggest that, unless it’s been well hidden from me. So I don’t know where the stories come from.”

In a wide-ranging discussion, Pennycook said that “the bulk of the reform has been done” and, in response to a question from a housing association leader, warned organisations against waiting for further changes.

“if you’re holding off for some reason, I don’t know what you’re holding off for,” he said. “There’s not next year some huge change to the planning system. We’ve got to make the existing system work”.

He said that the government “might make tweaks around the edges”, such as the upcoming “acceleration plan” that the new housing secretary, Steve Reed has hinted at.

“But now we will need to get working so it is about maximizing delivery, and we want to work in partnership with the sector to do that,” he said.

Pennycook told the audience to expect to “see the fruit” of multiple consultations “in the coming months”. This includes new site threshold changes, brownfield passports and ”a more pro-growth approach to development around transport hubs”.

While celebrating what the housing ministry had achieved in a little over a year, he encouraged people to temper their expectations.

“Development and planning does take time,” he said. “Even when we speed it up, it’s going to take time, and we won’t see the fruits of some of our changes for some time yet”.

However, he pointed to “green shoots”, including figures suggesting that housing starts were up 29% in the second quarter of the year, compared with the same period the year prior.

Pennycook also dismissed a questioner who suggested the government’s new town programme, which sets out plans for communities of at least 10,000 homes, was less ambitious than the original new town programme, where plans for Milton Keynes alone including 250,000 homes.

The housing minister explained that the taskforce had come forward with site that can accommodate “at least” 10,000 homes, but that “in some cases it will be far, far larger numbers” and that over their lifetime, some of the recommended sites could “really accommodate potentially very large scale, communities”.