Planning Reform Working Paper: Streamlining Infrastructure Planning

Overview

This paper proposes a number of measures that could be taken to streamline the consenting process for national infrastructure and to enable faster decision-making, whilst ensuring the process is fair and certain.

Sustained economic growth is central to this Government’s Plan for Change and is the only way to increase prosperity across the country and improve living standards. Upgrading the country’s major economic infrastructure – including our electricity networks and clean energy sources, roads, public transport links and water supplies – is essential to delivering basic services, growing the economy, supporting the UK’s transition to clean power by 2030, and enabling 1.5 million homes to be built over this Parliament.

Enquiries

For any enquiries about this working paper please contact: 

InfrastructurePlanning@communities.gov.uk

How to respond

Please note that this is not a formal consultation and is instead intended to inform discussions with the sector, to determine whether and how to take these proposals forward. Alongside these discussions, we welcome responses to the series of questions that are posed at the end of the paper.  There is no formal deadline, and we will confirm next steps on these proposals in due course.  

Citizen Space is the department’s preferred route for receiving responses. We strongly encourage responses to be made via Citizen Space, particularly from organisations with access to online facilities such as local planning authorities, representative bodies and businesses. Using Citizen Space greatly assists our analysis of responses, enabling more efficient and effective consideration of the issues raised. 

If you cannot respond via Citizen Space, you may send your response by email to: InfrastructurePlanning@communities.gov.uk

Written responses should be sent to:

Nationally Significant Infrastructure Projects (NSIP) Reform team
Planning Infrastructure Division
Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government
Floor 3
Fry Building
2 Marsham Street
London
SW1P 4DF 

Please make it clear which question each comment relates to and ensure that the text of your response is in a format that allows copying of individual sentences or paragraphs, to help us when considering your view on particular issues.