The next steps: how to build on the Planning and Infrastructure Bill
The Government’s flagship Planning and Infrastructure Bill is currently making its way through Parliament, with a lot of hopes being pinned on the Bill and its provisions. These hopes are shared by MPA member companies in the domestic supply chain required for their construction. But there are further steps needed to deliver the necessary raw materials and products required to deliver Government’s ambitions.
Ministers believe the Bill will accelerate housebuilding and, most importantly for delivering the Government’s 10-year infrastructure strategy, help unblock Britain’s infrastructure pipeline, allowing major projects to be delivered more efficiently and reliably.
Businesses in the mineral products sector, and across the infrastructure supply chain, will hope the Bill achieves these aims. Regarding infrastructure, successive governments have announced major projects with great fanfare and little detail as to how they intend to achieve their lofty ambitions, only for costs to spiral, and the projects to inevitably end up delayed, pared back, and in many cases cancelled altogether.
There are almost too many examples to mention. HS2. Heathrow expansion. The Oxford-Cambridge ‘arc’. The Silvertown Tunnel, opened this year, was announced 13 years ago and mooted long before that, with land safeguarded for it as early as 1995. Recent months have seen the next Road Investment Strategy delayed by a year, five road infrastructure schemes cancelled altogether, and much of the New Hospital Programme pushed back well into the 2030s.
This delay and uncertainty is frustrating enough for everyone who stands to use the promised infrastructure once the project is complete. For businesses in the construction material supply chain, it makes it difficult to plan for future demand and invest with confidence. Better infrastructure delivery would help fuel growth by unlocking this investment, as well as by allowing the projects themselves to deliver economic benefits once completed.
The Bill and the forthcoming 10-year infrastructure strategy mark a much-needed opportunity to break the cycle of spiralling costs, delays, and cancellations that has dogged British infrastructure for years, and set our approach to delivering the infrastructure we need on a more growth-friendly path. But what can ministers do next to make the most of this opportunity, and embed changes for the long term?
Infrastructure projects, as well as housing developments, rely on a secure, sustainable supply of mineral products, such as aggregates, concrete, cement, and asphalt. However, our permitted reserves of aggregates are being consumed much faster than they are being replaced, with a ten-year replenishment rate of 61 per cent for sand and gravel, and just 33 per cent for crushed rock.
This situation is clearly unsustainable in the medium to long term. Action to reverse this decline, and ensuring a ‘steady and adequate supply’ of domestic construction materials for the housebuilding and infrastructure projects ministers want to see built in accordance with national policy, should be the Government’s next move in its programme of planning reforms.
Ministers have the power to do this. Importantly, there’s no geological shortage of these essential mineral resources: the decline in permitted reserves is caused by an uncertain investment environment, fuelled by unnecessary cost, delay, and uncertainty in the planning system compounded by slow, underperforming regulators.
One simple step ministers can take to ensure businesses can plan ahead and invest with confidence in new aggregates extraction is requiring major projects to publish Construction Material Supply Audits at an early stage in the planning process, potentially alongside the waste audits they are already required to produce. This would give businesses in the supply chain clarity over future demand and ensure the planning system can provide for the right materials to be made available in the right place and at the right time. In turn, this would also help prevent instances where multiple projects assume they can rely on the same supply at the same time, causing delays and additional costs.
This requirement could be backed up by a National Minerals Strategy for the wider mineral products sector. The Government has published a Timber in Construction Roadmap and recently consulted on a steel strategy, but the largest supplier by volume to the UK construction sector, mineral products essential to all major infrastructure projects, is currently lacking equivalent support. The availability and supply of these essential domestic resources must not be assumed – but that is exactly what is currently happening.
This strategy should provide for a regularly updated National Statement of Need for construction aggregates, which would further help the industry plan for future demand and invest accordingly, and help local planning authorities provide for the future need for aggregates extraction in their area. It should also include measures to protect the UK cement industry from carbon leakage, ensuring a secure domestic supply of cement that isn’t reliant on imports in an increasingly turbulent world.
The strategy would also be a golden opportunity to improve the mineral planning system more broadly by ensuring that, in addition to being generally well-resourced, each local planning authority has access to specialist mineral planning expertise. Revenue from mineral planning and associated permitting fees should also be ringfenced to fund the services being delivered.
Passing the Planning and Infrastructure Bill and publishing the 10-year infrastructure strategy must not be the end of the road for the planning reform agenda. To maximise the reforms’ potential, it is essential that the Government follows them up with policies that will help the mineral products sector invest with confidence and supply the projects that these reforms have the potential to unleash. Mineral planning reform is the natural next step.
