National Infrastructure Plan 2013, National Networks NPS And 2014 Review All Published

Today's entry reports on three significant developments affecting the Planning Act 2008 regime.

Although the Autumn Statement isn't until tomorrow, it is already looking like an also-ran as three major announcements are made today by three different government departments on the biggest day for infrastructure policy for more than a year.

National Infrastructure Plan 2013

The Treasury launched the third edition of the National Infrastructure Plan (NIP) this morning. I attended the press conference accompanying the launch, where Chief Secretary to the Treasury Danny Alexander MP and infrastructure minister Lord Deighton spoke.

The NIP can be found here and contains several significant planning-related announcements, as follows:

The 'Top 40' list of projects and programmes has been refreshed with a few changes and more detail (pages 79-82). The government has established a 'Major Infrastructure Tracking' unit within Infrastructure UK to track the progress of each project (paragraph 5.15). The government will 'ensure' that any Top 40 project that is not already and NSIP is able to use the regime, and being a Top 40 project will make a positive decision more likely (7.36). Further to an earlier consultation exercise, the government will introduce a specialist planning court with set deadlines to handle planning judicial reviews and may introduce other reforms as well (7.37). Fees for NSIP applications will not increase until at least May 2015 (7.40). The government will consult on a statutory requirement to have a Local Plan in place (7.42). The government will introduce legislation so that Where a planning authority has failed to discharge a condition on time, it will be treated as having been approved, and will consult on planning authorities having to provide more justification for imposing conditions (7.43). The government will consult on reducing unnecessary statutory consultations (7.44). The government will develop a pilot programme of passing community benefits of development directly to households (7.45). Analysis

This National Infrastructure Plan looks much more like a plan that its predecessors. It identifies what the UK needs in each sector and what projects are in the pipeline to meet that need. The one thing that seems to be missing to me (and would have been my question to Danny Alexander had I caught his eye) is that I can't see anything setting out where (or indeed if) there is a gap between need and the pipeline - i.e. if the pipeline will not deliver everything that is needed, what is missing and what the government will do about it. With that one extra ingredient, I think that it would be a true National Infrastructure Plan for the first time.

On the Top 40...