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Lord Lucas (Con)

Speaking in the House of Lords on 15 September 2025

Debate

Planning and Infrastructure Bill

Contribution

My Lords, I have had a number of conversations with developers over the course of the past month or two. Their universal conclusion is that Part 3 makes it much harder to build houses. It adds huge levels of risk and uncertainty. It tears up the arrangements that they were half way through making—in order to get things done and deal with the environmental impact of housebuilding—and substitutes them with a regime where they just will not know what is happening. It will be really difficult to make commitments because so much could change if an EDP is imposed and because of the timescale of imposing an EDP. What will the consequence of an EDP be? It will make the whole business anti-business. I really hope that the Government will take the chance of a change in the Secretary of State to look at this aspect of the Bill and say, “Even if it’s a good idea, we need to take it slowly and carefully, and we need to make sure that people can rely on it”, because, if you are setting out to build houses on any scale, you are taking a long-term decision. You need to know how the landscape will be for years in advance.

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