Viscount Hanworth (Lab)

My Lords, Amendment 52 is of prime importance. Our planning system has become sclerotic. According to the Explanatory Notes that accompany the Bill, the time that it takes on average to secure a development consent order, or DCO, for major infrastructure projects has more than doubled in the last decade to more than four years. The development consent system is beset by objections and pleas and by judicial reviews, with several judicial reviews sometimes besetting the same project. The effects of the delay may be to cause an otherwise viable project to become uneconomic or unaffordable. Nowadays, such delays are often envisaged as a means of defeating a project. The conjunction of lawyers and protesters, which has given rise to a veritable industry, is a modern and unprecedented phenomenon. Recently, I had good cause to consider such developments. I made a trip by car from London to Ilfracombe in Devon. I had intended to travel on the M4 motorway, which is a major arterial route. However, in consequence of its blockage, I was diverted, on the advice of the Google satnav system, on to the A303. In doing so, I remembered that 303 is the calibre of a rifle bullet. I had hoped to travel at the maximum legal speed, if not at the speed of a bullet. I was pleased to be able to do so until I was brought to a halt. I was then constrained to travel at a snail’s pace for a prolonged period, while passing an ancient stone monument on a single-lane road. I saw the ancient megaliths of Stonehenge on the brow of a hill, which were surrounded by a gathering of druids. I was reminded of their campaign, which has prevented the building of the Stonehenge bypass. They regret the presence of the road and resist the building of a bypass that would encroach upon Salisbury Plain. Some might regard their campaign as a worthy attempt to preserve the dignity of an ancient monument. However, there is another side to the story, which concerns the objections of residents in the neighbouring villages to the diversion of traffic on to their streets. They contend that their villages have an equal claim to preservation. The legal wrangling has been interminable. The first grant of development consent for a bypass, in 2020, was quashed by the High Court in July 2021. It was then given the green light again, by the Department for Transport, which reissued a development consent two years later, in July 2023. The project was put on hold again, because of another series of judicial reviews, which were dismissed by the High Court in February 2024 and by the Court of Appeal in October 2024. Undeterred by those two defeats, the claimants asked the Supreme Court if they could appeal to it. On 29 January this year, the Supreme Court refused permission to appeal, on the grounds that the challenge did not raise an arguable point of law. However, this decision was immaterial since, within weeks of taking office last July, the Labour Government had scrapped the plans for a two-mile tunnel that would bypass the monument on the grounds that the cost of the project had become unaffordable. The decision to cancel the project was taken some three and a half years after the development consent order had been issued and after a full and detailed examination of all the issues. In this case, it might be said that the campaigners had won not by virtue of the strength of their case but by dint of endless legal chicanery and delay. However, the same recourse is available to many other parties who, for various reasons, wish to stand in the way of important development projects.