Peter Lamb

My hon. Friend must be reading ahead. The impact on escalating costs and viability as a result of the delays is hard to overstate. The capacity issues do not stem from laziness or as a covert form of development suppression; they stem from one issue and one issue only: the absence of sufficient numbers of planners in the public sector. The rates of pay at local authorities are massively out of kilter with the private sector. The consequence is that an increasingly small number of extremely hard-working people are left trying to keep the system afloat principally out of their public spiritedness. Yet, instead of receiving the thanks they deserve, all too often they have to deal with public rhetoric that regularly denigrates them and the work they do. I hope that I am not the first or the last in this Chamber to thank those public servants for their efforts on behalf of our communities and country. Much needs to be done to reverse the decline in public sector planner numbers. While the Bill sets out many positive steps forward, I remain of the belief that few areas in the public sector would be better suited to, or would generate better economic returns from, the introduction of AI than planning. It could use decades’ worth of computerised training data to deal with simple applications automatically, freeing up expert human planners to deal with the cases that would genuinely benefit from a human eye. As a former council leader, I am defensive of the record of local government in planning. However, despite my initial scepticism, I found much that is good in the new national planning policy framework and in the Planning and Infrastructure Bill, showing that this Government genuinely listen to voices across the sector.