Lord Lansley (Con)

Clause 6 provides, right at the end, that Schedule 2 makes further provision, including in relation to the spatial development strategy that strategic authorities are required to produce under the Planning and Compulsory Purchase Act 2004, as inserted by Section 58 of the Planning and Infrastructure Act 2025. Those who are former inmates of the Stockholm syndrome that was the Planning and Infrastructure Bill will recall this very well. I apologise to all those noble Lords for revisiting this, but I hope with a useful purpose. Alongside a spatial development strategy, the Bill requires, in Clause 39 and Schedule 20, the strategic authority also to prepare a local growth plan. Noble Lords will see that, by virtue of the transport and infrastructure powers of strategic authorities and their power to charge a community infrastructure levy linked to that infrastructure provision—Clause 34 and Schedule 15 provide for that—the strategic authority will need to have, in addition to a local growth plan, an infrastructure strategy and an infrastructure delivery framework. I hope that is what they intend to do. The purpose of my amendments in this group is to link these things together. I entirely take the point that the Minister may rightly make: “Surely that’s what strategic authorities have to do”. But we have statutory provision in relation to the spatial development strategy, in particular, that does not refer across to local growth plans and I think it is important that it does. There are two things that should be linked. Amendments 138 and 144 say that the local growth plan should identify, for the spatial development strategy then to take into account, the employment, industrial, commercial and logistic growth opportunities identified in the local growth plan. Noble Lords will recall from the Planning and Infrastructure Act that there are a number of specifics that the spatial development strategy has to take on board, but they are essentially housing related. I did not succeed in persuading the Government that they should also specifically take account of employment and related issues. But that is exactly what will happen in practice, and ought to happen: the local growth plan and the employment opportunities associated with it should be an essential part of the strategic process of establishing the spatial development in that area. I cannot see that they can be separated and done without reference to each other. Amendments 139 and 145 are intended for the local growth plan to identify the infrastructure needed to meet the growth priorities set out in the local growth plan. As a consequence, it must identify the employment-related implications for the spatial development strategy. I do not think that I am inventing these kinds of processes. I have been involved locally for a number of years—I refer to my registered interest as chair, over the years, of the Cambridgeshire Development Forum. The way a local plan is established—and in due course the spatial development strategy for Cambridgeshire and Peterborough—starts from an understanding of the future employment implications of the growth that will occur in our area. It is substantial and those growth priorities will be laid out in the local growth plan, a draft of which has already been produced by the Cambridgeshire and Peterborough Combined Authority. That is a starting point for understanding the spatial development strategy that I hope it will now rapidly go on to produce. There are two sets of amendments, one for county combined authorities and the other for combined authorities. I hope that Amendments 138, 139, 144 and 145 would secure an internal coherence between the local growth plan and the infrastructure priorities derived from that local growth plan, which is then linked into the planning of where that growth in employment and housing should be located through the spatial development strategy. I hope that consistency would enable the strategic authorities to work effectively.