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[00:00:00] Intro: You are listening to Parliament Matters, a Hansard Society production, supported by the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust. Learn more at hansardsociety.org.uk/PM.

[00:00:16] Ruth Fox: Welcome to Parliament Matters, the podcast about the institution at the heart of our democracy, Parliament itself. I'm Ruth Fox.

[00:00:23] Mark D'Arcy: And I'm Mark D'Arcy.

[00:00:24] Coming up in this week's edition.

[00:00:26] Ruth Fox: Catastrophic meltdown or little local difficulty? Will Reform's internal rows derail them? And what are the parliamentary implications?

[00:00:34] Mark D'Arcy: Bad news for bats and greater crested newts and all kinds of other protected creatures. The government's just published its Planning and Infrastructure Bill. Will it mean less protection for them and maybe more work for MPs?

[00:00:47] Ruth Fox: And we've been looking ahead. There are plenty of clouds on the horizon for the government whips on everything from social security cuts to relations with the European Union.

[00:00:56] Mark D'Arcy: And Ruth, just before we get into what you described just now as Reform's possible catastrophic meltdown or maybe local difficulty, just a reminder that if you're listening to this podcast in the hope of hearing about the assisted dying bill that's going through Parliament at the moment, we've actually got a special dedicated podcast looking at all the nuances of that process, all the twists and turns in the current Public Bill Committee.

[00:01:19] So look out for that in your podcast feed. It'll be there very soon. And in the meantime, Ruth, what about Reform?

[00:01:28] All sorts of shenanigans, a vast bust up between Nigel Farage and Rupert Lowe, one of the new MPs elected for Reform in Great Yarmouth last July. This has led already to the suspension of Rupert Lowe.

[00:01:40] He's not just lost the Reform whip, he's been told, apparently, that there's no way back for him. He, in turn, has been tweeting out requests for Nigel Farage to meet him for dinner so that they can iron out their differences and restore harmony by the time they get to the port and cigars. It's an incredibly messy bust up. And I think what it goes to is the internal culture, a problem that small parties in Parliament tend to have, that they aren't configured to manage personal or policy differences or some other kind of issue in the way that the bigger parties are. I suppose it's a generic problem, especially when you're a relatively new start-up, as reform is.

[00:02:19] Ruth Fox: Yes and of course remember Reform until very recently was essentially primarily owned by Nigel Farage.

[00:02:25] Mark D'Arcy: It was the Reform party Limited.

[00:02:26] Ruth Fox: Yes, um, so they're changing their constitution, they're sort of democratising and reorganising, which in itself is obviously likely to lead to fallout.

[00:02:34] But yeah, they're very small, these differences therefore magnified. You've got Lee Anderson really the only one of the group with any parliamentary experience, but he's somebody who's been in three political parties, he's their Chief Whip, but not perhaps an individual whose sort of, uh, approach to political life is designed to, uh, to calm things down.

[00:02:54] Mark D'Arcy: He's not exactly Mr Consensus, is he?

[00:02:56] Ruth Fox: No. Rupert Lowe, I mean, he's a businessman, I think it's an interesting question about the way in which businessmen who become politicians, become parliamentarians, actually find parliamentary and political life quite challenging, because that sort of executive direction that they're used to, getting things done and done quickly, it's a very different life in Parliament. And he's got limited political experience. He had a short spell as a member of the European Parliament, but I mean, a very different context. And, you know my thoughts on that Parliament.

[00:03:26] Mark D'Arcy: It was in the brief period between the European Parliament elections of what was it now? 2019. And Britain subsequently leaving the EU at the end of 2019.

[00:03:39] So about seven months total experience. And you can't imagine, because they must have known that Britain was going to leave, you can't imagine that they necessarily took European parliamentary life perhaps as seriously as someone who thought they were embarking on a full five year term.

[00:03:53] Ruth Fox: Yeah, quite. So, I mean, we've got these clearly personal and political differences. Some of this is about policy, some of this is about support for Tommy Robinson on the far right, some of this is about what Rupert Lowe has said in terms of wanting mass deportations of people who knew about these sort of rape crime gangs in places like Rochdale.

[00:04:13] Well mass deportations

[00:04:15] Mark D'Arcy: of all illegal immigrants. Yeah. Indeed. And, um, Nigel Farage has been very, very wary of using such a phrase in his speeches. I mean, there was a very good piece in the Times earlier this week by Danny Finkelstein, a veteran, it has to be said, of the SDP Liberal split in the 80s before he joined the Conservatives, about the difference between what he described as wideners and deepeners.

[00:04:37] Wideners want to widen their party's appeal, reach out to people who are not already attracted to a particular party, and deepeners want to do what the existing membership wants. So Rupert Lowe is in the category of those who want to give the members that old time religion. Nigel Farage appears to be in the category of someone who doesn't want to frighten off potential sympathisers, who might not want the full fat version of what a lot of Reform members want.

[00:04:59] Ruth Fox: Yeah, and there's a YouGov poll out this week suggesting that a third of Reform party members think they would do better under another leader, presumably Rupert Lowe. A third of them think they'd be better sticking with what they've got in Nigel Farage. So yeah, this is a consequence of a party that's growing and hasn't got perhaps a clear ideological base across a range of policies.

[00:05:19] It's known for things like its position on immigration and so on, but you couldn't, you couldn't say that we know what its stance is on education policy or health policy to any great degree. But I was interested, Mark, because going back to this question about small or new start up parties and whether they've got that internal culture to manage these problems and the difficulties of doing so, I mean, obviously, in Parliament at the moment, you've got the Green Party, which is of a similar size to Reform, and there's, there's certainly, at least in public, no evidence that they're having these kinds of difficulties.

[00:05:50] Of course, they have a much more consensual approach to leadership. They have joint leaders and they don't have the huge personality, the dominant personality that Nigel Farage obviously is. But I was trying to think historically about comparisons and I just, you've talked in the past about the SDP, and obviously Danny Finkelstein himself was associated with the SDP. And it seemed to me that the big political figures, an emerging new sort of start up party, there are some comparisons there perhaps.

[00:06:16] Mark D'Arcy: Well, indeed. I mean, the SDP after the 1983 general election had David Owen as its leader. He was a very, very big figure. He was someone who, um, basically operated on his own, almost as a free agent, with a party bobbing along in his wake.

[00:06:30] And sometimes that caused tensions, because some of the rest of the troops weren't always necessarily happy with the kind of things he was saying. So there's a little bit of a Nigel Farage example there. But there was a party to consider in a way that isn't quite the case with Reform. I mean, Reform is very much the creation of Nigel Farage.

[00:06:51] He can very easily argue that all the other MPs are there because of him. They wouldn't have got elected on their own. He's the one who got them into Parliament. With possibly the unspoken thought that they should "bleedin' well shut up and do as they're told". I mean, I'm sure he doesn't put it in quite those terms, but when people accuse him of being messianic I think that's one of the strands behind that, the thought that he's the one who knows what he's doing, and possibly they don't.

[00:07:17] Ruth Fox: Yeah. He has the track record, doesn't he?

[00:07:18] Mark D'Arcy: Well, he has the track record. I mean, he is..

[00:07:20] Ruth Fox: He has his finger on the pulse of a certain section of the population, the electorate.

[00:07:25] Mark D'Arcy: You may like him, you may loathe him, but it's very, very hard to deny Nigel Farage's achievement. Without even being in the House of Commons until just recently, he's been one of the most influential politicians of the 21st century.

[00:07:37] And who knows what he might achieve next, but here's the rub, I mean, this is a party that has been on occasion topping the polls, has been within a few percent of the top of the opinion polls in recent months. Could easily be a participant in government after the next general election, if it goes on that way.

[00:07:56] Are they now blowing it? If I was a Reform member, I would be spitting tacks that this kind of personal feuding has broken out and may scuttle the whole enterprise. It may not. Maybe the public at large isn't taking much attention to the sort of Westminster minutiae of it.

[00:08:11] Ruth Fox: Well, most members of the public will not know who Rupert Lowe is.

[00:08:14] Most members will know who Nigel Farage is. But outside his own constituency, political nerds like ourselves, the Westminster commentariat and probably people in Southampton, because he used to own Southampton Football Club, but apart from that, almost nobody would recognise him in the street. So there's a problem for him in that regard.

[00:08:33] He might have a high profile in that Reform community, but he hasn't got a national profile.

[00:08:39] Mark D'Arcy: But the perception of a blowout and losing one of your five MPs, that's 20 percent of your parliamentary strength, has just lost the whip.

[00:08:47] Yes. That's a big deal. The equivalent of 60 Labour MPs or so. 80 Labour MPs.

[00:08:52] Ruth Fox: The public doesn't like party political inviting. One of the problems I think for Reform is going to be what impact this has on, you know, their membership has been growing rapidly. Does that suddenly start to fall off? The pace of development, the pace of growth, what are the implications for recruiting and selecting candidates?

[00:09:10] Because all this discussion about they might be a party, if not in government themselves, then a major player in a coalition in the future, after the next election. This is all predicated on them being able to grow their party machine on the ground, and being able to recruit enough candidates that are not going to blow up in their faces after the election.

[00:09:30] So, you know, doing the due diligence on getting hundreds of new candidates across the country, that is a big challenge, it's a big operation. And if you are looking on as a potential or perhaps an actual member of Reform who thinks, well, I quite fancy a parliamentary career. You look at that and you think, do I really want to get involved in that? Is that going to be a waste of time?

[00:09:51] Mark D'Arcy: Yes, and it doesn't look like it's an easily solvable rift either. I mean, the protagonists are tweeting at one another quite a lot at the moment. Rupert Lowe has tweeted that he used to consider Nigel Farage to be a personal friend and now doesn't, but they should still have this dinner and try and iron things out. But you've told outright lies about me on national television, he says. It's hard to see them kissing and making up that easily. So what for Rupert Lowe in the meantime? He now joins Parliament's growing band of independents.

[00:10:19] Ruth Fox: Yeah, and I think this is an interesting question, because as you say, it's a growing number.

[00:10:22] There are now 14 Independent MPs recorded on the parliamentary website. And there are, there are at least three types of independents. There are the, the group of MPs, well not a group, they were all elected individually as an Independent on an independent ticket at the general election. You've then got MPs who...

[00:10:39] Mark D'Arcy: These are people like Jeremy Corbyn and Shockat Adam.

[00:10:41] Ruth Fox: Yeah. Then you've got a group of MPs who've lost the whip for disciplinary reasons for breaking the whip, John McDonald's and Apsana Begum's and so on. And then you've got MPs who've lost the whip because they're under investigation for complaints, whether that's through the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards, even the police in some instances.

[00:11:01] So being an Independent is a mixed bag. And yet the way Parliament describes them on the website, the way they're referred to in Hansard, their status, if you like, is as an Independent all in one bag together. And this brings in the parliamentary element here and the Procedure Committee of the House of Commons has been looking at this.

[00:11:22] And in a recent, uh, evidence session they had with four Independent MPs, two of them the MPs who'd been elected on, uh, as Independents, and two, John McDonnell and, um, you know, Ian Byrne, who had lost the Labour whip because they voted for an SNP amendment on the King's speech last year. There was a discussion about were they happy with being labelled as independents and John McDonnell made clear he was not. You know, he has aspirations to return to the Labour party. He wants to be a Labour MP again.

[00:11:52] Mark D'Arcy: And that's the problem with the description there, they're not Independents, they are basically semi detached members of the Labour Party, even if they're not allowed to be called that, because if you're in that kind of status where you've been suspended for breaking the whip, you have to be very, very good indeed to get the whip back.

[00:12:09] You have to toe the line. You have to vote according to the Labour whip, even though you are officially not getting it. Mm. And woe behind you if you continue to vote against the government line on things. 'cause that'll probably increase the distance between you and your chances of ever getting back into the fold.

[00:12:25] Ruth Fox: Yeah. And then on the other side, you've got people like Rosie Duffield who've walked away from the Labour Party.

[00:12:29] Mark D'Arcy: Mm-hmm .

[00:12:29] Ruth Fox: And are not gonna come back. Now John McDonnell suggested he be labeled as "Labour - Suspended" .

[00:12:35] Mark D'Arcy: Doesn't sound great though, does it?

[00:12:38] Ruth Fox: No, but that's what he wanted. And he was making the case that, with engaging with his constituents, they were saying to him, we elected you as a Labour MP, we wanted a Labour MP, and what is this? Have you gone Independent now? And of course he hasn't. Now, how long it will take to get the Labour whip back, if he'll ever get it back, we'll have to see, but if you have that, "Labour - Suspended", would the Labour Party be happy with that? So who gets to decide what their designation is? Is it the MP? Is it the party?

[00:13:07] Mark D'Arcy: Is it some lowly sub editor on the parliamentary website who's trying to make up a term that covers the case?

[00:13:12] Ruth Fox: In the House of Lords, of course, they have the term non affiliated, in addition to independents, and obviously they've got crossbenchers, but they assign themselves to a group, they sign up to be a crossbench peer. That's another option. So it's actually a question that's fraught with complexity, but is increasingly something I think the House authorities are going to have to confront, and that's why the Procedure Committee is looking at this.

[00:13:35] Mark D'Arcy: And of course there is the point here that it is entirely open to MPs to go off and join another party, change their label completely if the other party will have them.

[00:13:45] I mean, there are some Conservative MPs who are sort of openly batting their eyes at Rupert Lowe at the moment and saying, "Come and join us, the water's lovely". And it would be quite a coup in some respects for the Conservatives to attract a member of Reform. I suppose that might be quite a blow for Reform, but there is the policy question there. Do they actually want someone to the right of Nigel Farage to join the Conservative fold? And what would that say? Might they end up leaking mPs at the other end of their ideological spectrum who might go off somewhere else if they, they think it's a party that's fit for Rupert Lowe to be in.

[00:14:13] Ruth Fox: Yeah, and one thing you can say about Rupert Lowe, he is a very, very active parliamentary performer. Um, he accounts for something like just under 50 percent of Reform's parliamentary activity. Debate...

[00:14:25] Mark D'Arcy: Talking speeches, questions, participation.

[00:14:27] Ruth Fox: I mean, questions. He's submitted a huge number of parliamentary questions. I mean, some of it, frankly, given the administrative costs of parliamentary questions, you could argue that he's over the top. Yes, but there we are. You know, he is a big part of their parliamentary front if you like, and they've lost that activity.

[00:14:46] Mark D'Arcy: Yeah. So who knows what will happen next with that? But it is a thought that the strains of politics can splinter parties. We saw it in the 2017 to 2019 Parliament, where Conservative MPs and Labour MPs briefly joined the new Independent Group, which then became Change UK, and then imploded, and some of its members went off and joined the Lib Dems, and some remained as kind of independents without much hope of holding their seats.

[00:15:12] So there was a very messy period then, and you could see messy periods ahead, particularly on the Labour benches, where the government is going to do a lot of things, where a lot of Labour MPs might not be very comfortable.

[00:15:23] Ruth Fox: Yeah, so with that, Mark, we take a break. But just before we go, can I just make my usual appeal to listeners? Ask a small favour of you, if you're enjoying the podcast, if you can think of anyone who might like it, enjoy listening to it as well. Perhaps someone in your life who's interested in politics, who's a bit of a parliamentary or procedural nerd, would like a bit of parliamentary history thrown in. Basically, someone like yourself. Friend, colleague, party member, trade unionist, campaigner, whatever it may be, send them the link and encourage them to listen. We're obviously a small independent podcast. We don't have a huge marketing team behind us, so we rely on word of mouth. So if you can also rate us in your podcast app, that would be a huge help.

[00:16:03] Mark D'Arcy: So, uh, while you do that, we'll take a short break.

[00:16:06] See you soon.

[00:16:11] We're back, and Ruth, there are a lot of clouds now lowering on the Labour horizon at the moment. The government is going to have to do an awful lot of things that an awful lot of its troops are going to find pretty uncomfortable to vote for. The list starts with some rather ominous headlines that have been coming about very, very big cuts, five or six billion pounds to social security spending, which could mean, for example, freezing the payments for Personal Independence Payment, one of the key benefits for people with disabilities, that may not be increased in line with inflation. And there are all sorts of other things as well. Realignment with Europe, possibly getting closer to the EU single market, all sorts of other cuts to public expenditure along the way, something that people are starting to label "Austerity 2.0", and the government is distinctly uncomfortable about that label.

[00:17:00] Ruth Fox: Yes, and the critical question the Whips will be looking at is whether and on what they will need a vote in Parliament for, or votes perhaps plural. Because of course the annual uprating of benefit payments is written into primary legislation and generally what happens is in advance of the new financial year, you have a slate of Statutory Instruments, my favorite subject, that come forward. They're happening now in advance of the new financial year in April. Come forward at setting out the provisions for the annual uprating of a range of, of, of benefits. And the question is whether or not the government cannot do that, simply not bring forward this Statutory Instrument, or whether they will in fact need to bring forward primary legislation to enable themselves not to have to do that.

[00:17:50] If that makes any sense whatsoever.

[00:17:52] Mark D'Arcy: There is talk that they will actually need to change the law if they're not going to uprate personal independence payments in line with legislation. Then we've got the comprehensive spending review coming down the track. All the mude music around that is very, very ominous indeed.

[00:18:07] The suggestion that lots of cuts are going to have to happen across lots of government departments, doubtless touching lots of projects very dear to the hearts of lots of Labour MPs. It's one of these moments where the Labour troops are being invited to grit their teeth a very great deal. And where extra money is being spent, it's mostly on things that they didn't come into politics to do.

[00:18:28] So if a lot of money has to be found for rearmament, that is not a subject that gladdens the heart of most Labour MPs, unless they happen to have an arms factory in their constituency that's going to get lots of orders out of the rearmament drive.

[00:18:40] Ruth Fox: Yeah. And of course, one of the things that is creating some difficulties for the government is that they've bound themselves into these fiscal rules that they legislated for at the start of the Parliament shortly after the election, which we said was probably not a good idea.

[00:18:52] Declaratory legislation, which is really... And yes, so here we are. There's that, and then looking a little bit further ahead into mid May, there is the upcoming UK European Union Summit, which is seen as central to the reset of our relationship with the European Union. Issues about whether or not there are going to be arrangements for youth mobility between the UK and Europe, whether there's going to be a deal on Britain joining or rejoining the Erasmus scheme for scholarships for young students, whether there's going to be a deal on things like musicians being able to travel more easily across the continent.

[00:19:28] Mark D'Arcy: That critics will immediately pounce on and call free movement, and say that free movement is back just when we thought it was safe.

[00:19:34] Ruth Fox: On the other hand, it may be that nothing is agreed, because, uh, you know, there's, uh,

[00:19:37] Mark D'Arcy: These things aren't easy.

[00:19:38] Ruth Fox: Yeah, and trying to pin down exactly what the government's policy may be is a bit like trying to pin jelly to a wall.

[00:19:44] Mark D'Arcy: Yeah, I think that the government is being clearly very, very cagey about this, and this is very much the style. of Sir Keir Starmer's inner circle, I think, that they don't let much information out into the wild if they can possibly avoid it. So we won't really know what happens until they probably try and present Parliament with some kind of fait accompli at some point.

[00:20:02] The early rumbles of any discontent may be heard when the Product Safety and Metrology Bill finally makes its way into the Commons. It's just cleared its Third Reading in the House of Lords. And despite its very, very boring, techy title, this is a bill which could be used as the instrument for doing a bit of realigning with Europe if the government was minded to do so and if agreements could be reached with Brussels.

[00:20:25] Ruth Fox: Yes, I mean this, this bill would allow ministers to either diverge from European standards on product regulations and marketing or it would allow them to converge. And the fact that the Bill gives the power to ministers to decide as and when and on a case by case basis is one of the challenges because this bill has just completed this week, its passage through the House of Lords, so it will now make its way to the Commons. But for the, for the House of Lords, we discussed it on a previous podcast, this raises quite serious constitutional issues, because should the question about whether or not we converge or diverge with the EU not be something decided by Parliament collectively rather than just Ministers.

[00:21:06] Mark D'Arcy: Or waved through by Ministers with some perfunctory Statutory Instrument somewhere along the way. And if you're a Labour MP for a quite Brexity seat, with the Reform Party breathing down your neck I'm looking at people like, for example, Gareth Snell in Stoke. There are plenty of Labour MPs who will feel that they face a genuine electoral threat if the government is seen to be rowing back on Brexit in any way.

[00:21:31] Maybe Donald Trump and the whole international situation may have changed a few people's mind about this. Maybe the climate is now very different. But I think there will be an awful lot of nervousness about LabourMPs who've regained some of those red wall seats that the Conservatives took under Boris Johnson that their term might be rather limited if the government is seen to be moving backwards on Brexit.

[00:21:51] Ruth Fox: Yeah. And one thing that I suspect we won't get any clarity on in the Comprehensive Spending Review is the future of the Restoration and Renewal of Parliament. You know, this multi billion pound project has still to be determined. What is going to happen. Is the government going to agree to spending the money necessary?

[00:22:10] Mark D'Arcy: I'd be amazed if there was any kind of commitment whatsoever, to be honest.

[00:22:12] Ruth Fox: Absolutely. And yet by the end of this year, there is going to have to be a decision made. The government's going to have to bring votes to the House to decide. What is the direction of travel? What model of restoration and renewal are they going to adopt?

[00:22:27] They've got to decide something.

[00:22:28] Mark D'Arcy: I confidently predict that there will be a firm decision not to decide.

[00:22:32] Ruth Fox: You could be right, but not deciding is just going to store up further problems.

[00:22:37] Mark D'Arcy: Yeah, but store up further problems, kick it into the long grass, hope somebody else picks up the ball eventually. In the meantime though, it's well worth looking at the effect of frog marching MPs through the lobbies to vote for something they don't like. We saw this decades ago now with the Iraq War votes. The MPs who voted against the Iraq War from the Labour benches were able to sleep fairly soundly in their beds. The ones who were put into a half nelson and marched through the division lobbies in favour of it, probably never forgave Tony Blair and his government and felt that they'd been forced to vote against their conscience.

[00:23:13] Now you may see similar emotions being raised by votes on freezing benefits, cutting the benefits bill later on. And also, we were talking about those Independents. I mean, will some of the people who've been excluded from the Labour whip for disciplinary reasons, for breaking the whip in previous occasions, the Zahra Sultanas, the John McDonalds, will they be prepared to vote for this in order to get back inside the Labour fold, or will this just be the final straw in a potential break with the Labour Party?

[00:23:41] Ruth Fox: Well, unlikely I would have thought that John McDonnell's going to go into the lobby to vote for. Well, exactly, if you look at who these people are, yeah. And of course, on the horizon, there's still speculation about a cabinet reshuffle, which would have fallout and implications in relation to all these, uh

[00:23:56] Mark D'Arcy: Might make a few people hoping to get through the pearly gates into ministerial office hold off and behave themselves.

[00:24:01] Ruth Fox: Or alternatively might make some of them realise that they're actually not going to get a ministerial office.

[00:24:06] Mark D'Arcy: So the sky's the limit.

[00:24:08] Ruth Fox: Yeah. But another piece of legislation that is going to be challenging is the planning and infrastructure bill. Oh yes. Um, because although the mood music out of the, the Labour ranks is obviously we want growth. We've got to have economic development. We need to get these big national infrastructure projects going. That's all very well in. But when it's going to be plonked into your constituency, it might be a different proposition. So, uh, Mark, I suggest at this point we have a short break and come back and talk about the government's new Planning and Infrastructure bill.

[00:24:38] Mark D'Arcy: Always love to talk about planning.

[00:24:40] Ruth Fox: See you then.

[00:24:45] Mark D'Arcy: The government's made economic growth its central objective, and that makes planning reform vitally important to Sir Keir Starmer's whole agenda. And planning reform is pretty damn difficult. Those whom the gods would destroy, they first persuade to try and reform the British planning system, I sometimes think. Angela Rayner has published the Planning and Infrastructure Bill. It's getting its first debate in the House of Commons a week on Monday, and this is a bill that's designed to speed up the technocratic, time consuming tangle that the British planning system has become in order to allow developers to get spades in the ground much more quickly and start building the infrastructure and the housing that Britain needs.

[00:25:26] It's not going to be easy, is it, Ruth?

[00:25:28] Ruth Fox: It's not, no. So you remember Mark, the Government published its Plan for Change. So it's got, as you say, this big objective to build one and a half million new homes across England. But it also has said that it wants to fast track planning decisions on 150 critical infrastructure projects by the end of this Parliament.

[00:25:47] Now, bear in mind, we're coming up to your sort of eight, nine month mark shortly, and time will move on quite considerably. This Bill will take a while to get through parliament. So it's going to be tight and it wants to support also targets around clean energy, clean power by 2030. So it needs all its big energy projects done as quickly as possible.

[00:26:07] So it's a big challenge.

[00:26:08] Mark D'Arcy: Yeah, the existing system starts with National Policy Statements on a whole variety of issues, things like electricity generation, transport, ports, all kinds of big ticket infrastructure issues. And then it moves through a whole very, very complicated. planning process, which often requires developers to start with vast environmental assessments and consultation and a whole load of very, very time consuming and expensive requirements.

[00:26:34] Now, that's not to say these are unnecessary.

[00:26:37] Ruth Fox: And yeah, and a big question in all of this is what should Parliament's role be? You mentioned the National Policy Statements. So there are about a dozen of these covering areas like transport, energy, water, and waste, and so on. And these are the framework policies that address, you know, why the government wants its critical national infrastructure. How does it contribute to things like sustainable development, environmental improvements, and so on. And at the moment, those are scrutinised, generally by departmental select committees in the House of Commons. So the Liaison Committee in the House decides once those statements are published, where they should go, to which committees, and the committees then have to report and then the government has to respond to the committee's recommendations.

[00:27:19] Beyond that then, there's sort of areas where, okay, if a major national project is coming forward, like for example in the past Crossrail or HS2, there might be the Hybrid Bill process, as it's called.

[00:27:30] Mark D'Arcy: Yeah, so I still have post traumatic memories of the time that I followed the HS2 Bill Committee around rural Warwickshire, listening to all sorts of objections to all sorts of very detailed aspects of the route of the line, the plans to protect the environment in particular areas with sort of would there be banks? Would there be, uh, lorry depots that would cause disruption to local residents? That level of very granular detail about how it would all work. It was quite an eye opening experience because you suddenly realise quite how intensely angry some local residents feel about development that they feel is going to turn their lives upside down.

[00:28:02] Ruth Fox: Yeah, and the Hybrid Bill process is lengthy. MPs who are appointed to the committees have to spend a long time looking at the responses of petitioners, local petitioners, who are complaining about the process.

[00:28:13] Mark D'Arcy: Such a lengthy process indeed, it sometimes continues across general elections. Very rarely in legislation are you allowed to do that.

[00:28:20] Ruth Fox: Yeah, so there's been an argument about whether that process should be speeded up, whether there are different ways to scrutinise that, whether indeed MPs should be involved in that process at all, or whether it could be done in different ways. But this bill, Planning and Infrastructure Bill, uh, it's 160 pages, only published this week. As you said, it's going to be debated in the House in about 10 days time, so not long for MPs to grapple with the detail. So we thought it'd be a good idea to talk to an expert practitioner. So we've been along to talk to Robbie Owen of the law firm Pinsent Masons. He's Head of Infrastructure Planning and Government Affairs, represents clients, both government and private clients, on infrastructure and economic development issues.

[00:28:59] And we asked him, does he think that the bill will achieve the government's stated objectives of speeding up and simplifying the system?

[00:29:06] Robbie Owen: I don't think it will achieve everything the government is saying it will achieve. I think the rhetoric and hyperbole about the Bill is slightly ahead of reality if I can put it that way because the Bill contains some really important proposals for change in relation to infrastructure planning and planning more widely for development projects but I think it's an exaggeration to say that these are the biggest changes in a generation or as the Minister said that this is revolution by evolution.

[00:29:34] It seems to me that that is overstating the effect of the measures in the bill, which are important measures, but I don't think they will do everything the Government is claiming they're going to do.

[00:29:44] Mark D'Arcy: Very few things do in government legislation, but the idea behind this is to get Britain building again to get nationally important infrastructure projects in particular, being built much faster with far less planning bureaucracy encrusting them and costing millions before the first spade hits the ground. Will that happen?

[00:30:04] Robbie Owen: I'm not convinced, Mark, that it will speed up the process significantly. Again, the Minister last weekend was saying that he hoped that the effect of the Bill would be to achieve a timescale of two years for determining applications for consent for major infrastructure. Now that is longer actually than the about 18 months we were regularly achieving in the 2010s when the National Infrastructure Planning regime first started.

[00:30:33] So something is still not quite right there and I don't think therefore that it's going to make a huge difference in terms of time taken for these projects to be decided. And furthermore, the changes to judicial review have been hugely overstated in terms of what they are and the effect they will have. And we are still going to have the ability for controversial major projects to be delayed by probably several years in some cases by continued judicial reviews.

[00:31:02] Mark D'Arcy: And is that the big barrier that you think needs to be eliminated that isn't being fully eliminated here.

[00:31:07] Robbie Owen: I think probably in relation to infrastructure planning as opposed to sort of development planning and the Town and Country Planning Act regime I think in relation to infrastructure planning we need three things.

[00:31:17] I would say first of all the pre application process, it's just very complicated and it needs to be simplified.

[00:31:25] Mark D'Arcy: The pre application process is things like what, ecological assessments, that kind of thing?

[00:31:29] Robbie Owen: You have to do your whole environmental impact assessment resulting in your, your environmental statement. You have to do your detailed consultation and engagement. You have to do all those sort of activities and all the other appraisals and assessments required to support the application. And that process has almost doubled, I think, in length over the last decade or so. We need to get back to a much shorter pre application process than we now have. So, I think that's the first change.

[00:31:57] The second change, I think, is almost a cultural change. It's not a matter for legislation, but I think the way in which statutory bodies and statutory agencies engage with the project promoter during the pre application stage and indeed beyond that stage. There needs to be more of a "can do" approach, if I can put it that way, rather than constantly finding problems and deciding that more surveys, more work needs to be done. There isn't a sufficiently positive, facilitative attitude from those statutory bodies, I think, and that would be a really beneficial change as well.

[00:32:31] And I think the third issue is we do need a discussion I believe, a debate about the extent to which these decisions on consent for major infrastructure should necessarily all be subject to judicial review.

[00:32:45] And I think there's an argument for those national infrastructure projects that are of a critical national priority, that once they've been given consent by government ministers in the normal way, Parliament should have a role to confirm the decision taken. And that would then have the effect of removing it from judicial review because this is a question of where the balance lies between national need and national benefit on the one hand and local impact and local benefit. And at the moment it feels to me that the balance isn't quite being struck between those two and my suggestion is for going back to a system that we used to have for some types of infrastructure of involving Parliament more.

[00:33:29] Ruth Fox: So Robbie, how do we do that? How would Parliament shield decisions from judicial review? I mean, presumably that has to be a piece of primary legislation, does it? So the government would have to bring forward a bill and Parliament approve it.

[00:33:40] Robbie Owen: What I'm suggesting is we should go back to a system that we've had before where Parliament confirms in a one clause bill, the decision to approve a particular project. So the result would be an Act of Parliament, Provisional Order Confirmation Act, confirming a particular Development Consent Order made for a particular project. And whilst the precise detail of that parliamentary process after the projects being approved by the Minister would need to be thought through carefully, the key point is, well two key points really, first of all, this is not a new thing, we've had this process before in terms of Parliament confirming individual projects, and secondly, the result would be an Act of Parliament that would then mean as with HS2 for example, or other projects that Parliament has dealt with through the Hybrid Bill process, the result would mean that you would not be able to judicially review the project and delay it by three, four years, which is the case in some instances. So that's what I'm suggesting.

[00:34:45] Mark D'Arcy: Oh, so that's our old friend the Bill of Rights. The courts can't get involved once Parliament's made an act.

[00:34:50] Robbie Owen: Yes, exactly.

[00:34:51] Ruth Fox: And you had an interesting letter in the Times a few weeks ago, Robbie, setting this out.

[00:34:56] But I was interested then that you said that Parliament's role over the course of your career has declined and the courts has increased and that needs to be rebalanced. This is clearly one area in which that could be done. Are there other areas where you think Parliament could usefully play more, should usefully play more of a role?

[00:35:14] Robbie Owen: Well, I think we're seeing proposals in the Planning and Infrastructure Bill for government to review and, as necessary, update National Policy Statements every five years. That's going to involve Parliament doing more than they have done in relation to infrastructure projects, because they're going to be required to approve these revised NPSs every five years.

[00:35:34] So that is one area. The other area is the suggestion I've made that in relation to critical national priority projects, Parliament should confirm decisions taken by individual ministers to approve projects so that they then can't be judicially reviewed.

[00:35:50] Mark D'Arcy: And should Parliament be paying a lot more attention to the kind of framework documents, the National Policy Statements on airports or ports or electricity generation or whatever it is, than they do at the moment? There's a feeling that if the framework is set out and something fits properly within that framework, it should be able to go ahead. So maybe the framework itself deserves a lot more attention.

[00:36:11] Robbie Owen: Um. I'm not sure about that because Parliament has performed quite a detailed scrutiny role in relation to proposed National Policy Statements. They are scrutinised by the relevant select committee. I was involved a number of years ago in relation to the scrutiny of what became the airport's national policy statements, and that was a very detailed process. So I think probably what is more required is Government needs to think through, especially now with these proposals, well, how are they going to deliver updated National Policy Statements every five years, because there are 13 or 14 of these National Policy Statements, and there may well be others added, and that's quite a burden, I would suggest on government to have to update these things every five years, and therefore, I think government should think through whether there's a better way of organising the national policy statement so that, for example, you might have an overarching National Policy Statement covering all sectors of infrastructure dealing with common issues. And then you can have some technical sort of annexes per sector, which are then easier to keep up to date. And this was a recommendation, uh, well, certainly for modular National Policy Statements that the National Infrastructure Commission made a few years ago.

[00:37:17] So I think that's what's required. Government needs to think through carefully. how they're going to deliver on this commitment. I don't think the parliamentary procedures need to radically change.

[00:37:28] Ruth Fox: Are they also subject to review though, subsequently Robbie, sort of National Policy Statements, do the courts get involved in those at all?

[00:37:35] Robbie Owen: Well, yes, they are. I've never understood why, I mean, originally when the Planning Act of 2008 was passed, National Policy Statements did not have to be approved by Parliament. They were just issued by the relevant Secretary of State. But since the Localism Act of 2011, Parliament has to approve National Policy Statements, and I've never understood why it's seen as appropriate that National Policy Statements approved by the House of Commons can be judicially reviewed. And they have been judicially reviewed. I mean, the most extreme example was the airport's national policy statement, which went all the way to the Supreme Court in December 2020.

[00:38:09] Ruth Fox: So that could be a possible amendment to the, uh, to the Planning Bill there for MPs that are listening. You've been involved in, uh, in Hybrid bills. One of the criticisms of the Hybrid Bill process is how long it takes, and it's been suggested that that might be another area which is ripe for reform. What are your thoughts on that?

[00:38:26] Robbie Owen: My thoughts on the Hybrid Bill process are that, yeah, it's proven to be extremely effective in authorising large, complex projects, so the Elizabeth Line, HS2 Phase 1, HS2 Phase 2a, and many other projects before that.

[00:38:42] So it's very effective, and actually it has been reformed in recent years, there have been a couple of reviews of it, but neither of those was comprehensive, and I think that there are some issues with the process that could do with a more comprehensive review, but it has improved in recent years, and I've, as you said, recently been advising the Government on a Hybrid bill, but before that I have been advising objectors to those projects I've mentioned, and therefore have experienced sort of both sides of the coin, if you like. And I think that the difficulty is, certainly in the, in the House of Commons, finding MPs who are prepared to sit on the committee for many, many months at a time, and typically, for the HS2 bills and indeed for the Elizabeth Line bill, the Crossrail bill as it was at the time, the Select Committee in the Commons has been in place for over a year, and that's a long time.

[00:39:31] Apparently there's a rule, but actually it's not a rule at all, it's just a convention that you can't have more than one Hybrid bill in Parliament at a time. And I think that's the reason, because of the resources they require in the Select Committee stage, where petitions against the bill are heard by the Committee.

[00:39:48] And going back to what I was suggesting earlier for Confirmation Bills in relation to Development Consent Orders, um, they will be subject to very much an abridged process that would involve, i would suggest a Joint Committee, but nothing like the Hybrid Bill process that takes three plus years. And that's clearly not something we can contemplate for almost most schemes.

[00:40:11] Mark D'Arcy: Given the gross tonnage of big infrastructure projects the Government seems to want to get going, extra Heathrow runway, possibly an extra Gatwick runway, all sorts of other big ticket items, might Parliament actually have to relax that rule about having more than one Hybrid Bill underway at a given time?

[00:40:27] Robbie Owen: Well, Mark, that is my view actually. I think the government would be within their rights, given the growth agenda and the need for infrastructure for housing, the need for infrastructure for clean energy, Government would be absolutely entitled, in my view, to essentially ask Parliament to step up here and go back to what Parliament used to do in relation to infrastructure projects many years ago. And the result would be that, yes, that rule, I think, would need to be relaxed because, as I say, it's not really a rule at all, it's a convention.

[00:40:58] Mark D'Arcy: The government is also, at the moment, looking to clip the wings of local councils in terms of planning decisions. Are we possibly in danger of painting ourselves as a country into a corner where actually the public doesn't really have a channel to object to something anymore?

[00:41:13] Robbie Owen: Um, I think in relation to planning decisions taken by local authorities under the conventional Town and Country Planning Act route. I think that is a danger, yes.

[00:41:22] In relation to nationally significant infrastructure projects and the different system those go through, I think the ability to object and to be heard is much greater because you have all of the pre application procedures I was talking about earlier, including consultation and engagement. But also when you then come to examination of the application, that's a six month process where communities, local landowners and others can participate, which is considerably more than often you're, you're given three minutes before the Planning Committee on a planning application. So I think there is a real danger in relation to conventional planning applications, that that is a result, yes.

[00:41:57] Mark D'Arcy: They say that planning reform is a process, not an event. Do you think that this bill will be followed up by another bill to fill the holes that this bill didn't quite manage to cover?

[00:42:07] Robbie Owen: I think that is pretty likely, and speaking to officials and others in government I get the distinct impression that Ministers realise that this is not it in terms of planning reform. It's a continuous process and of course this bill only deals with provisions that need primary legislation. There are lots of other things going on but I think that work is already underway within government looking at what more might be required to really affect significant change because these proposals are important and valuable but they they will not themselves bring about significant change. I'm not calling for a revolutionary change, but I'm just calling for significant change within the current processes we have. And I think there's more that can be done.

[00:42:47] Mark D'Arcy: So to channel Churchill, this isn't the end. It's not even the beginning of the end. It might not even be the end of the beginning.

[00:42:52] Robbie, thanks very much indeed for joining us on the pod.

[00:42:55] Robbie Owen: You're very welcome. Thank you very much.

[00:42:56] Ruth Fox: Thanks Robbie. So Mark, what did we learn from that? I mean, I thought it was particularly interesting this idea of a one clause bill to shield a planning proposal from future judicial review.

[00:43:07] Mark D'Arcy: That seems to me a good kind of can opener for the development world to get the kind of things they want. I'm slightly wary of a process that would just allow developers and the government to just tank through local objections, but there is quite clearly a problem in getting stuff done in this country quickly and that we're never going to get the kind of economic growth that Keir Starmer wants and indeed needs until we start being able to do infrastructure much faster than we do it at the moment.

[00:43:34] Ruth Fox: Yeah, it's how do you strike the balance and what is Parliament's role in this? And I think it's interesting that Robbie's you know, he's got many years experience in this sector and his reflection is that Parliament's role has reduced over the years. Um, I was particularly interested in his idea that the National Policy statements, having been effectively approved by Parliament, again, why do they need to be possibly judicially reviewed?

[00:43:56] Mark D'Arcy: Yeah, we're back to the Bill of Rights territory again. I was also very struck by his final thought there that we could well see more legislation coming down to follow this up later on.

[00:44:05] Ruth Fox: Well, his implication was that there's actually work underway on that, so Yeah. Possibly something to ask ministers about.

[00:44:12] Mark D'Arcy: Wave upon wave of planning reform. What a lovely prospect.

[00:44:16] Ruth Fox: Well, with that, Mark, I think we should call it a day for this week and, uh, see what next week brings.

[00:44:22] Mark D'Arcy: And don't forget, of course, there is our special pod on all things to do with the assisted dying bill, which we publish separately from this one.

[00:44:28] Do give it a listen if you're following that process.

[00:44:31] Ruth Fox: And with that, Mark, see you next week.

[00:44:32] Mark D'Arcy: Bye bye.

[00:44:37] Intro: Parliament Matters is produced by the Hansard Society and supported by the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust. For more information visit hansardsociety.org.uk/PM or find us on social media @HansardSociety.