What fast-track development planning will mean for farms

Build, build, build. That has been the Labour government’s mantra since it came to power almost 12 months ago, and last week’s Spending Review only reinforced the narrative.

In her speech to Parliament on 11 June, chancellor Rachel Reeves announced £113bn of infrastructure commitments.

These included £15.6bn for regional transport projects, £14.2bn for the Sizewell C nuclear power station, tens of billions for major rail projects, and more than £9bn for carbon capture, usage and storage projects.

The nuts and bolts of the proposals will be contained in the 10-Year Infrastructure Strategy, due to be published later this month.

The chancellor has specifically namechecked East-West Rail between Oxford and Cambridge and the TransPennine route upgrade.

See also: Compulsory purchase of farmland: Compensation explained

Planning changes

Labour has put creating 1.5m new homes over the course of this parliament at the heart of its policy agenda.

Supporting this aim, which could include the development of 12 new towns, £39bn was also allocated as part of the Spending Review to a 10-year social housing programme.

Changes to the National Planning Policy Framework and the introduction of the Planning and Infrastructure Bill are designed to facilitate the delivery of this new infrastructure and housing, including more development on the green belt.

The Bill is currently moving through parliament.

Farmer impact

So, what does all this mean for farmers? As yet, there have been no forecasts of how much land will be required for the government’s plans.

But it has already been estimated by National Grid that up to 1,000 miles of new pylons will be needed to deliver on its ambition for the UK’s energy supply to be 95% fossil-free by 2030.

Initiatives to upgrade the country’s crumbling water supply, such as Anglia Water’s Strategic Pipeline Alliance, will also require hundreds of miles of new water pipes and hectares of new reservoirs.

Jeremy Moody, secretary and adviser to the Central Association of Agricultural Valuers, suggests solar farms and pylons are likely to have the most impact on farms.

Although government policy dictates that solar farms should not be built on the most productive land, Jeremy says that is not always the case.

“I think there’s been one that’s been built on towards 50% of Grade 2. It is a planning factor, but proximity to the grid outweighs almost everything,” he says.

The only factor that has “so far in any way tempered the unfolding of solar farms” has been whether any of the proposed land or buildings have had a heritage designation, he points out.

However, although the current big six solar farm planning applications will cover about 5,300ha, Jeremy predicts the total area of farmland required is not going to be significant.

“As a comparison, we’ve got something like 900,000 acres (364,000ha) under golf courses. We will probably have more land under biofuel crops, producing energy much less efficiently, than we will have under solar farms.”

NSIPs on the rise

Given the scale of the challenge facing the government, there is likely to be an increased use of the Nationally Significant Infrastructure Project (NSIP) regime, which bypasses normal local planning requirements.

“Since 2008, we’ve had 130 NSIPs. The government’s intention is that in this parliament there will be 150,” says Jeremy.

NSIPs were created to streamline the process for delivering projects deemed to be of critical national importance in England and Wales.

A pre-application consultation period initially takes place and can take several years depending on the complexity of the project.

Subsequent stages of the approvals process – acceptance, pre-examination, examination and recommendation – adhere to a fairly strict timetable.

The relevant secretary of state then has three months to take the decision whether to issue a Development Consent Order (DCO) that will allow compulsory purchase of land for the scheme.

Defra has already said it will use the process to fast-track the construction of two long-mooted reservoirs in East Anglia and Lincolnshire, with more in the pipeline.

Water minister Emma Hardy said: “We are backing the builders, not the blockers, intervening in the national interest and slashing red tape to make the planning process faster to unblock nine new reservoirs.”

The government also wants to streamline the NSIP process further.

A consultation that included a suite of procedural changes to effect faster decisions, including to the pre-application and consultation processes, closed in March.

“I think there will be less negotiating time for a farmer as a result of this,” says Tim Broomhead, a compulsory purchase expert at Knight Frank who acts for farmers and landowners.

“The government wants to cut down on a lot of the environmental work it considers ‘over the top’.”

The NSIP threshold for solar farms has already been raised from 50MW to 100MW, to encourage larger sites to be put forward.

Few sites between 50MW and 99.9MW in England have been proposed due to the extra time and resources of the NSIP regime, while there are 174 either built or in the pipeline at 49.9MW.

Onshore wind farms above 100MW will also be brought into the NSIP process to streamline their delivery.

Data development

Most types of infrastructure can already be designated as an NSIP.

The government has said it plans to introduce legislation this year to explicitly include data centres, gigafactories (producing electric vehicle batteries) and laboratories within the regime.

The rise of cloud computing and artificial intelligence (AI) has seen demand for server space rise exponentially, with government and the wider society increasingly reliant on them to function.

Data centres were designated as Critical National Infrastructure (CNI) by the government last September.

It was the first new CNI designation in almost a decade, since the space and defence sectors gained the same status in 2015.

CNI status puts data centres on an equal footing with water, energy and emergency services systems, meaning the sector can now expect greater government support when recovering from and anticipating critical incidents.

Currently, about 80% of the UK’s data centre capacity is based around London, but this could start to change as the rise of cloud computing makes location less of a factor.

The first data centres needed to be close to the banks and investment firms that used them to avoid even the slightest delays to the trading of equities and other investments.

Robbie Owen, head of infrastructure planning and government affairs at law firm Pinsent Masons, says:

“This is about finally selling the benefits of the NSIP consenting regime beyond traditional infrastructure projects, particularly for co-located business and commercial projects having functional dependencies and economic synergies, such as data centres with energy generation, cooling water supply and heat offtake facilities.”

Concerns

The Country Land and Business Association (CLA) says it is not anti-infrastructure in principle, but does have a couple of issues with the way the government is rolling out its plans.

“There hasn’t been the level of strategic co-ordination that’s really needed,” says the organisation’s infrastructure expert, Mark Burton.

“I was at a meeting in south Lincolnshire about a month ago, and there were farmers with up to six sets of transmission cables all running across the same farm. Couldn’t these projects all just have one single cable?”

Mark says the CLA is also calling for a code of practice to ensure landowners are treated fairly during the compulsory purchase process, which is not always the case.