There are three key parts to the bill:

• - It changes the way we protect nature, moving from an inefficient site-by-site approach to a new model of strategic compensation.
  
  
• - It limits (but doesn’t remove) the opportunity to challenge major infrastructure planning decisions in the courts.
  
  
• - It removes the power of political planning committees to refuse permission when a scheme has been signed off by planning officers (in most cases).

At the moment, developers carry out lengthy assessments of the environmental impact of every project they want to carry out, focusing only on the specific place where each individual project is happening.

Under a strategic model of conservation, builders would instead rely on environmental assessments which take place over a much larger area and cover multiple projects.

If a project would have a negative impact on nature, developers would get a choice. Either continue as normal and design your own mitigations, or pay into a new Nature Restoration Fund that funds mitigations at a strategic level.

This central fund approach allows money to be pooled together to fund larger mitigations which consider British nature more broadly than a site-by-site approach.

In theory, yes. But this bill would only make contributing to the Nature Restoration Fund instead of doing site-by-site mitigations an option if there is a government-approved Environmental Delivery Plan (EDP) in place for the environmental issue the developer is trying to mitigate.

For example, an EDP for river pollution (what’s known as ‘nutrient neutrality’) might involve a Nature Restoration Fund paying to upgrade sewage treatment facilities. So if their development needed to mitigate against river pollution, they could opt-out of the extremely bureaucratic (and expensive) status quo.

So long as the Nature Restoration Fund’s contributions set in the EDPs are not excessive, this will make development a lot easier.

The big risk is that the Government’s delivery bodies, like Natural England, fail to put enough delivery plans in place, or find that putting EDPs in place for certain species is extremely difficult in practice.

For the uninitiated, one of the most prominent examples of the absurd consequences of the site-by-site approach to environmental mitigations was the construction of a £121 million tunnel on the HS2 line to protect just 300 bats. Another such example is the ‘fish disco’ acoustic deterrent complicating the construction of a new nuclear power plant in Somerset.

Will the bill end this kind of waste? It depends. Until there is an EDP in place for every single species and every single protected site, there will be a risk that the existing system will throw up absurdities like bat tunnels and fish discos. The real danger is that developing EDPs will be harder than expected for some types of species where impacts in location A can’t be offset by mitigations in location B.

To fully solve the problem, the aim must be to get delivery plans in place for as many issues as possible, but there needs to be a backup option for the cases where delivery plans haven’t been agreed and following the status quo is unacceptable.

That’s why Britain Remade thinks there ought to be an additional power for the Secretary of State to authorise new significant development even in the cases where there is no delivery plan in place.

In effect, for a major infrastructure project, the Secretary of State would be able to step in and disapply the Habitats Regulations if they are convinced that following them would require extremely poor value for money mitigations such as bat tunnels.

Not necessarily, but the delays should be shorter.

National Highways, the government body tasked with building new major roads, reckons that when a major road scheme is hit by a legal challenge it costs the taxpayer between £60m to £120m. The other big cost of these challenges is that the risk of losing a case embeds caution in the developer throughout the planning process. Because the legal challenge could see their planning permission overturned, developers have to spend more time and money trying to ensure that their approach can withstand any challenge.

What the bill changes is the number of opportunities someone gets to take a major infrastructure project to court. Under the status quo, you get three tries. First, you submit your case to the High Court in written form. The judge then looks at it and decides whether or not it’s worth accepting for judicial review. If the judge says no, you get a second chance at an oral hearing - again at the High Court. If the judge still says no, you get a third bite of the cherry at the Court of Appeal. Even unsuccessful legal challenges can add well over a year on to a planning timeframe.

The Government is scrapping the initial stage and limiting the opportunity to go to the Court of Appeal. These changes should cut the length of delays by a third to a half. Anti-building activists will still take projects to court, but the delays should be measured in months, not years.

Nearly three decades ago, Britain signed up to the Aarhus Treaty which guaranteed a ‘right to access environmental justice’. This treaty sets up an exception to the legal convention that being unsuccessfully sued by an individual gets you off the hook for the legal fees spent fighting the case - put simply, the convention that if you sue me and lose, you have to pay my lawyers.

The treaty has been operationalised in Britain as a cap on the legal costs a developer can claim back from a litigant when their lawsuit is unsuccessful. Individual costs are capped at £5,000, while organisations (such as groups which have come together to oppose a project - or several) have a slightly higher cost cap of £10,000.

The combination of the Aarhus cost caps with crowdfunding websites has made it dramatically cheaper to mount legal challenges to projects. Even when lawsuits are unsuccessful they can have a chilling effect on similar projects, National Highways is effectively forced to price in delays. At the margin, it means some otherwise good viable projects don’t get funded.

One option the Government could take would be to direct judges to raise the caps when they deal with repeat litigants (groups who take multiple infrastructure projects to court and lose). A more radical option would be to scrap the caps altogether and treat environmental lawsuits like any other.

Not really. As it stands, democratically elected councillors engage in the planning process at two points. First, they develop a local plan (in line with national policy) that identifies the sites where they want to see development targeted. This will also set out the types of development they do (and don’t) want to see. 

Second, a subset of councillors – the planning committee – vote on individual applications after receiving recommendations from the council’s unelected planning officers. The Planning and Infrastructure Bill proposes to get rid of that second step in most cases.

Under the new system, elected officials would still get to have their say on what types of development can and can’t go ahead when they set their local plan. It’s just they can’t then turn around and tell a local plan compliant proposal that they’ve changed their mind. It’s not eliminating democracy, it’s shifting it from elected officials using their discretion on a case-by-case basis to elected officials setting (and sticking to) rules.