Heritage Party Formal Objection – Planning & Infrastructure Bill

26 October 2025

The Heritage Party has submitted its second Formal Objection and Written Evidence to the House of Lords regarding the Planning & Infrastructure Bill.

This follows the Party’s first submission lodged earlier in 2025, before the Bill entered its stages in the House of Lords. It has been presented as a reform to “streamline” planning and infrastructure delivery, but would in reality centralise control, curtail public objections, and remove the evidential safeguards that protect local democracy, heritage, and the natural environment.

Previously, our formal objection letters and evidence against election postponement and local government reorganisation were read in the House of Lords and cited by peers during the fatal motion of March 2025, which challenged the Government’s attempt to delay local elections and impose structural changes without lawful consultation.

This new objection warns that the Planning & Infrastructure Bill repeats the same pattern of democratic bypass. Clauses 12–15 and 28–33 of the Bill would allow “strategic urgency” declarations and “national interest” housing targets to override adopted local plans and existing planning regulations.

In practice, many councils and developers are already acting as if these powers were law, approving major schemes on the basis of “benefits outweigh harm” arguments while holding no verified housing-need or CO₂ data.

Formal correspondence, official statistics and data, and Freedom of Information replies from MHCLG, councils across the UK, and other authorities confirm that these claimed emergencies rest on political narrative rather than factual evidence.

The Party’s evidence dossier – drawn from collected data — demonstrates clear and consistent national patterns:

Hundreds of thousands of long-term empty homes across the UK, many owned by public bodies, NGOs, or investment groups;
DEFRA-endorsed data shows that 16% of species assessed are now at risk of extinction, and 60% have declined since 1970 — a loss that is continuing to accelerate across almost every habitat type.
Historic England’s data records 4,891 heritage sites officially “at risk,” yet thousands more remain unmonitored and many have never received listing protection despite qualifying applications, some of which have been postponed by councils for years.
Independent heritage organisations estimate hundreds of additional unrecorded demolitions in recent years — between 300 and 500 locally or regionally significant buildings have been lost, often pre-emptively or under permitted-development loopholes.

These losses reveal a widening gap between official monitoring and the real scale of destruction affecting the nation’s architectural and cultural heritage.

The submission concludes that the Bill would legalise unlawful practice, converting procedural breaches into statute and eliminating effective public or judicial scrutiny.

Documents

📄 [Download Formal Objection (PDF)]

Copies of this submission have been circulated to the Public Bill Office, relevant Ministers, Members of the House of Lords, regulatory authorities, and national media outlets.