ICE has organised for the Rt Hon Greg Clark MP, Minister of State, Department for Communities and Local Government to speak to a group of senior representatives from the civil engineering, business and the financial sectors next week to discuss the implications of the Government’s localism agenda on infrastructure planning and delivery.
The event marks the first meeting in 2011 of the ICE Strategic Infrastructure Group, a group that brings together chief executives and directors from major companies in civil engineering and related sectors to meet key infrastructure figures and discuss the most pressing infrastructure issues. Formed in 2008, the group has has met with various influential people in the past including with James Stewart, Chief Executive of treasury body Infrastructure UK (IUK) and Minister of State for Trade, Investment and Small Business, Lord Davies of Abersoch.
The upcoming meeting will provide an opportunity for the group’s members, including representatives from the Federation of Small Businesses, Arup, London First and EDF, to raise concerns and discuss the implications of the Government’s Localism Bill with the Minister, who is responsible for steering the Bill through parliament.
Introduced to Parliament in December 2010, the Bill seeks to change the relationship between central and local government, giving more power to local authorities and communities. Many aspects of spatial planning will be affected, including the abolition of regional strategies, the introduction of a “Duty to Cooperate” among planning authorities, and the addition of a neighbourhood level of planning.
ICE is actively engaging with MPs, other institutions and the public during the course of the Bill, to highlight how the changes may impact on infrastructure delivery. A lifed panel, chaired by Vice President Geoff French, is leading ICE’s localism work, and an initial briefing was provided for MPs prior to the Bill’s second reading in Parliament.
In the briefing ICE raised concerns about how localism will effect infrastructure development in the future, in particular how the ‘Duty to Cooperate’, which is intended to facilitate cooperation between planning authorities on infrastructure of strategic importance, will be monitored to ensure effective collaboration between local authorities. It warned that ‘larger than local’ infrastructure projects, which sit between the neighbourhood and national level and require local authorities to collaborate, could be hampered if local priorities are allowed to take precedence.
As the Bill enters the Lords later this month ICE will be producing a second briefing giving more focus to the proposed changes to the Community Infrastructure Levy (CIL), which could have a significant impact on how authorities finance local infrastructure projects.
You can access ICE’s first localism briefing here: http://www.ice.org.uk/Information-resources/Document-Library/ICE-Localism-Bill-briefing