The Levelling Up And Regeneration Act 2023

The Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill was Gove's flagship scheme to mitigate the gap between deprivation and wealth in the UK, and was intended to lead to regeneration via planning reform. It was welcomed by much of the real estate industry when it was first introduced to Parliament in Spring 2022, and after a long journey through both Houses, it finally received Royal Assent on 23 October 2023.

Now the Levelling-up and Regeneration Act 2023, its mission statement is to "speed up the planning system, hold developers to account, cut bureaucracy, and encourage more councils to put in place plans to enable the building of new homes".

Lofty ambitions but it is important to note that many planning provisions are in skeleton form at present, with further detail still needed. Most will require further steps, in the form of consultations and secondary legislation.

Some of the most eye-catching provisions are:

1. An overhaul of the regimes for Environmental Impact Assessment ("EIA") and Strategic Environmental Assessment ("SEA"), replacing them with a new system of Environmental Outcomes Reports. At a simple development management level, it is hoped that these will be more focussed and be an improvement on the voluminous (and often clunky and repetitive) material often found in Environmental Statements submitted as part of planning applications.
2. The introduction of national development management policy ("NDMP"). This will add a further layer of planning policy against which new applications are to be evaluated. It will also limit the scope of local plans to locally specific matters.
3. A new, mandatory, Infrastructure Levy – this represents a significant change to the system for developer contributions as we currently know it via S106 agreements and the Community Infrastructure Levy ("CIL").
4. A blanket 10-year time limit for planning enforcement, instead of the current combination of 4 years and 10 years depending on the nature of the breach.
5. Register of contractual controls - In 2020 the Government launched a call for evidence regarding its proposals to increase transparency of contractual arrangements used to exercise control over the buying or selling of land, meaning conditional contracts, options and pre-emption agreements. The Government's stated goals are to improve the ability of local communities to play an informed role in the development of their neighbourhoods, to support the Government's efforts to encourage more companies to enter the house building market, particularly smaller builders, to understand the prevalence of land-banking, and to improve the development process for both planners and developers. The Act states that the purposes for requiring the relevant information can include beneficial ownership purposes, contractual control purposes, and national security purposes. The proposed new regime would involve the Government collecting additional data about contractual controls, other than those arising in relation to statutory options, testamentary options and rights of pre-emption, or options held by individuals relating to the purchase or lease of residential property for use as a domestic residence. It is only interested in long term conditional contracts that relate to the development of land. The mechanism for enforcement would include changes to the land registration system so that it would no longer be possible to use a unilateral notice to protect options, pre-emptions or contracts, and it would only be possible to use agreed notices if the required data was supplied. There is also a proposal to limit the use of restrictions in the same way. .

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