Planning and Infrastructure Bill: motion to disagree with Lords Amendment 40

What happened: On 13 November 2025, the House of Commons voted to disagree with Lords Amendment 40 to the Planning and Infrastructure Bill, meaning MPs overrode a change the House of Lords had made to the legislation. The motion passed by 244 votes to 132. Lords Amendment 40 had sought to restrict the range of environmental impacts that could be addressed through a new mechanism called an Environmental Delivery Plan (EDP), limiting its application to strategic landscape matters only. By voting to disagree, the Commons rejected that restriction and kept the broader scope of EDPs intact.

Why it matters: Environmental Delivery Plans are central to Part 3 of the Planning and Infrastructure Bill, which introduces a new Nature Restoration Fund (NRF). The NRF is intended to replace the current system under which developers must individually discharge environmental obligations, site by site, before building can begin. The government argues this site-by-site approach frequently delays or deters development. Under the new model, developers would contribute to a strategic fund, allowing environmental improvements to be delivered at scale rather than piecemeal. Lords Amendment 40 would have confined EDPs to landscape-level matters only, preventing them from being used to address impacts on individual species or habitats at the project level. The government contended that this restriction would undermine the whole purpose of the NRF. Critics, including some Labour MPs and opposition parties, argued that removing site-level protections risks allowing local populations of species to be permanently lost, since populations destroyed at a given location may never return.

The politics: The vote divided almost entirely along government-versus-opposition lines. All 241 Labour and Labour Co-operative MPs who voted did so in favour of disagreeing with the Lords amendment, while all 74 Conservative, 46 Liberal Democrat, 5 Reform UK, and 4 Green MPs who voted opposed the government. The Lib Dems argued that without a firm commitment to a stronger mitigation hierarchy within EDPs, they could not support removing Lords Amendment 40. The Greens and some independent members also voted against the government. The division on Amendment 40 was one of several on the same day, with related votes on Lords Amendments 1, 3, 32, and 33 all producing similar majorities for the government. The Bill represents a central plank of the government's economic growth agenda, and ministers pressed for Royal Assent quickly, framing planning reform as essential to delivering 1.5 million new homes and fast-tracking 150 major infrastructure decisions by the end of this Parliament.