The Bill will be introduced to Parliament today (11th March 2025), and intersects with our Business Climate Hub, Net Zero Council and Nature Markets Dialogue projects, as Broadway works to support the clean energy infrastructure and nature-positive frameworks Britain needs for environmentally-friendly growth.

So what's in the Bill?

- As was heavily trailed ahead of the Bill's publication, households near new electricity transmission infrastructure will save up to £250 a year on their energy bills for 10 years. The Bill also aims to encourage developers to fund community projects in affected areas
- The Bill introduces a national scheme of delegation setting out which planning applications can be administered by officials and which must be referred to committee. Committees will be streamlined, training for committee members made mandatory, and councils allowed to set their own planning fees to recover their costs.
- The Bill establishes a Nature Restoration Fund through which builders can meet their environmental obligations. The NRF aims to pool contributions and fund large scale environmental interventions while building proceeds.
- The Bill aims to improve the compulsory purchase process that allows land to be acquired for projects that are in the public interest
- The Bill aims to strengthen Development Corporations to make it easier to deliver large-scale development, like the government’s proposed 'new towns'
- The Bill will introduce spatial development strategies, working across planning authority areas to identify the best places to build in order to boost growth and aiming to join up development needs and necessary infrastructure
-The Bill aims to speed up the National Significant Infrastructure Projects regime. Alongside amendments to the Highways Act, the Transport and Works Act, and the process by which large projects can be challenged, the Bill aims to deliver major infrastructure more rapidly.
- The Bill introduces a ‘first ready, first connected’ principle to approving clean energy projects for grid connections, with a view to helping achieve clean power by 2030
- The Bill also aims to:
- Streamline the process to install EV charging infrastructure
- Unlock investment in long duration electricity storage (LDES)
- Change planning rules for electricity infrastructure in Scotland
- Extend the generator commissioning period to reduce the number of offshore wind farms requiring exemptions
- Allow forestry authorities in England and Wales to bring forward development proposals relating to the generation of electricity from renewable sources

The infrastructure necessary to decarbonise the grid is a vital element of Broadway's work to support business achieve net zero, while the introduction of the Nature Recovery Fund has significant implications for our work across the EIP and through the Nature Markets Dialogue. We will keep our members engaged and up to date with the Bill as it makes its passage through Parliament.