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Like the proverbial London buses, housing and planning legislation tends to come together in a group, after a long gap. So, the new Housing and Regeneration and Planning Bills are both beginning their parliamentary passage at almost exactly the same time. Both Bills are central to the Government's commitments to expand the house-building programme and speed up the planning process. They bring into existence three new organisations – the Homes and Communities Agency; the Social Housing Regulator; and the Infrastructure Planning Commission. They also introduce a new procedure for handling major infrastructure and planning applications, and a new community Infrastructure levy. The Homes and Communities Agency (HCA) is based on a merger of the Housing Corporation with English Partnerships, but will also take on further housing responsibilities from CLG, as well as providing a home for the Academy for Sustainable Communities. It will, therefore, be a powerful delivery agency for the housing programme. The agency's ability to expand the land assembly functions of English Partnerships and the Housing Corporation's role as funder of the social housing development programme will be critical to meeting the Government's ambitious targets. After a lengthy gestation period – more than 18 months since the concept was first proposed – the agency will need to make a rapid impact to build confidence at a time when the market is turning down, and the target of 240,000 new homes a year is looking increasingly hard to reach. The Social Housing Regulator – infelicitously referred to as OFTENANT – is the second new organisation. This is the product of the Cave review, which recommended the establishment of a domain-wide regulator for social housing. Currently, housing associations are regulated by the Housing Corporation, and that is what is reflected in the Housing and Regeneration Bill. For, although the Government is committed to extending the regulatory regime to cover local authority housing and ALMOs, the details of how this will work have not yet been agreed. The danger is a two-stage process which will result not in a clear framework applying to all social landlords and tenants, but in a hotchpotch of differing and inconsistent regimes. The third new organisation, the Infrastructure Planning Commission is being created to deal with planning consent for large infrastructure schemes, such as power stations, railways, water and sewerage systems, and airports. The aim is a speedier process than the notoriously long-drawn out planning inquiry which took eight years to consider Terminal 5 at London's Heathrow Airport. The commission, made up of appointed experts, will work within a framework of policy statements approved by Parliament. While this is likely to achieve the objective of a less protracted process, the risk is that legitimate local concerns about the impact of major infrastructure schemes get lost. Less controversial is the introduction of the community infrastructure levy to replace the ill-conceived planning gain supplement. As the CIL will be collected locally, and the rate of the levy set by the local authority through its development plan, many of the fears felt in local government about PGS have been addressed. All in all, a complex set of measures, with far-reaching impacts. Parliament will be kept busy scrutinising the two Bills over coming months. Nick Raynsford is former local government minister

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ECONOMIC GROWTH

Room on top for a bumpy ride

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