The Confederation of British Industry is holding a conference to discuss the major infrastructure projects in the energy, waste, transport and water sectors.

The conference will be tackling the government's white paper on Planning for a sustainable future, which has proposed a stream lining to how the planning system handles applications for major infrastructure projects such as airport expansion, motorways and nuclear power stations.

Planning professionals from the transport, construction, utilities and property sectors will come together to discuss the potential implications of the forthcoming legislation and how businesses should respond to the changes.

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Another area of concern for the CBI is their relationship with the proposed independent Infrastructure Planning Commission (IPC), which will consider planning applications for nationally significant infrastructure projects.

The controversial white paper has been bitterly received in several quarters, and threats of a legal challenge to its implementation were vented in mid October, when Friends of the Earth found the policy may be in breach of UK, European and international law.

The environmental campaign group are worried the white paper is planning to remove independent scrutiny from many planning decisions and will vastly limit the role given to the proposed IPC, allowing large scale infrastructure decisions to go ahead without robust controls.

(DW/JM)