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Housing secretary Steve Reed has told Labour MPs to vote down an amendment to the new planning bill intended to protect British wildlife and its habitats from destruction.
The amendment, which was passed with a large majority in the House of Lords, restricts the most controversial part of the draft bill by removing protected animals such as dormice, badgers, hedgehogs, otters and nightingales, and rare habitats such as wetlands and ancient woodlands, from new rules which allow developers to sidestep environmental laws to speed up house building.
Under the draft legislation proposed by Labour, developers will be able to pay into a national “nature recovery fund” and go ahead with their project straight away, instead of having to carry out an environmental survey and to first avoid, then mitigate damage, before putting spades into the ground.
Experts say this is a regression on decades-old environmental law and it has been criticised as “cash to trash” by ecologists and environmental groups.
The Lords’ amendment would mean the nature recovery fund is restricted to impacts from water and air pollution, meaning developers would still have to take the usual measures to mitigate damage to wildlife and habitats.
Reed has recommended rejecting the amendment when the bill returns to the Commons on Thursday for the final stages before being passed into law.
In a letter to MPs some of the UK’s biggest nature charities, including the Wildlife Trusts and RSPB, say the government rollback of environmental law “lacks any rigorous scientific or ecological justification.
“There is no credible, published, or well established evidence that this model can simply be scaled or replicated for multiple species nationwide without risking serious ecological harm, legal uncertainty, and increased costs for both developers and land managers,” the letter reads.
The Guardian revealed this week how the chancellor, Rachel Reeves, and housing minister Matthew Pennycook have met scores of developers in the past year over the planning bill. Reeves has not met a single environmental organisation or the body for professional ecologists, while Pennycook has had just four meetings with such groups, compared with 16 with leading developers.
A spokesperson for the Ministry for Housing, Communities and Local Government said: “The planning and infrastructure bill will remove barriers to building vital new homes and infrastructure and this amendment is an unnecessary limit on the benefits which the nature restoration fund will create for both nature and the economy. There are already safeguards in our legislation to ensure environmental delivery plans are effective for the environment, as we get Britain building again and deliver the homes we need.”
