Those of us who try to defend wildlife are horribly familiar with bad laws. But we’ve never seen anything like this. The government’s planning and infrastructure bill is the worst assault on England’s ecosystems in living memory. It erases decades of environmental protections, including legislation we inherited from the EU, which even the Tories promised to uphold.
The rules defending wildlife and habitats from unscrupulous developers are weak enough already, which is partly why, as Labour reminded us in its manifesto, Britain is “one of the most nature-depleted countries in the world”. But this bill will make it much, much worse.
At present, builders are supposed to follow a “mitigation hierarchy”: avoid, minimise, mitigate, offset. Ideally, they should avoid building in places of high wildlife value, especially irreplaceable habitats. If that isn’t possible, they should minimise the harm inflicted. Then they should mitigate that harm, by restoring the habitats they’ve damaged. Only if all these options are exhausted should they seek to offset the damage by creating habitat elsewhere. This final gambit is generally the most expensive and least successful.
The new bill scratches all that, jumping straight to option 4: offsetting. By paying a “nature restoration levy”, developers will be allowed to trash whatever habitats – woods, meadows, wetlands, streams – stand in their way. Once they’ve paid, the bill states, they can “disregard” the impact of destroying a protected feature. The details are remarkably, horrifyingly vague: the secretary of state merely needs to believe that the levy is “likely”, one day, to create new habitat to deem the damage “outweighed”.
Some ecosystems, such as ancient woodlands, ancient meadows and chalk streams, simply cannot be replaced. But the bill pretends that everything is tradeable. You can destroy an ancient woodland, as long as you deliver an “overall improvement” in woodland cover, namely saplings in plastic tubes. Anyway, we won’t even know what we are losing, as the new legislation negates the requirement to conduct ecological site surveys. How can you measure an “overall improvement” if you don’t have a baseline? Without surveys, no one can be charged with wildlife crime for destroying habitats and species, as there will be no evidence. It’s the kind of anti-scientific, pro-corporate scrubbing of expertise we see in Donald Trump’s US.
Even if a huge impact is somehow identified, the bill insists that the levy for offsetting habitat destruction cannot be high enough to make the development “economically unviable”. So developers have no incentive to avoid trashing rare and beautiful places, as their profits will be protected by law.
Inevitably, this will reduce the provision of urban green spaces. Building land is expensive; farmland much cheaper. It will always be in a developer’s interest to build over urban habitats while paying for restoration in the countryside. As evidence gathered across three decades shows, this will have serious impacts on local people’s physical and mental health. Like austerity, deregulation tends not to save money, but to shift costs from the rich to the poor and the private sector to the state.
Across my long and largely futile career, I’ve read innumerable reports by professional bodies. But never one as scathing as the note last month by the Chartered Institute of Ecology and Environmental Management. “It is evident that the broad consensus of concern raised by a wide range of environmental professionals, professional bodies, NGOs, learned societies and developers” has been “entirely disregarded in the bill drafting process … no meaningful inclusions have been made to address the significant issues identified”. The government has introduced the bill without an evidence base, truncating its own consultations and expert assessments. Its “lack of transparency”, and “failure to follow an objective, evidence-led, democratic process” is “reckless”.
So who has the government listened to? Astonishingly, Keir Starmer has told us. His attack on environmental regulation, he states, has been inspired by “my conversations with leading CEOs”. He seems blissfully unaware that this is the bit you are not supposed to say. Politicians are meant to sustain the illusion that governments exist to enact the will of the people, not the will of the corporations.
If you listen only to corporations, you’re a dupe. Of course, they will produce justifications for the harmful things they want. Of course, they will tell you that rules are too onerous, taxes too high and subsidies too low. It takes spectacular political naivety to take them at their word. But Starmer seems happy to be conned.
The story they have told him, which he recites like an automaton, is that development is being impeded by “blockers”, “time-wasting nimbys” and “zealots”. The case that he and the billionaire press cite repeatedly is HS2’s £100m tunnel to protect bats. How’s that for regulator overreach? But had ecologists been brought in at the beginning of the planning process, they would have advised avoiding the ancient woodland the railway bisects, saving HS2 a ton of money and trouble.
A combination of a lack of foresight and the dire undercapacity of local authorities and government regulators, caused by austerity, are the main impediments to development, not ecological surveys and consultation. As ecological consultants explain to me, many of the delays developers bemoan are actually caused by the companies themselves, commissioning surveys at the last minute, rather than designing them into the process. Nature is ever the afterthought. And afterthoughts are expensive.
In its manifesto, Labour promised “to restore and protect our natural world” and “to unlock the building of homes … without weakening environmental protections”. Well, I guess you could argue it isn’t weakening them. It’s deleting them.
Like the government’s new anti-protest law, exacerbating the Conservatives’ draconian measures, this bill betrays an undemocratic impatience with the people, motivated by the blatant appeasement of corporate power. Just as the US is captured by a billionaire death cult, our government is opening the door to the same forces.
All this is supposed to promote economic growth, which appears to be Labour’s sole remaining principle. Trashing the living world to stimulate growth is like sacrificing virgins to secure a good harvest: it’s cruel, ignorant and ineffective. If anything, it will have the opposite effect.
Environmental defenders were wary of Starmer’s Labour party, though I don’t think anyone believed it would be worse than the Tories. But here we are. Its legacy, if this terrible bill is approved, will be a grimmer, greyer, unhappier nation.
