My Lords, I support these two amendments to which I have also put my name. It is distressing that we are again beginning to see important and lesser wildlife sites being increasingly damaged by development, and particularly by housing development. When I first came into the environmental movement almost 30 years ago, on average 15% of sites were damaged each year. We managed to get that down to less than 0.1% about 10 years ago, but it is increasingly creeping up again. So there is a real issue to make sure that the provisions for permission in principle and for the brownfield site register do not inadvertently make it more possible for development to damage sites of wildlife interest.
As the noble Baroness, Lady Parminter, said, the NPPF and, indeed, the national planning practice guidance steer both local authorities and developers away from land of high environmental value. We run the risk of encouraging developers—at the breakneck speed with which we are moving towards the provision of housing in particular—to be less aware of the requirement to be careful, especially on brownfield sites and on sites such as local wildlife sites that do not have statutory protection. As the noble Baroness said, brownfield sites with high environmental value are comparatively small in number, but a proper assessment is required at the appropriate time for that to be established.
We also need to take into account the fact that some of the traditional safeguards against development of these sites have diminished. Local authorities are under pressure and have less specialist ecological advice available to them. The statutory nature conservation bodies similarly have less capacity and less ability to comment in detail on small-scale sites. So it would be absolutely right to have on the face of this Bill a reminder to both local authorities and developers of the importance of these sites and to abstract them from the permission in principle and the brownfield site register processes.