My Lords, I support Amendment 257AA in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, and the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett of Manor Castle. As the noble Baroness said, this is a very neat amendment which wraps up an awful lot of things that the Government need to pay attention to.
Further on the thought expressed by the noble Duke, the Duke of Montrose, that we could trust the Government, I draw the attention of the House and Minister to a project which seems to fly in the face of all the aims of noble Lords in this House and indeed of all these amendments. That is the £3.5 billion theme park called the London Resort, which is on the Swanscombe peninsula on the Thames estuary. The concept for this site, which is spread across 535 acres in Kent, is of a union jack-designed dome, a Disneyesque castle lit up by fireworks, and a Paramount Pictures entryway. It will be the first European development of its kind. It is inspired by Hollywood blockbusters and will have swords, sorcery, dragons and legends. There will even be a jungle where the ancient ruins of a long-extinct Mesoamerican civilisation will sprout out of the ground—which seems ironic. This is in partnership with EDF Energy—always a good one for a bit of greenwash—plus the BBC, ITV, Hollywood and all the rest of it. That is all online. It is aiming to be an attraction claiming to have net-zero emissions—which I personally do not believe. However, it will be built on a recently named SSSI.
5.45 pm
Despite letters from all the leading conservation charities and despite agreements from the developers to change some things, the ultimate goal has remained the same and was indeed signed off by Robert Jenrick in February this year. They will be digging up an area of great importance to biodiversity, wetlands, and, of course, given that this is in the estuary, migratory birds. This joint letter from wildlife charities, which I have in my hands, includes the Kent Wildlife Trust, the RSPB, Buglife and the CPRE in Kent. They said that the company ought to have sought to withdraw its
application and restart the pre-application process after the site was protected. Natural England, which named the area an SSSI, said that 40% of the nationally important wildlife would be directly lost to this theme park, with additional impacts likely from construction and the operation. It also questioned the plans to compensate for the lack of habitat, the home to breeding birds, endangered plants and apparently more than 1,700 species of insects, by creating some sort of protected wildlife somewhere else.
The company is London Resort Company Holdings, or LRCH, and the boss of this project, Pierre-Yves Gerbeau, said that it was fundamental to be a leader in sustainability, and as a result he has provided eight miles of footpaths—I am not sure whether they are concrete or not. It seems the ultimate irony that we are planning to create an ancient civilisation, which has been lost due to the activities of man, in a place which is deemed to be an SSSI and which is just down the road from where we sit now. All the points that noble Lords are making about why we need protections written into the face of the Bill, and indeed the point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, about the delay again to the meeting in Kunming, mean that the Bill has to be firmed up. I am sorry, but there are inconsistencies that happen with planning such as for this project; as your Lordships will know, I have gone on about the houses on the edge of the Knepp estate. You need people to come with you, and we need to be able to trust the Government. I urge the Minister to look at this project and I very much look forward to his answers.