My Lords, I declare an interest as a member of the South Downs National Park Authority, which is a major planning authority. I am speaking to Amendment 247, to which I have added my name, and the three amendments in the name of the noble Duke, the Duke of Wellington, to which I have also added my name.
The noble Baroness, Lady Willis, has set out with great clarity the rather modest intention of our original Amendment 247, which was to underpin the delivery of nutrient neutrality measures, which are necessary to halt the catastrophic damage to some of our most protected wetland sites. Since then, of course, the Government have tabled a raft of amendments that would have the opposite effect to that which we were seeking to achieve in our original amendment. That Government package goes against many of the fundamental principles of environmental protection to which we agreed during our consideration of the Environment Act.
We have heard reference to the letters from the chair of the Office for Environmental Protection, Glenys Stacey, who has made it clear that the government amendments amount to a regression in law. In the meeting that the noble Baroness, Lady Scott, had with Peers this week, she said that that judgment by the OEP was wrong as it had not considered all the factors. That is a serious allegation to make, and I would be grateful if the Minister could update the House on how these differences of opinion between the Government and the independent regulator, the OEP, are being addressed.
Our Amendments 247YYAA, 247YYAB and 247YYAC address the heart of our concerns about the Government’s proposals. First, as the noble Duke, the Duke of Wellington, has said, they place an intolerable requirement on public bodies to ignore the evidence of water pollution in plain sight and pretend that it does not exist. In fact, I am surprised that these late amendments were not sent back to the lawyers due to defective drafting; as has been said, they now require public bodies to look both ways at once, facing different requirements in different legislation. As Matthew Parris said in his recent Times article, under the government proposals,
“when considering an application to build, the authorities must assume that what poisons rivers does not poison rivers”.
This is madness. Planning authorities currently have a responsibility to take all material considerations into account, including the need for more housing and for environmental protections. The government proposals will undermine our evidence-based planning system and set a dangerous precedent.
Secondly, it is being argued that these measures are necessary to unlock housebuilding. I listened to the noble Lord, Lord Best, and normally I agree with him on so much, but I felt that his contribution was rather intemperate and had obviously been swayed by some of the so-called evidence given to his committee. I wish that, as he said, the committee had heard evidence from the noble Baroness, Lady Willis, before it made its decisions on this issue, because delays in securing planning permission are not the biggest barrier—it is the inability of developers to build out schemes that have already been approved. We all know the statistics about how much is already in train but has not been developed.
The further uncertainty caused by the government amendments may mean that fewer houses, not more, will be built. Because the legislation is not retrospective, there will be tens of thousands of homes across the country for which consent has already been given, with nutrient provisions in place, but on which the developers have not yet begun. So planning departments will need to enforce the nutrient provisions in relation to those consented developments, leading to a two-tier system that will last for many years.
Thirdly, as Natural England has confirmed, it is perfectly possible to address the balance between the habitat regulations and housebuilders through non-legislative means. There are already a number of well-established schemes that do this, adopting a more strategic approach to the nutrient migration scheme. The Government and the noble Lord, Lord Best, have suggested that everything has come to a halt. This is simply not the case. Housebuilding is still happening, and people are working with Natural England to make sure it is being done in an environmentally sensitive way.
Finally, these proposals will be a major blow to the rollout of the green finance system, which is necessary to support nature recovery. For example, in the South Downs we estimate that we have about 4,000 hectares of nutrient neutrality offset land in the Test, Itchen and Solent catchment areas alone. That represents
around £400 million of potential income to landowners and farmers to support economic opportunities and help with the agricultural transition, while also supporting nature recovery.
Without nutrient neutrality offsetting, the Government have no hope of reaching their private finance targets in the environmental improvement plan of £500 million every year by 2027—so it is a lose-lose situation. I urge noble Lords to reject these ill thought out plans and find a consensual way to deliver a housebuilding programme that enhances, rather than wrecks, our water quality.