My Lords, I am grateful to speak, in part in my capacity as chairman of your Lordships’ Built Environment Select Committee, to which the noble Lord, Lord Best, referred. I should explain that we have, perhaps coincidentally, spent the last six months taking evidence—not “so-called evidence” but actual evidence—on precisely this topic. The subject of our inquiry has been the interaction between environmental regulations and development. Inevitably, the question of nutrient neutrality has occupied an important place, because it is so important and live. The noble Lord, Lord Best, has explained that the report is not yet published; it is practically at the printer, and we hope it will appear next week, so we are not in a position today to quote from it. However, I see a number of members of the committee in the Chamber and I hope that they will speak, because we have been very struck by what we have found.
A great deal of what we found was explained by the noble Lord, Lord Best, and I do not propose to repeat all of that. I will speak more briefly, but I would like to draw attention to one conclusion we reached without any dissent. When new environmental legislation is introduced, which is well thought out, consulted on and given adequate time for implementation, it is normally absorbed, adopted and implemented by the housebuilding industry with no disruption or difficulty. That is the right way for us to make environmental legislation; it is what we normally do. However, in this case, that is not what has happened at all.
The root of the problem is a European Court of Justice decision in 2018 in a case related to Dutch farming—which, as we all know, is probably the most intense farming in the world—and the consequences it had in the Netherlands for run-off into watercourses. That judgment created a more restrictive interpretation of existing habitat regulations than had been agreed and understood before. Because we were still part of the European Union—I shall not go into the European consequences of this—Natural England rightly understood that this judgment had an effect in England as well. So it took legal advice on what consequences it had.
It then went off and discussed it with Defra, and Defra look legal advice. I have not seen that advice, but it appears to have concurred with the advice obtained by Natural England. Our committee still does not quite understand why Defra insisted at that stage that nobody should be allowed to discuss this, and that it all had to be kept very secret between Defra and Natural England. The result was that when it announced the consequences of that new decision, as it understood them, there was no warning whatever.
There was none of the normal consensus, building of consultation, buying in, or time for implementation. All of a sudden, it appeared in a number of catchment areas covering, I believe, approximately 14% of the land area of England. It is absolutely true that it has not stopped housebuilding in every part of England but, in effect, overnight there was a moratorium in roughly 14% of the land area of England even on the completion of sites that already had planning permission. This is utterly disruptive and completely unplanned and, in my view, evidence and argument for treating this particular circumstance as a special case. The Government need to take steps to sort this out, untangle ourselves and make a plan that allows us to deliver all our housebuilding and environmental objectives over time.
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That is why I support this package. It does involve a few optical devices, but they achieve the effect. It effectively says that you can carry on building housing that we desperately need—local housing, affordable housing and student accommodation, which are all caught by the ban—but there will also be additional, mitigating measures. More money and bigger efforts will be put into addressing the pollution in our watercourses. That is the sort of balance we need to achieve if we are not to be paralysed completely. There is a strong reason for thinking of this as a special case.
Unlike the noble Baroness, Lady Willis, I have not extensively researched how big a contributor housebuilding is. I have simply looked it up on Google. There are 26.5 million dwellings in England and Wales. We build a number of new houses each year. The government target is 300,000, but we do not get close to this. We are very lucky if we hit 250,000—which is 1% of the existing stock. Even if all the nutrient problems in our watercourses came from housing, new housebuilding would still be a very small fraction of what we are discussing; it would be less than 1%. But we know that it does not all come from housing. A great deal of it comes from poor agricultural practice built up over years. It comes from piggeries and from chicken farms that are not properly managed. We know that it comes from sewage works that are inadequate for the combined flows of water and sewage they are expected to take. So, when you take that into account, it is not even 1%; it is a fraction of 1%. We just need to keep this in proportion and not be excessively hysterical about it.
As I said, it is a matter of great regret that this debate is taking place before the Select Committee report appears next week. I encourage noble Lords to read it when it appears. I think they will find a great deal of evidence in it that is relevant to what we are discussing today.