Impact of Environmental Regulations on Development (Built Environment Committee Report)

Baroness Eaton Excerpts

Friday 19th April 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Eaton (Con)]

My Lords, I declare my interest as a vice-president of the Local Government Association. I welcome the noble Lord, Lord Banner, and thank him very much for his contribution. I know that we all look forward to hearing much more from him. I also thank my noble friend Lord Moylan for the clarity of his introduction to this debate, and the team of experts and staff who helped us create the report that we are looking at today.

The title of the report, The Impact of Environmental Regulations on Development, seems straightforward enough. However, the more evidence the committee received, the more it heard of the disconnection between government departments, organisations, local planning authorities and developers—all of which play a major part in implementing government policy. The delivery of 1 million homes over this Parliament and 300,000 a year by the mid-2020s was a key government manifesto pledge. As we have heard, the Government also promised to become

“the first generation to leave the environment in a better state than it found it”.

The commitment to the housing numbers and the environment is to be commended. No Government would make such statements without the intention to deliver them. However, the work of the Built Environment Committee, in interrogating this intention, has found that the desire is far greater than the outcome.

One of the most obvious requirements for having a full understanding of the reasons for problems in enabling increased housing numbers is to have a clear understanding of the costs of delivering a full range of environmental regulations for housing or infrastructure delivery. The committee was unable to obtain such information. It suggested that the Government should have a review of costs so that their policies better balanced development and environmental objectives. Is this work under way?

As we heard from the noble Earl, Lord Russell, the Office for Environmental Protection’s January 2024 report on progress on the Government’s targets, including those in the Environment Act 2021, indicated that, of the 40 targets, the Government are on track to achieve just four. Due to a lack of information, 15 of the targets cannot be assessed. Nitrogen pollution contributes to limiting housing delivery in large areas where there continue to be damaging levels of nitrogen.

A problem for local authorities is how to balance the delivery of more housing against environmental ambitions when the two areas do not have equal statutory weight. Other areas of conflict can be the steps taken to off-set nutrient pollution or to deliver biodiversity net gain. One result of this is that active farmland is being taken out of production, including through Natural England’s own mitigation schemes. It is important that the Government recognise the critical importance of domestic food production and the role it plays in food security. In the 2022 National Food Strategy, the Government committed to publishing a land use framework in 2023 to manage the increasing demands on the UK’s land for food production, nature recovery and renewable energy. This land use framework is still eagerly awaited.

It is alarming to read advertisements such as the one I saw recently for 20 hectares of arable land and pasture near Darlington, where the site is being transformed into an

“expanse of wildflower grassland with a network of natural ponds”.

However attractive sites such as this might become, they do not produce food. What assessment has been made of the loss of arable land for mitigation schemes and its impact on food security? Could progress be made in cross-departmental working and, when policies are being created, could cross-organisation working be prioritised? Where there is existing expertise in organisations such as Homes England and the Planning Inspectorate, it certainly should be used.