Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill

Baroness Jones of Whitchurch Excerpts

Report stage
Monday 4th September 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Parminter (LD)]

My Lords, I have two amendments in this group, which have been kindly supported by the noble Baroness, Lady Willis of Summertown, who cannot be here this afternoon, and the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Whitchurch, for which I am extremely grateful.

I do not wish to detain the House long by explaining what local nature recovery strategies are; we have been through that in Committee. They are an important new initiative created by this Government to find a mechanism to ensure that we can bring forward the nature recovery we need. However, they will not work unless they have a firm purchase in the local plans and spatial plans and various other constraints of the planning system. That is what the arguments we made throughout Committee were about. Presently, local authorities do not have to sufficiently have regard to them. The amendments we proposed called upon the Government to bring forward legislation which would incorporate the policies and proposals of local nature recovery strategies in local plans.

I am pleased that, over the summer, following much consultation with Ministers and their civil servants, while we may not have come to an accord we have come to a position where the Government have certainly moved more than half way. They are now proposing seven amendments, whereby local authorities “must” take account of local nature recovery strategies in their various plans and proposals. That does not mean they have to incorporate the policies and proposals, but to my mind—and indeed to legal minds—if the local authority plans were to go, for example, to an inspector, the local authority would have to show how they had taken the local nature recovery strategies into account.

I think we have made demonstrable progress. It has not gone as far as I would have liked but I am a politician and I know you do not always get what you want. However, we have in this House made the arguments and the Government have been prepared to listen in a way that they have perhaps not been prepared to, and are not going to be prepared to, on other environmental arguments.

I thank Ministers and their civil servants, who have gone to the trouble of putting together seven amendments to make the intentions of the Government crystal clear. I hope that, when the guidance comes forward to local authorities on how they should implement this new legislation, it is crystal clear that they “must” take account, as the Government’s new wording says, and that we can therefore do what I think both sides of the House want and ensure that local nature recovery strategies have a firm footing in the planning process. We know that without that we will not deliver the environmental gains that we all want. I beg to move.

[Baroness Jones of Whitchurch (Lab)]

My Lords, I will speak briefly to the amendment. The noble Baroness, Lady Parminter, has set out extremely well why we are keen to make local nature recovery strategies an effective tool for helping the Government hit their legally binding 2030 nature targets.

The noble Baroness quite rightly said that we did not believe that the current requirements for local planning development plans to simply “have regard to” their local nature recovery strategies would be an effective delivery mechanism. A planning authority could disregard all the spatial recommendations of the local nature recovery strategy and still be compliant with the duty. They could simply write that they “had regard to” the local nature recovery strategy without providing any evidence of how it had shaped the substance of their plans.

When we debated this in Committee, the Minister extolled the virtues of the guidance, and the noble Baroness made reference to the forthcoming guidance. But we did have a very good debate, led by the noble Baroness, Lady Willis, which highlighted the many omissions of the guidance already published. I will not go over all of that, but there is still a concern about the detail of it, and I hope that it will now reflect this new wording in the Bill.

As I said, and like the noble Baroness, I am grateful for Ministers having had subsequent meetings and for the further consideration of our arguments that has now taken place. The Government’s proposals make it much clearer that all tiers in the planning process must take account of local nature recovery strategies when they make their plans. It is not perfect, but it is a welcome concession. I therefore share the view of the noble Baroness, Lady Parminter, that we should not pursue Amendment 182 at this stage.

[The Minister of State, Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Lord Benyon) (Con)]

My Lords, I am grateful to both noble Baronesses for their constructive contributions on this subject, both in Committee and more recently. As noble Lords know from the many Statements I have given to this House over recent years, I fully recognise the vital importance of nature and the pressing need for nature recovery. This is at the heart of the Government’s environmental improvement plan and our legally binding targets to halt, and subsequently reverse, species decline.

Local nature recovery strategies were created by the Government to deliver more co-ordinated, practical and focused action to help nature recover. We have been clear from the outset that the planning system has a key role to play in making this happen. Local nature recovery strategies and biodiversity net gain, which we will come on to later, are crucial policies that enable us to achieve this in practice.

Given the strong calls we have heard for more clarity about how the new strategies should be taken into account, we have brought forward government amendments to address this. These amendments would impose a requirement for plan-makers, at all tiers of the planning system, to take the content of local nature recovery strategies into account, and they are explicit about the different aspects of the strategies that must be considered in this context. In this way, we are providing a clear legal framework that plan-makers will need to work within—one that will make sure that priorities for nature recovery are properly addressed. As both noble Baronesses said, this will be reflected in the guidance that we have committed to produce for local planning authorities on how they are to consider local nature recovery strategies in planning. This guidance is in draft and will be published shortly. I am happy to have further conversations with noble Lords about this.

Although our amendments do not impose additional reporting duties on local planning authorities, the way that local nature recovery strategies are addressed through their plan-making will be transparent and open to public scrutiny through the processes of public consultation and examination. Given the importance of getting plans in place, and the pressures on local authority resources, it is important that we do not impose duties that can be met through other means. An enhanced requirement for local planning authorities to report on actions taken to deliver the objectives of local nature recovery strategies is not required at this time.

In May this year, the Government published guidance on how public authorities should comply with the Section 40 biodiversity duty under the Natural Environment and Rural Communities Act 2006, stating that local planning authorities should include information in their biodiversity reports about how local nature recovery strategies have informed policies, objectives and actions.

I really hope that what I have said addresses the concerns of the noble Baroness, Lady Willis, about how local nature strategies will work across boundaries, catchments and landscapes to make sure there is a coherence that fulfils the principles of the Lawton review of about a decade ago, which set out how our approach to wildlife sites and nature recovery should work.

I hope that I have said enough. I thank the noble Baronesses again for their work on this with us. I am grateful to have been given the hint that they will not press to a Division Amendments 182 and 202.