Planning and Infrastructure Bill

Lord Fuller Excerpts

Report stage
Wednesday 22nd October 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Hampton, who so ably introduced Amendment 62 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Boycott. I do not need to say very much, but I will just add a couple of extra perspectives. This amendment would ensure that there is training for members of planning committees and planning officers on climate and biodiversity and an enhanced ecological literacy. I particularly applaud the appearance of mycological surveying here as someone who is very passionate about soil science, but I will not go further down that road at this moment, given the hour. What I will say is that this ties very well with our extensive discussion in Committee on the plans and ideas put forward by the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, about overall strengthening of the planning process—the idea of a chief planning officer and of strengthening planning committees—namely, that we need to strengthen public and political trust.

I declare here my position as vice-president of the Local Government Association. The noble Lord, Lord Hampton, noted the lack of resources that local authorities have. If something is not statutory, it is very likely that it will not get done—that is all that local councils have the money to do. We have a huge problem with lack of trust in politics, lack of faith in politics, concern about the planning system and concern that local voices and concerns are not being heard in the system. This is a way of both strengthening the system itself in technical and scientific terms and helping to strengthen trust in the system, which is so crucial in terms of restoring trust in our overall political system and local government system.

I do not know what the noble Lord, Lord Hampton, is planning, but I think that this is something on which we should think about testing the opinion of the House. I look forward to hearing the Minister perhaps tell us that the Government will follow along these lines, in which case a vote would not be necessary. It is really important that we put these principles in the Bill and make them statutory. Then we can ensure that they will get done; otherwise, it is very likely that they will not.

[Lord Fuller (Con)]

My Lords, nobody, I believe, would want to disagree with members of planning committees, those decision-makers at all levels, being trained. Noble Lords will remember that I tabled an amendment in Committee on Ministers and the Secretary of State having the equivalent training as that expected of councillors. I have not pressed that on Report.

However, I am concerned because, if we are going to start enumerating all the essential skills that the committee must take into account when weighing all the evidence in the balance, and if we are going to cherry pick climate, quadrats and field trips on mycorrhizal fungi and everything else, how will they rank against the impact on residents, business, the economy and the socioeconomic impacts of development? They are all sort of subjective, but then we get the objective ones: space standards, design, viability and so on. It would be invidious to single out just climate change and mycorrhizal fungi in the Bill. Regulations will come forward and we will have an opportunity to influence those, potentially, at a later date in the Moses Room when we can have this debate all over again.

I have sat on a planning committee, and I have appointed a planning committee. We take our obligations and our own authority for training very seriously and it is right that we do. It costs tens of thousands of pounds—hundreds of thousands in some cases, as we heard in the previous debate—to bring a planning application forward. Members of the planning committee should have the widest experience and training.

That training should be not necessarily in the issues themselves but in the ability to work out, critically, whether what they are being told by officials and quangos is valid scientifically. There are different types of science.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

Oh!

[Lord Fuller (Con)]

I was not making a suggestion about whether climate science is there. There are different levels of science in all manner of different disciplines in planning. Some of it is contested and others are not so. That is why we have planning officials, quangos and scientists. I cannot support this amendment, and I rise because the noble Baroness indicated that she may want to press it to a vote, so I place my objection on the record.

[Lord Blencathra (Con)]

My Lords, contrary to my noble friend, I support Amendment 62—in part. The “in part” is because I do not want climate change to freeze out biodiversity, which is ultimately far more important for local authorities, which have specific biodiversity duties but no legal climate change responsibilities. The other reason that it is in part is that, while some of the training is meritorious, it need not be mandatory.

I was privileged to serve on the board of Natural England for almost seven years and on the extraordinary Joint Nature Conservation Committee—the official adviser to the four Governments of the United Kingdom on all matters of biodiversity, both in the UK and internationally. All the top experts in both organisations said that, if we could go back to the drawing board, there would not be two UN conventions—one on climate change and one on biodiversity—but just one. Our chairman, Tony Juniper, consistently said that they were two sides of the same coin, and I entirely agree with him, even if agreeing with Tony may antagonise some of my noble friends around me. The point is that, if we saved our peat bogs, planted enough of the right trees in the right place and stopped ripping the ocean floor apart, we would save so much carbon that we would not need to put our industries out of business, inflict heat pumps on households and penalise anything that produces carbon.

The consequences of those two conventions are that all NGOs and Governments have focused heavily on climate change and that biodiversity gets a poor look-in, and that is a tragedy. With a tremendous amount of political will and with horrendous expenditure that will impact every person, it is possible to reverse climate change eventually. However, we are losing species in the world at a phenomenal rate and, when a species is gone, it is lost for ever. Forget these gimmicks of restoring mammoths, since most of the species being lost are the unsexy flora and fauna that may be vital to future human existence.

I come to the point of council training. The UK has lost dozens of species; even hedgehogs are critically endangered. Also endangered are water voles, turtle doves and farmland birds. Local authorities need to be aware of that, and training for councillors on biodiversity is quite important, in my opinion.

I cannot find any legal duty on councillors to take climate change into account when making decisions. I researched this in case my memory was failing, and the only law on climate change is the Climate Change Act 2008, which was amended in 2019 to add the net-zero requirement. All the requirements of the Act relate to action by central government not local authorities.

I understand that local councillors need to be trained in the legal matters to be taken into consideration when determining a planning application—nothing more, nothing less. My concern is that more than 300 councils have declared a so-called climate emergency and 85% of them have adopted climate action plans, which are all inconsistent with each other. Many of these plans are showboating; some are meritorious, such as Wirral Council’s tree-planting policy, but it is not a legal requirement. Councillors should receive training in strictly only those matters that are legal requirements to be taken into account in planning applications, not in things like Waltham Forest’s policy to divest its pension fund from fossil fuel companies.

We have a completely different scenario with biodiversity, since we have lots of legislation on biodiversity that needs to be taken into account in deciding planning applications. I will not go into it all, but the key elements for councillors are contained in my noble friend Lord Gove’s marvellous Environment Act 2021. It is a watershed Act.

The sections that I will briefly mention now will deliver nature recovery for the first time, provided that the Government do not cut the funding. The key item is local nature recovery strategies, which councils, NGOs, Defra and Natural England consider to be the main vehicle to bring about nature recovery. All 48 designated areas have now completed their LNRS plans, I think, but only five have been published so far. I believe that the rest are due to be finished by the end of this year. The success of the strategies will depend on farmers and landowners doing their bit through ELMS, and it is a tragedy that the Government are cutting ELMS funding.

I suggest that training for local councillors needs to focus on the 2021 Act. The main sections are as follows: Sections 98 to 101 on biodiversity net gain; Sections 102 and 103 on the general duty to conserve and enhance biodiversity; Sections 104 to 108 on local nature recovery strategies; Section 109 on species conservation strategies; Section 110 on protected site strategies; Section 111 on wildlife conservation licences; Sections 112 and 113 on habitats regulations amendments, which might possibly be for councillors; and Sections 117 to 139 on conservation covenants, which they might come across. There may be other things, but I suggest to the House that these key issues are what local councillors should be informed of and trained on.

I am intrigued by proposed new subsection (b) in the noble Baroness’s amendment, whereby councillors would be trained in “ecological surveying”. The only training that they need is to be able to read and understand the technical ecological reports they might receive, not to do the surveying.

I turn to the mycological bit. As far as mushrooms are concerned, I initially assumed that this was one of those in-jokes we used to have in government that councillors and Ministers were treated like mushrooms by their civil servants—that is, kept in the dark and fed a lot of bull stuff. Of course, I can understand the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, being interested in mushrooms. If she invites me to dinner, I hope she will not serve me mushrooms, being an Australian.

Seriously, however, I am concerned about the huge increase in the last 12 months of trendy Tik-Tokers deciding that foraging is the latest fad and stripping woodlands of far too many mushrooms. That has happened in just the last 12 months. Many years ago, when I was food Minister, I became friends with the wonderful chef, Antonio Carluccio, and had various meetings with him. He was a mushroom afficionado. After a four-course lunch consisting of a mushroom starter, a mushroom amuse-bouche, a mushroom main course and a delicious mushroom pudding, he presented me with an official Italian mushroom picker’s knife. Italy takes fungi seriously. It had a little curved blade; a centimetre scale, so that no ceps were cut under 4 centimetres and others at no less than 2 centimetres; and a little brush at the end to clean off the dirt. Antonio drummed it into me that mushrooms should never be washed—