Planning and Infrastructure Bill

Debate between Lord Moylan and Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle

Committee stage
Thursday 24th July 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, I am at risk of losing my carefully nurtured reputation as an environmentalist and a nature lover. This amendment was beautifully presented by my noble friend Lord Gascoigne, but perhaps somewhat extravagantly. We were told that having more trees would improve driving. Does anybody believe that? Just think what experiment you would have to conduct to be able to prove it.

Not every tree is as attractive as you might think. Right across the road from my front door, there is a mulberry tree. Most of the year it is survivable, but at the moment it is absolutely fatal. It is dropping its half-formed mulberries on the pavement, causing danger in every direction, as well as being terribly ugly. The householder was out today with a hose trying to sweep it off the pavement, I assume because he was worried about liability. Just around the corner we have some very fine plane trees in Queen’s Gate that must be 150 years old. They are aggressively pollarded. Why? It is because they suck so much water out of the clay that they cause subsidence in the houses adjacent. As it is the council’s liability if the street trees pull the houses down, to protect itself it pollards them aggressively to reduce water demand.

There is a right place for trees. Bedford Park in west London, built as a semi-rural extension, would look ridiculous without trees and of course must have them, but other fine Italianate terraces looking like palazzos are made ridiculous if you plant the odd sapling in the carriageway because you cannot fit it on the footway due to the voids under the pavement built to house coal. Everything must be judged very finely and at local level.

The idea here is that the source of wisdom on this should be a civil servant in MHCLG, producing guidance which includes, to my horror,

“standard designs, and planting palettes”.

What will that produce? It will be one ash, one poplar and one oak sapling—box ticked and that is the developer done. You will have the same trees planted in the same configuration in half the developments in the country. There are people who can produce guidance on trees, and I would encourage them to do so. There is a professional body representing local authority arboriculturists. People who really work with trees, know trees and have great affection for them have a great sensitivity to what is appropriate to plant in a particular location. Guidance from that source might be very sensible and valuable. I would encourage that, but not, I hope, box-ticking.

Let us have trees in the right places and remember that they are good in some places but bad in others. Let us have variety in the right place and perhaps fewer mulberry trees overhanging the footway, but let us not bureaucratise this with guidance from the ministry with little drawings.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

I should declare that for the past year or so I have been working with the Horticultural Trades Association, which represents environmental horticulturists under the Industry and Parliament Trust scheme. The industry is very keen to improve the quality of planting. We have talked about housing, but I do not know if the noble Lord has seen, for example, the planting near warehouses or commercial estates. Far too often, there are one or two exotic species which have no value at all for wildlife. The Government could of course work with the industry and those experts to produce the guidance, so it would not just be them; it would be a co-operative effort.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

That would be an indispensable approach, if this were to go ahead, but we are fundamentally forgetting local authorities and local planning departments in this. The arboriculturists to whom the noble Baroness refers are exactly the sort of people who should be involved and are the right source of information for this—more so than the Government. If the Government are to be involved, it should be at a very considerable distance from the whole process, offering encouragement, advice and light support rather than providing the guidance itself. Otherwise, I welcome everything else that my noble friend said and I am very happy to have a further discussion with him in due course.