Environment Bill

Baroness Neville-Rolfe Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 7th July 2021 Lords Chamber

[The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Baroness Finlay of Llandaff) (CB)]

My Lords, I have received five requests to speak, from the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe, the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett of Manor Castle, the noble Earl, Lord Caithness, and the noble Lord, Lord Lucas. I will start by calling the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe.

[Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)]

I am sorry I missed the list for this amendment. Noble Lords will know the importance I attach to cost benefit, whatever the nature of legislation and however much support it has. Improving biodiversity is clearly very desirable, given past losses. However, the proposals before us on nature, notably on net gain, will have a large and certain impact on development while they might or might not significantly improve biodiversity. They will add grit to the system, placing a further burden on local government and decreasing productivity, especially in infrastructure and housing.

This could cumulatively cost a lot, and it could hit smaller operators disproportionately, as the Minister was kind enough to acknowledge. The costs, of course, fall mainly on business and other developers and not on the Treasury, which is no doubt one of the reasons why it has been supportive. One of the main beneficiaries will be consultants, as with the environmental impact assessments that I remember coming in in the 1980s. They added costs—a lot of costs—and gave a lot of work to consultants, but may not have been entirely effective.

I am not sure that the published impact assessment—for which, many thanks—gives the full picture on costs. These will depend on the details and the complexity, on the time taken to assess biodiversity loss, on registration, on maintenance, on inspection, on enforcement and on covenants and the credits scheme the Minister has mentioned. My noble friend Lord Lucas was very good on some of these points, I thought, and the noble Earl, Lord Devon, made an interesting observation about the pressure on land use that needs to be assessed. Moreover, and this is the reason I have stood up, the Bill has been added to quite substantially. That has been well received today, and there is pressure to add more. How much will the costs to businesses and public authorities rise as a result of adding so many new areas to biodiversity gain in Schedule 14A?

I acknowledge that today’s audience is an entirely environmental one, including our “environmental superhero”, my noble friend the Minister, and that this is the year of COP 26. However, the productivity of the economy also matters to the interests of our children and grandchildren, and to the disadvantaged. There is lots of work still to do on getting the detail right and understanding the costs.

[Lord Goldsmith of Richmond Park (Con)]

I thank the noble Baroness for raising an important point. It is one that I also addressed in my remarks. We are not there yet and do not have all the answers. We are determined that this should be a streamlined process. We need to deliver for nature, but we have to do it in a way that requires developers, particularly smaller developers, to bear as little cost as possible. What we do not want to do is inhibit the productivity that the noble Baroness has just described. We have work to do, this is an evolution, but the proposals have been warmly welcomed pretty much across the board—from the small to the medium to the larger developers. There are questions and concerns, but the principle has been embraced across the sector.