Planning and Infrastructure Bill

Baroness Parminter Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 25th June 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Parminter (LD)]

My Lords, I will contain my remarks to Part 3 of this Bill, which rips up the current planning rules that have, for decades, ensured that the environmental outcomes of developments have been taken into account. In their place, the Government are saying great things about their proposals: that they will speed up the planning process; that they will deliver the homes we need; and that they will restore nature through this overall improvement test. To my mind, however, the proposals in Part 3 will allow developers to buy out of their obligations and will dismantle the environmental protections that we have had in favour of some vague promise that Natural England will somehow make the situation better in the long term.

Worryingly, as it stands, the Bill will get rid of three fundamental environmental governance structures. It will get rid of the precautionary principle that we do not allow environmental destruction until we know exactly what is going to be lost; with the proposals, we will move straight to buying offsets elsewhere. It will lose the mitigation hierarchy, which many other noble Lords have raised as being of great concern—not just because we need first to move to ensure that we avoid harm but because the mitigation hierarchy has been the means for, when you cannot always avoid harm, improving the area around. As the noble Baroness, Lady Willis of Summertown, said, we need planning to help build green spaces into communities.

With the new proposals, under which you can go straight ahead without worrying about mitigation moving to support an EDP, these EDPs could be anywhere in the country. As it stands, the Bill does not say that they have to be in the same locality, and Natural England confirmed today that it does not know how many EDPs there will be or where they are going to be. For example, we could have planning applications in Burnley but the EDPs could be down in heathlands in Dorset. The Minister is looking at me—I hope that she will be able to clarify in her final remarks that there is no guarantee in this Bill about how many EDPs there are going to be or when they will come forward in the next timeframe. This is an extremely worrying point that I do not think has been picked up fully yet this evening; I am glad to have had the opportunity to make it. We need to look at this issue seriously.

The third main environmental governance tool that is disappearing is the “polluter pays” principle. In the past, people paid up front for the amount of pollution and destruction that they were responsible for. Now, there will be a fixed fee, paid at some point in the future. As the noble Lord, Lord Goldsmith, said, there is even an economic viability opt-out in the Bill. Those of us who have sat on planning committees for a long time know just how much the economic viability clause has in the past prevented social housing being built in developments. We are facing the same prospect happening here with environmental projects.

I am not opposed to strategic landscape-scale nature recovery—we all know that it can have benefits—but not for irreplaceable habitats and species. I am not going to revisit that point, because others have made it so well.

What particularly worries me about these proposals is that it is the Secretary of State at DCLG who is going to determine whether these EDPs are strong enough to outweigh the harm undertaken by the developments. In the Bill, it is not that they have to; it just says that they will determine whether it is “likely” that they will outweigh the harm. That is not strong enough. Nor does the Bill say anything about the Secretary of State having to look at scientific evidence—to make sure that the decisions are robust—that can give us any form of confidence or certainty that the environmental losses we are having to take up front will be mitigated for in the future.

This Government are saying that the environmental regulations need to be changed because planning needs to be speeded up. Other Members have said why environmental regulations have not been the cause of those delays. In her opening remarks, the noble Baroness, Lady Scott of Bybrook, made the very important point that this new system will create uncertainty, which will be legally tested. Part 3 will deliver more uncertainty, while stopping the Government delivering on their legally binding environmental targets. We need more quality affordable homes, but we also need homes for nature.