Planning and Infrastructure Bill

Baroness Parminter Excerpts

Report stage
Wednesday 29th October 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, I very much support Amendment 130. It is absolutely crucial that we get this system to a point where developers see EDPs as something they can live with. At the moment, as I evidenced in a meeting that the Minister very kindly allowed me, they clearly do not. They see this as a huge additional complication, which will slow down development enormously. I very much support what the noble Baroness, Lady Freeman, said. No one who has ever tried to manage a garden would think you could model biological processes out in the wild. You can model the watering of a garden, but you cannot model what the plants are going to do; it requires observations on the ground. Natural England are not going down a road that will work.

That brings me to Amendment 122. I was on the Front Bench for MAFF when most of that department’s business was run through the EU. If you do not have control of what is happening in your own department, it produces a dysfunctional political process. You cannot respond to what people are saying from outside. You cannot even influence what is happening internally in the department. The department should not be doing this to itself; it should not be inshoring so much of its business to an unaccountable body, as we have seen with bat tunnels. There is nothing you can do with Natural England when it goes wrong. You cannot just pick up the phone and say, “Come on, be sensible, guys”. It does not work. What we are doing is producing an unstable political situation which will have to be unwound. Let us not create it.

[Baroness Parminter (LD)]

My Lords, given that time is short, I will contain our remarks to the standout amendment in this group, Amendment 130, moved so ably by the noble Baroness, Lady Willis of Summertown. It is a means to address a fundamental question we all have on the Bill: how do we help the Government deliver the win-win for nature and the economy by giving developers certainty about this new process, given that we are moving away from an established process which has served for many years, while at the same time ensuring that the environmental protections we want are locked in? The approach taken by the noble Baroness is to curtail the scope of this new process by saying that an EDP can happen only where it has been shown that those approaches will work, benefiting conservation at the strategic landscape scale.

I have to say that we, as Liberal Democrats, thought long and hard about supporting this amendment. It is our contention that we should always follow the science, so if there were scientific evidence that there could be conservation benefits for a species, for example, it would normally be our position to support that. Therefore, this approach to curtail it by area rather than evidence is not one that we would normally support. But as noble Lords will see, after thinking long and hard, we put our Front-Bench name to this amendment. The reason is that we are not convinced at this point in the debate that there are sufficient safeguards about how that scientific evidence will be considered by Natural England to ensure that the environmental safeguards that we all want will be in place. Therefore, we on these Benches will listen very carefully to what the Minister has to say in response to this amendment but, if the noble Baroness is minded to move to a vote on it, at this point in time, we would support her.

[Lord in Waiting/Government Whip (Lord Wilson of Sedgefield) (Lab)]

My Lords, the usual channels have agreed that we should pause now to allow for a short break before Oral Questions at 3 pm. Although unusual, I therefore beg to move that the debate on this amendment be adjourned, and we will return to it later this afternoon.