Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill

Baroness Sheehan Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 17th January 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Sheehan (LD)]

My Lords, I declare my interest as a director of Peers for the Planet. The planet is facing potentially catastrophic challenges from climate change and damage to the ecology on which, ultimately, all life on earth depends. Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is at unprecedented levels: 421 parts per million, as measured at the Mauna Loa observatory. These levels are more than 50% higher than pre-industrial levels and were last seen over 4 million years ago, when sea levels were between 5 and 25 metres higher than today—high enough to drown many of today’s largest modern cities.

It is a sobering thought that, even if we were to stop burning fossil fuels today, the impact of the carbon dioxide already in the atmosphere would continue to cause a rise in global temperatures. This is a stark reminder that we need to take urgent and serious steps to become a more climate-ready nation and work to create an economy with a workforce equipped to carry out high-quality green jobs to transform our infrastructure and protect our natural environment.

The Skidmore review, Mission Zero, published last week, makes reassuring reading, and I welcome it. Every one of its 129 recommendations is designed to maximise economic investment, opportunities and jobs across the UK, all while working towards achieving our legally binding net-zero targets by 2050. So the Government have an opportunity in the Bill to give that clear direction to investors, both public and private, across all sectors of the economy. Those opportunities must be of the highest quality, and they must be future- proofed to meet the twin challenges of our changing climate and nature depletion.

After all, this is a Bill in which the Government seek to embed processes that feed from central government to local government. It is a Bill in which the Government take greater powers for themselves, yet they do not once mention mitigation of, or adaptation to, climate change, or put in the Bill their wish to safeguard our natural capital. One glaring example is the environmental outcomes reports, EORs, which will replace the environmental impact assessments and the strategic environmental assessments—processes that are currently used to assess the impacts on nature and the climate of planning proposals. But the Bill does not include details of the EOR regime: that will be left for a later date, through secondary legislation, and will therefore of course be subject to lesser parliamentary scrutiny. This is unsatisfactory. There is also a big question mark over the proposed EORs’ interaction with the habitat regulations requirement. Can the Minister clarify whether the EOR regime will supersede the habitats regulations? If that is the case, can she give an assurance that protections will not be weakened?

Planning is key to satisfactory local outcomes. Having spent four years on a planning committee, during my time as a local councillor for the beautiful ward of Kew in the London Borough of Richmond, I can testify to that. But the changes to the planning regime seem to move power away from the people most affected by the proposed changes to centralised bureaucrats. The changes also do not have at their heart a green agenda.

In conclusion, Chris Skidmore’s review urged Ministers to grasp this historic opportunity, and it emphasised yet again that future economic growth is green growth that will benefit every part of the country. Without incentivising investment in green jobs in less prosperous parts of the UK—not least in improving our housing stock, greening our infrastructure and providing quality upskilling opportunities—we will fail those communities. I fear that, in its current form, the Bill puts us in grave danger of doing just that.