Planning System Reforms: Wild Belt Designation

Caroline Nokes Excerpts

Tuesday 22nd June 2021 Westminster Hall

[Caroline Nokes (Romsey and Southampton North) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mrs Cummins, and I extend my congratulations to my hon. Friend the Member for East Surrey (Claire Coutinho) on securing this important debate. She has clearly struck a chord.

I will always claim that the Hampshire and Isle of Wight Wildlife Trust is visionary and ahead of the curve, and I should declare an interest as a member of it. The trust does brilliant work in my constituency, specifically around rewilding. Fishlake Meadows on the edge Romsey, a bog in North Baddesley, and, of course, the Wilder Wallops project, which it has supported, are brilliant ways to inspire local communities not just to visit nature, but to volunteer and become part of it, and to ensure that facilities in those areas improve and increase. A specific designation could do exactly that.

I want to turn the clock back 10 years to when the chief executive of the Hampshire and Isle of Wight Wildlife Trust came to visit me and spoke of wildlife corridors—perhaps the forerunners of wild belts. That was a recognition that a belt in itself is not adequate: we need areas where wildlife can spread, move and migrate, and we need to ensure that they are linked so that where there is development, green corridors can surround that development to make sure that our wildlife can thrive. That is why a new planning designation could really help, giving strategic planners the opportunity to look at things holistically and work out how to integrate development and green areas in a managed way.

We know that nature, when left to its own devices, can be incredibly rich and can provide some of the solutions to climate and pollution challenges. In Romsey and Southampton North, we have some important designations. We have national park, SSI, SINC—site of importance for nature conservation—and ancient woodland, but no green belt. I will always make a pitch to the Minister to consider having some green belt in Hampshire. We have farmers who have embraced high-level stewardship and have pioneered environmentally friendly techniques and low plough strategies to prevent soil erosion. We have the Broughton water buffaloes, which are used as part of a regenerative farming policy that enables carbon to be captured and has built biodiversity.

None of that happens by accident. People take deliberate, carefully thought through decisions to improve the local environment. I am extremely envious of the green belt that my hon. Friend the Member for East Surrey has in her constituency. I also want to pick up the comment about enforcement made by my hon. Friend the Member for Hendon (Dr Offord). In the valley of the River Test, we have seen over the last few days a horrific pollution incident, which I sincerely hope agencies such as the Environment Agency will seek to remediate as quickly as possible. That incident reinforces the message that where we put in protections for our environment, we must also give authorities the power to enforce when accidents happen or, indeed, when deliberate acts cause pollution.

Fundamentally, I want to leave the Minister with one thought: we need planning policies and strategies that will help nature and our environment, and the proposal for a wild belt could do exactly that.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Minister for Housing (Christopher Pincher)]

Thank you, Mrs Cummins. It is a great pleasure to serve under your chairmanship. I will certainly leave as much time as I am able to my hon. Friend the Member for East Surrey (Claire Coutinho). I congratulate her on bringing forward this debate and on assembling such a passionate, wild bunch in favour of her wild belt designation proposals.

I will say a few words about our planning proposals before I turn to my hon. Friend’s proposals. We have said that building back better from this pandemic means ensuring not only that new developments are greener and better for the environment, but that they support healthy, happy and flourishing communities and habitats. I want to be absolutely clear that one of the key purposes of our planning reforms is to leave a legacy of environmental improvement.

Our new planning system will improve both the quality and the standards of development. It will secure better outcomes, including for our countryside and the environment, alongside increasing the supply of land for new, beautiful homes and sustainable places—not least by getting local plans in place; as my hon. Friend the Member for Bosworth (Dr Evans) rightly noted, that is a significant contributor to preventing speculative development and building in the wrong places, rather than the right ones.

To deliver on our ambitions, we have announced a number of proposals for driving forward environmental benefits, through both the Environment Bill and our proposed reforms to the planning system. The Environment Bill, which has already come before the House, mandates, for the first time, a 10% net gain for biodiversity as a condition of most new developments. We are now proposing to extend that to the nationally significant infrastructure regime.

Recognising the relationship between the environment and development, we want to broaden the use of measurable environmental net gains beyond biodiversity to include wider natural capital benefits, such as flood protection, recreation and improved water and air quality, as my hon. Friend the Member for North Norfolk (Duncan Baker) suggested. Alongside existing regulations that protect our most threatened or valuable habitats and species, that will allow us to establish a strategic, flexible and locally tailored approach that focuses, above all, on positive outcomes. We want to capitalise on the potential of local nature recovery strategies, including opportunities for new habitat creation, as we seek to make the system clearer and more responsive.

To complement this, we are examining the current frameworks for environmental assessment. They are often complex and lengthy, and we believe they lead to unnecessary delays, hindering opportunities to protect the environment and open up appropriate development. Our intention is to bring forward a quicker, simpler framework that encourages opportunities for environmental enhancements to be identified and pursued early in the development process. We will embed this approach through further updates to national planning policy, ensuring that environmental considerations feature fully in planning decisions, including their role in mitigating and adapting to climate change.

As several hon. Members have suggested, our reforms also encourage the sector to think more creatively about biodiversity and about how bee bricks, green roofs and community orchards can improve the quality of our air and the quality of our lives. We are taking action through the national planning policy framework to set the expectation that all new streets will be tree-lined, aspiring to the beauty of green infrastructure such as we see in the cherry blossom trees that line the streets of Bonn in Germany.

Protecting and enhancing the green belt is very much part and parcel of this. I said that yesterday in the debate on planning brought forward by the Opposition, and I say it today specifically to my right hon. Friend the Member for Romsey and Southampton North (Caroline Nokes), who is keen on the green belt—she said as much in her speech. I trust that she will encourage her local council to be equally keen on the green belt. I can certainly assure her, as I assure the shadow Minister, that it is our intention to undertake a wholesale reform of local authority resourcing, including looking at the fee structure to ensure that local authorities have the wherewithal do the job we ask of them.

[Caroline Nokes]

rose—

[Christopher Pincher]

If she will be very brief, I will give way to my right hon. Friend.

[Caroline Nokes]

We have no green belts in Hampshire, and it would be lovely to have some. Would my right hon. Friend the Minister consider it?

[Christopher Pincher]

In consultation with local authorities, I am happy to have that discussion with my right hon. Friend.

Before I turn to the issue of wild belt designation, our White Paper proposes a new approach to the categorisation of land, reflecting its potential for growth, for renewal and for protection. We are now considering responses to our consultation carefully, so I hope that hon. Members will understand that I cannot say overmuch about the proposals while they are still being digested. I can say, however, that I am open to some of the proposals that my right hon. Friend has suggested, but with this word of caution. It is not only roots and vines that creep; the scope of Government Departments and their arm’s length bodies also creeps. We must be very careful that by giving statutory powers to such bodies, we do not allow them to make use of land—or rather, designate against development of land—that could be good brownfield sites, such as land close to railway lines. That simply places the weight of expectation of development on other places, such as greenfield sites. We need to be careful about what we wish for.

What we want to do is to build on more brownfield sites to protect the sort of land that my right hon. Friend the Member for North Thanet (Sir Roger Gale) talked about. That is why we have increased the local housing network calculation for the 20 largest cities in our country; that is why we increased brownfield regeneration funding by £500 million; that is why we have introduced an urban taskforce; and that is why we have introduced PDRs, to allow better and easier gentle densification of urban and town centre landscapes.

We are determined to support our environment through our planning reforms, we are determined to build on brownfield first and we are determined to take forward the views and aspirations of all in this Chamber who want wildlife to be placed first and foremost at the heart of our planning reforms. I appreciate that the fickle finger of time is ticking down the clock, so I am very happy now for my hon. Friend the Member for East Surrey to retake her rightful place and close the debate.