Planning and Infrastructure Bill

Clive Lewis Excerpts

Report stage
Monday 9th June 2025 Commons Chamber

[Gideon Amos]

It is absolutely right to say that we should be moving to zero carbon homes. In fact, one study shows that had they been introduced in 2015, new homeowners would have saved £9 billion.

Our new clause 25, tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Chichester (Jess Brown-Fuller), would give key national landscape partnerships, such as in the mellow and beautiful Blackdown hills in my constituency, a seat at the planning table.

As we see species becoming extinct before our eyes, people want to see new homes and nature thrive together. Crucially, our new clause 1 would put back the pre-eminent principle in all this: wherever possible, we must first do no harm to the environment on the sites that are being impacted. Of course, there are circumstances such as phosphate mitigation, where off-site measures can deal with the problem, but by completely removing from EDPs the hierarchy of mitigating impacts first and foremost on site, the Bill provides what the National Trust has called a “licence to kill nature”.

[Clive Lewis (Norwich South) (Lab)]

Does the hon. Member agree that the problem with the Bill is misdiagnosis? The problem is not nature holding up house building, or local authorities—which have been starved of cash for the last 15 years— holding up housing, but developers that are sitting on 1.4 million homes with planning permission, because they are land banking and profiteering. That is the problem that the Bill is not getting to. We do not have to destroy nature, and we do not have to undermine our future environmental protections.

[Gideon Amos]

The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right to draw attention to the thousands of homes that have planning permission and have not been built, including the 11,000 we have in Somerset. While I welcome what the Government have said about bringing those forward, a real “use it or lose it” power is missing from the Bill. The Liberal Democrats have tabled new clause 3 so that, unless those homes are built, the local authority would have powers to take over the land and to build the houses. That would ensure a real “use it or lose it” penalty for those that do not build out the permissions that they have.

Pitting communities and nature as the enemies of progress and development would be a massive mistake. Taking power away from councillors is taking it away from local people, and taking power away from Members of Parliament is taking it from the hands of the people who elect us to this place. Both are examples of centralisation and “Whitehall knows best” thinking, in which local views count for little and nature for even less. There is another way to build the hundreds of thousands of homes we need. It is to invest in 150,000 social homes per year to pump-prime our industry, give communities the funding for the jobs, transport, green space and energy infrastructure that our constituents want, build the new GP and healthcare facilities before building the houses and homes our communities will need, and build them in ways that will support rather than harm those communities.