Planning and Infrastructure Bill

Graham Stringer Excerpts

Report stage
Monday 9th June 2025 Commons Chamber

[Chris Curtis]

In one of the wettest countries in Europe, we could face summer water shortages because we have not built a single major reservoir in over 30 years. Here is the real kick in the teeth: we have paid all those prices for rules that have failed even on their own terms. We have created endless hoops to jump through and poured public money into bizarre mitigation schemes while Britain has become one of the most nature-depleted countries on Earth. We have lost over half our ancient woodland and one in six species are at risk of extinction. We have got fewer birds, fewer butterflies and fewer mammals, and yet more paperwork than ever before.

We should ask this: if these rules are not helping people and they are not helping nature, who on earth are they for? We throw money at scattergun mitigation—fish discos and bat tunnels—while failing to invest in strategic, landscape-scale restoration that actually works. We force every project to fit every issue on site, even when that is more expensive, less effective and totally irrational. That means tens of thousands of individual site-by-site protections, which are bureaucratic, inconsistent and scientifically out of date, and all despite the fact that modern ecological science is clear that nature recovery depends on scale and connectivity, not isolated microprojects.

[Graham Stringer (Blackley and Middleton South) (Lab)]

When I was building the second runway at Manchester airport, I had similar rants to my hon. Friend’s. I came to hate great crested newts, which were getting in the way of building that second runway. Surely there has to be a solution with balance, one that does not cost a quarter of a billion pounds for looking at the land around the lower Thames crossing, but allows Government and local government to put things such as swift bricks into housing. There has to be balance.

[Chris Curtis]

I start by appreciating the description of a rant—I will keep ranting on this point until I do not have to speak to my constituents waking up in temporary accommodation because of this country’s failure to build. I note that there is a middle ground; in fact, it is even better than a middle ground, because through this Bill and the changes we are proposing we can improve the situation for nature and improve the situation for building, including incentivising developers—for example through the biodiversity net gain process—to put swift bricks in place.

What we currently have is not a conservation system, but a cargo cult, mimicking the symbols of protection while the reality on the ground gets worse. Contrast that with what protecting nature actually looks like, from this Government: a strategic land use framework that supports farmers to deliver climate and nature benefits across 1.6 million hectares of land—more than half the size of Wales; banning bee-killing pesticides; backing a transition to regenerative farming and planting forests on double the amount of land that will be needed to build the 1.5 million homes.