Impact of Environmental Regulations on Development (Built Environment Committee Report)

Lord Jackson of Peterborough Excerpts

Friday 19th April 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Jackson of Peterborough (Con)]

My Lords, I welcome the opportunity to participate in this debate and I congratulate my noble friend Lord Moylan and his committee on this excellent report. I also, of course, congratulate my noble friend Lord Banner, of Barnt Green, on his superb speech. He brings deep knowledge and expertise on this subject. For a lawyer, paid by the word, his brevity was both welcome and unexpected. I feel sure that his professional background, experience, intellect and eloquence will be a much valued addition to your Lordships’ House. I look forward to what I hope will be many contributions from him over the next few years, not least on a subject dear to his heart, that of Ukraine.

I wish to make a number of general observations, because this report is too long and too complex to do justice to in five minutes. It highlights a failure: a policy, regulatory, legislative and judicial quagmire which I think any Government would have struggled with.

There are some fundamentals that we need to concede, as the noble Lord, Lord Best, said. We have a housing crisis; we have an issue of intergenerational fairness; we have increasing housing costs. We have to look at a proper strategy for dealing with that. We have also lost our way on proper strategy and planning for infrastructure. My part of the world is leading the way. In the east, Anglian Water is developing two new reservoirs, one near Grantham and one in the Fens, near Chatteris, but these things take sometimes 20 or 30 years to come to fruition. We do not appear to have coherence on that issue.

The decision last September to throw the baby out with the bathwater, to make the perfect the enemy of the good, by rejecting the Government’s very credible proposals to ameliorate the impact of nutrient neutrality in sensitive river catchments was a big mistake and an avoidable error, not least because the nutrient mitigation scheme, worth £280 million, was sorely needed.

We have also seen over a number of years regulatory and quango overreach, judicial activism and policy capture, which is a very regrettable situation. The proposal in 2023 to roll out a national credit-based scheme to address the imperative for nutrient neutrality would have entailed more than 30,000 acres of productive agricultural land being taken out of use for that purpose. I was interested to see that that is 61,000 tonnes of wheat, which is 35 million boxes of Weetabix.

It also has not produced, as at 2023, 142,000 homes which could have been built across 70 discrete local planning authorities. As other noble Lords have made clear, that has had a particular impact on small and medium-sized enterprise builders, who have suffered significantly since the downturn over 15 years ago. In fact, the Government’s own research shows that agricultural runoff and inaction by the privatised water companies in maintaining water infrastructure are the main reasons for the discharging of raw sewage into rivers and issues around nutrient neutrality. Indeed, new development accounts for less than 5% of phosphate and nitrate loads in our rivers. Of course, we also have the rather pernicious decision of the European Court of Justice in the so-called Dutch nitrogen case in 2018, which has resulted in what I would call the judicial activism in respect of the habitats regulations.

We are left with just one weapon in the armoury. That intervention is the sledgehammer used by Natural England to block much-needed new residential development. So, to quote Lenin, I ask the question: “What is to be done?” We need new primary legislation. We absolutely must have new watertight legislation and, I am sorry, but I believe that we must scrap the existing nutrient neutrality rules—needs must.

I cannot analyse all the recommendations in the report and the Government’s comprehensive reply, but there are a few things that I think are important. Ministers need to be able to exercise powers to grant planning permission and bypass local planning authorities that wilfully refuse to prepare timely and comprehensive plans. We need to refocus on the funding, capacity and expertise of local planning authorities. As an imperative, we obviously must have a review by the Environment Agency of environmental permits and plots that discharge effluent into rivers and areas impacted by nutrient pollution, especially agricultural activity. We also need a long-term look at historic housing stock and existing agricultural practices, as outlined in paragraph 89 of the report. We of course also have to look again at a greater emphasis at development on brownfield sites and remediation of brownfield land.

In conclusion, I commend this report. It is detailed and comprehensive and, more importantly, as my noble friend rightly said, it has signposted this and future Governments to find a way to reconcile two extremely important objectives: protecting biodiversity, species and quality of life; and building homes for people who desperately need them.