Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill

Lord Lucas Excerpts

Committee stage
Monday 27th March 2023 Lords Chamber

With that being said, while I understand the intention behind this amendment and fully support the important role that local nature recovery strategies will play, this is not an amendment that we feel able to support. I will reflect on the debate and we will consider these matters further, but I hope that I have said enough to enable noble Lords not to press their amendment at this stage.

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, I very much hope that my noble friend will reflect. As he started his remarks, I was buoyed with confidence that the Government had taken on board the sheer difficulty of turning what throughout my lifetime has been a process of depleting nature into a process of augmenting nature. It requires difficult internal decisions in all sorts of processes to get this right. Unless we give the process a good deal of strength and power, it will, as the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Whitchurch, said, just be ignored; there will always be an excuse for letting it go. I urge my noble friend that this may be the time for a little too much force on the tiller, to make sure that we make this change. If we find that we are clogging up the development system, we can perhaps let it go a bit, but we have been headed in the wrong direction for so long that we need to be absolutely sure that we are doing enough to turn the corner.

[Lord Benyon (Con)]

I thank my noble friend for his wise intervention. We have come a very long way. Over a decade ago, the natural environment White Paper created local nature partnerships. Some of those have been incredibly successful but some have not. What we are trying to create here on a statutory basis is something that will see around 50 of these right across the country, with consistency and a determination to draw the threads of the desire to restore nature through the planning system and get good decision-making as a result. I am happy to work with my colleagues and anyone in this House to see whether that can be tweaked but, at this stage, I think we are going a long way towards creating the kind of regulatory and statutory basis that we need to see the proper restoration of nature.