Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill (Fourth sitting)

Sarah Atherton Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 23rd June 2022 Public Bill Committees

[The Chair]

Sorry, I am just going to have to stop you there and move on.

[Sarah Atherton (Wrexham) (Con)]

Q Dr Benwell, you spoke about bolder outcomes in devolved Administrations, so you will probably know about this. The Welsh Government have introduced phosphate mitigation targets in areas of special interest, which covers my constituency. In practice, that has halted all development for many months, including care home extensions, and the impact is delayed discharges from care. A homeless hostel has not been built. It has been left to the local authorities to scramble around with developers and Natural Resources Wales to find a way forward. That still has not happened, so how could the Bill square that?

Dr Benwell: This situation that we have got to, where I think 70 local authorities are facing moratoria on development because of nutrient loading, is a real problem, but it is a problem because in some ways the system is working. We have allowed ourselves to reach a threshold where our rivers are facing ecological destruction because we failed to halt diffuse pollution from agriculture and to halt run-off from urban areas. We need to find a way through it, absolutely, and there are a couple of ways to do that.

In the short term, we should make sure that developers have options to mitigate and compensate for any additional load that they would put on those water bodies—that is absolutely crucial. We have seen some brilliant examples around Poole harbour, where developers have been allowed to invest in treatment wetlands or to work with farmers to reduce artificial inputs of fertiliser—nitrate and phosphate—to reduce that load on the system so that you can go forward and provide that infrastructure and development that you need, but not in such a way that we leave our rivers and streams ecologically dead.

In the long term, we need to move to a more systematic approach, where we take these problems into account in advance and we permit plans and projects only when they are within a nutrient budget in the system. It is about having a catchment-level nutrient budgeting plan that says, “This is what is currently in the system and what it is adding to our waters; this is what we can bring forward; and this is what we have to take out of the system.” Other countries have done that really successfully, and it has enabled development to take place in a way that does not take them over those critical environmental thresholds.

So we should not knee-jerk and get rid of the rules that are in place, because they are serving a vital ecological function, but we should help developers to do their bit by taking away aspects of the problem. In the long term, we need to use things such as environmental land management to help pay farmers to shift towards more agroecological systems. We need to help developers to come forward with permeable membranes and reduce the load on the sewerage system so that they are not contributing to the problem.

[The Chair]

Paul, did you want to add anything—in 60 seconds?

Paul Miner: Just to go back to Rachael’s initial question, one area of the Bill that gives us real cause for concern, in terms of local authorities’ ability to adapt to climate change, is the proposal on national development management policies. We think that, as the clauses are currently drafted, it will make it more difficult for local councils to have what is known as Merton rule-style policies, requiring a higher amount of renewable energy generation in new developments compared with the national building regulations. Similarly, on biodiversity net gain, the national policy is to ensure 10%, but some local authorities want to go beyond that. They would not do so if we had a national development management policy that told them to keep to what is nationally mandated.

We therefore think that clause 83 needs to be changed so that it just says that local authorities should be able to decide applications in line with both local and national policies, but not always have to give supremacy to national policies. We hope the Committee will look further at that in due course. We know that, for many members of the Committee, it is a major cause of concern, which they have raised already.