Question to the Department for Levelling Up, Housing & Communities:

To ask the Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, whether temporary overnight accommodation proposed in the Solent region requires the installation of nitrate mitigation measures before development can commence.

Under the Habitats Regulations, it is for the competent authority to decide, through undertaking an appropriate assessment and considering advice from Natural England, whether a particular application requires mitigation measures and the adequacy of these proposals. It may be possible for individual proposals to advance mitigation schemes other than nitrate neutrality that are sufficient to demonstrate to the competent authority that an individual scheme would not have an adverse effect on the protected habitats sites.