The Lord Bishop of Norwich

My Lords, I shall speak to Amendment 94, and I thank the noble Earl, Lord Caithness, the noble Viscount, Lord Trenchard, and the noble Baroness, Lady Willis of Summertown, for their support. I am most grateful to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Grender, who has just spoken so powerfully about her amendment, as well as offering her support for this amendment. Amendment 94 would require a spatial development strategy to list chalk streams in the strategy area, outline measures to protect them from environmental harm and impose responsibility on strategic planning authorities to protect and enhance chalk stream environments. Chalk streams, as we have heard, are a very special type of river. Some 85% of the world’s chalk streams are in England. They are fed primarily by spring water from the chalk aquifer, not rain, which means that they have clear, cold water and very stable flows. These globally rare habitats are found in a broad sweep from Yorkshire and the Lincolnshire Wolds through Norfolk, the Chilterns, Hampshire and Dorset. The Bure, Glaven, Wensum, Test, Itchen and Meon are river names that come to mind flowing, as they do, through the tapestry of English history and in our literature, such as the River Pang-based Wind in the Willows. They are rich in minerals, especially calcium, and this “base rich” environment supports a distinctive and rich ecology. It is no wonder that this amendment and a similar one in the other place have received such positive support, including in your Lordships’ Committee. What it seeks to do is such an obvious thing, for what we love, we should desire to protect; what we value, we should safeguard; what is of global significance, we should be deeply proud of. I am grateful that the Minister responded to my letter to her about my amendment. However, her response was far from reassuring in two ways. First, the Government have pointed to local nature recovery strategies as a way of protecting chalk streams. These could, of course, in future be capable of considering, avoiding and otherwise mitigating for direct damage to these habitats, such as occurs from the footprint of a development near a chalk stream. However, to do so, LNRSs will need more bite in the planning system than they currently have. We are still waiting for the regulations designed to do precisely that, placing a duty on local planning authorities to take account of the nature strategy when making planning decisions. We are still waiting for that to be commenced, and it is now a full two years after these regulations were promised in the Levelling-up and Regeneration Act 2023. Even once the regulations are passed, LNRSs will not be well placed to map, quantify and avoid or mitigate for the offsite impacts of development such as downstream pollution or the additional water that will be abstracted from chalk streams or their aquifers to serve new homes. These very real threats to our chalk streams, over areas much larger than are covered by strategies, cannot be addressed by LNRSs.