L

Lord Fuller (Con)

Speaking in the House of Lords on 15 September 2025

Debate

Planning and Infrastructure Bill

Contribution

I am talking to all of them—particularly those in the name of my noble friend Lady Coffey but also Amendment 333. There is more. I scrutinised Natural England’s nutrient calculator. It used the wrong digital elevation model. It used the wrong areas of influence on sewage treatment works. No allowance was made for excess capacity in the sewage treatment works. I am going to come to a very important point in a moment. The incorrect number of residents per property was assumed, which is significant where there are holiday homes. It assumed much greater water consumption for each house than we knew to be the case. The numbers for manures coming from outdoor pig units were underestimated by somewhere between 1,000 and 10,000 times, by reference to Defra booklet RB209. Suffice it to say that the calculator is orders of magnitude adrift. There was then a completely arbitrary 20% buffer applied over and above the calculated number for no justifiable reasons. It was all very shoddy. The dodgy statistics have resulted in an extra £5,000 to £15,000 extra tariff per home for every house built in what is essentially the entirety of the district in which I live and its two neighbours.

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