Contribution
My Lords, I am afraid that I cannot give the House satisfaction by saying “Not moved”. Like my noble friend Lady Andrews, I feel that it is bad enough tabling amendments to your own Government’s Bill, but I am doing it when the whole House wants to go home. Also, all my supporters were expecting this to come up next week as part of the Part 3 discussions and have all gone off to do whatever it is that they are up to. My noble friend Lady Andrews has got the inside track on that. It really is a big order. I will try to be brief, but I actually regard these amendments as probably the most important ones that I have tabled to the whole Bill. Perhaps this debate can be regarded as a warm-up act for the main discussions on EDPs and the nature restoration fund next week.
I thank the noble Lord, Lord Roborough, in his absence—I think that he is off fishing—for putting his name to my amendments. I am very grateful for that. These three amendments are a package, to be taken together, as they outline an alternative approach to Part 3 of the Bill by seeking to tackle the real blockages that are being experienced by developers, not by throwing the habitats regulations baby out with the bath-water but by streamlining the way they are implemented.
The habitats regulations have been portrayed as significant blockages to development and that needs a bit of unpicking. First, they cover only internationally important habitats and species that need and deserve the highest level of protection. Secondly, some see them as gold-plating by the European Union, but it was actually us Brits who invented the habitats regulations and negotiated them into the rest of Europe. They are pretty fundamental to the protection of those habitats and species that are the feedstock from which nature restoration is fed.
Thirdly, many developers and others are clear that nature issues are not actually the biggest cause of delays to development; they come quite a long way down the lists that developers have, behind the lack of planning, resources and skills in local planning authorities, behind the same problem in the various regulators and consultees and behind the inbuilt reluctance of developers to build out sites. We have extant planning permissions for 1.2 million homes that have not been built and we have heard tonight about delays that have happened as a result of CIL and Section 106. I gather that, at the moment, building safety requirements as a result of the Grenfell Tower event can delay planning permissions for up to a year. So it is not just the habs regs that are a problem, as is sometimes the impression you would get from Part 3 of the Bill.
I have put forward these amendments against that background of seeking to resolve these real problems, knowing that next week we will hear considerable and more detailed concerns from others about how EDPs and the nature restoration fund will work; and that is in spite of the very useful amendments that the Government have already put down following the Commons stages to meet the significant concerns expressed in the other place and to respond to the criticism by the Office for Environmental Protection that Part 3 represents a regression from current standards.
So I am not the only person concerned about the Part 3 proposals. Indeed, a recent legal opinion by David Elvin KC, subsequent to the laying of the government amendments, concluded that, even with these changes, Part 3 represents a regression on environmental standards that could be in breach of international law. That is the context.
I will briefly lay out these three simple amendments, which offer an alternative way forward. Amendment 242A would restrict EDPs to only those issues where approaches are required at a strategic landscape scale in order to be effective. These are issues of nutrient neutrality, water quality, water resources and air quality—the issues that developers are most worried about. EDPs would not be put in place for individual species issues. There are already good models, such as the newt district licensing scheme, which work and often involve leveraging private sector investment. These private sector investors already see EDPs as undermining their schemes and chilling investment. So development of further species schemes along those lines is perfectly possible.
Amendments 185F and 185G would tackle other concerns about the habitats regulations beyond the four priorities that are listed in Amendment 242A by moving the requirements to comply with the habitats regulations substantially upstream to spatial development strategies and local plans. This would mean that, by the time developers came forward with planning applications on specific sites, the heavy lifting of habs regs, surveys and assessments would have been done at the spatial strategy and local plan stage. This would have the added benefit of guiding developers towards the simplest sites for development, where there would be least opposition, reducing unnecessary conflict and simplifying the planning application phase considerably.
I have talked to developers, both housing and infrastructure, about these proposals, and to the environmental NGOs. They believe that they could be made to work. I beg to move.