Chris Hinchliff

I completely agree with my hon. Friend about the importance of protecting our curlews, and the curlew action plan is a hugely important step, which the Government should be looking at. I also wonder how long it will be before the screaming sky falls silent, as each year, fewer swifts return to grace the air above our towns and villages. Even our English language is losing its power, as the colours of the countryside are allowed to run dry. How could Brontë have conjured Heathcliff to love Cathy without the wild of the Yorkshire moors? How could Tolkien have fathered an entire fantasy genre without a shire worth fighting for? What hope is there for a future Vaughan Williams with so few larks left to ascend? Worse still, what stories will we have left to enchant the next generation of children with when the Hundred Acre Wood has been declared a blocker, Ratty and Mole have been evicted from their river home by decades of effluent, and—this is probably only a matter of time—someone tries to redefine Watership Down as grey belt? All in all, the scale of the nature crisis is difficult to overstate, and any move to lower standards risks turning that crisis into a catastrophe. Yet, despite all this, we still get senior politicians declaring war on what little remains of our wildlife, with repeated suggestions that even this dire baseline is somehow too high. We continue to hear the unevidenced claim that Britain is held back not by a broken economic model but by bats and newts, and that profiteering developers would build genuinely affordable homes for all if only the last remnants of the natural world were less burdensome. Liz Truss may be gone, but the spirit and lazy rhetoric of deregulatory Trussonomics bulldozers inexorably onwards with a planning and infrastructure Bill that sought to allow developers to pay cash to trash nature, despite having no meaningful evidence to substantiate the claim that environmental protections slow down infrastructure. Then, after we managed to head off the worst of that, we have had the wholesale rejection of the Joint Nature Conservation Committee’s recommendations on species protections, as well as a nuclear regulatory review based on fundamentally flawed evidence that inflates the costs of environmental protections and downplays ecological risks. I would welcome the Minister taking this opportunity to distance the Government from that particular exercise in scapegoating nature for developer incompetence. Each additional deregulation and attack on environmental protections is a blow to the very root of what it means to be English. It is a truly bleak vision for our country to suggest that the only way to secure investment, build infrastructure or deliver homes is to rip up our environmental protections. Such measures are not only bad policy but directly contradictory to the manifesto we were elected on and deeply unpopular. Only 14% of British people think politicians are aligned with their values on nature, and three quarters of young people actually want more of the UK countryside protected.