The Government says the purpose of the Planning and Infrastructure Bill is to speed up and streamline the delivery of new homes and critical infrastructure, delivering the 1.5 million homes they have committed to building by the end of this Parliament. They state the Bill will unlock a win-win for the economy and nature, with a more strategic approach to the 'discharge of environmental obligations'.

At the heart of this Bill is the proposal to allow developers to pay money to Natural England instead of dealing with protected species and habitats on development sites themselves, leapfrogging existing environmental protections.

New Amendments

Yesterday, the Government shared a series of amendments that do improve the Bill, ensuring that compensatory measures are delivered effectively, strengthening tests, introducing back-up measures where compensation falls short, and requiring compensation to be delivered close to where harm is caused.

These are welcome improvements, but they do not deal with the fundamental problem right at the heart of the Bill.

Part 3 undermines the environmental protections that have been hard won over decades, and in the time of a biodiversity crisis, these protections are critical. The mitigation hierarchy requires developers to avoid harm to species and habitats first, then to look at how to minimise that harm, then and only as a last resort, to compensate for any loss. This is not a bureaucratic process to be avoided. This is and must continue to be a fundamental principle of any development.

The Bill forces developers to go straight to compensation, which is only needed because the Bill makes it easier to destroy nature in the first place.

The key message this Bill is giving for developers is that it's okay to destroy habitats and kill wildlife as long as they are willing to pay for it.

The Office for Environmental Protection (OEP)'s original advice to the Government warned that without the mitigation hierarchy being central to the Bill, 'the law could allow a protected site to be harmed in such a way as to affect its integrity, even in an extreme case to be destroyed entirely.'

Yesterday, the OEP, followed up on their advice:

In other words, the Bill remains regressive.

Since the recent amendments, it is an improvement on the original proposal, but it still leaves nature less protected than it is now — and we know that nature is still in decline even with these protections.

We need to do everything we can to restore nature, and Part 3 of this Bill makes it easier and makes it legal to damage the natural world.

Please join us in saying NO to #CashToTrash and call on the Government to scrap part 3 of the Planning and Infrastructure Bill.

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