Yesterday the Government announced a package of amendments to the Planning and Infrastructure Bill.
The core purpose of the bill is to make house building easier by allowing developers to pay money to Natural England instead of dealing with protected species and habitats on development sites themselves.
The Government amendments strengthen tests, require back-up measures where conservation measures fail, mandate for evidence to be published and set an assumption that compensation should be delivered close to the harm caused.
These all improve the bill, but they do not deal with the fundamental problem at the heart of it.
The bill, and in particular Part 3 of it, short circuits the mitigation hierarchy that says developers must first avoid harming nature. Currently developers must avoid causing harm to species and habitats, next they must minimise such harm and then finally, and only if there are overriding reasons, they need to compensate for the harm done.
The bill forces developers to go straight to final step of delivering compensation.
All the amendments go towards improving the likelihood that the conservation measures will deliver what they are supposed to, but none of them go to the fact that compensation is only needed because the bill makes it easier to kill wildlife and nature in the first place.
The Office for Environmental Protection’s original letter of advice to the Government warned that, unless the mitigation hierarchy was put onto the face of 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’.
In its letter yesterday, following the Government’s announcement of new amendments, the OEP said “We are clear that even after the material amendments the Government proposes, the Bill would, in some respects, lower environmental protection on the face of the law.”
The bill remains regressive.
When compared to the Planning and Infrastructure Bill as first published, the amendments are a step in the right direction. However, the amendments don’t make the bill good, they just make it a bit less bad.
The fundamental flaw at the heart of the bill is that its core purpose is to make it easier for developers to destroy species and habitats. The purpose of the bill is to facilitate the destruction of nature. That is why Part 3 of the bill needs to be removed.
