Rachel Reeves really doesn’t care about bats – or newts for that matter. Speaking to The Times in January, when asked which she would prefer – bats or crested newts – Reeves answered, “neither because I want growth”. (This was the same interview in which Reeves outed herself as a packed-lunch lover).
Reeves’s aversion to this pair of small unassuming creatures likely stems from the discovery last year that £100m of the budget for HS2 had been spent on a shield to protect bats in ancient woodland in Buckinghamshire. Since its conception, HS2 (which was originally supposed to connect London with Birmingham, Manchester and Leeds) has been increasingly diminished (it will now only connect London and Birmingham). Its sluggish development is often held up as an emblem of the UK’s ongoing failure to build and upgrade infrastructure. The revelations around the bat tunnel seem to have angered government officials so deeply, that following last week’s publication of the Planning and Infrastructure Bill, the Treasury has been accused by various nature charities of ‘being nasty’ to bats in their dogged pursuit of economic growth.
A lot is riding on the Planning and Infrastructure Bill, not least the government’s target of building 1.5m homes in the next five years. The planning system is often held up as a major reason for the UK’s lack of housing and the slow pace of development on new infrastructure. The government clearly shares this feeling, repeatedly holding itself up as the champion of the “builders, not blockers”.
It’s true that the UK’s planning system is in desperate need of attention after years of neglect. The sector is massively under-resourced due to an ongoing brain drain of older, more experienced planning officers to the private sector and the diminishing recruitment of younger planners. Nimbyism is of course a presiding issue. Planning has been the subject of countless attempts at reform over the past five years (anyone remember Robert Jenrick’s ill-fated planning bill? Or Michael Gove’s bill for Levelling Up and Regeneration?).
With this attempt, Housing Secretary, Angela Rayner has revealed that this government intends to be (just) a little bit more radical. As it stands, once the new bill is passed, councils will be able to set their own planning fees, helping them to cover costs and (hopefully) attract more people into the profession; development corporations have (drastically) been told they can ‘do anything necessary’ to deliver new towns; and local authorities have now been handed down the power to seize land for development where there are no objections.
The Treasury’s bat-bashing aside, the new bill still includes new measures to ensure protections for climate and nature. It outlines plans for a new, Nature Restoration Fund, run by Natural England, into which developers will be required to make a payment to “discharge environmental obligations”. Natural England will then lead on the creation of excitingly-termed ‘Environmental Delivery Plans’ which will help to police and alleviate the environmental impact of increased development. That way, developers will essentially be forced to pay to help clean up the environmental damage their development may have caused and for the overall improvement of British habitats.
We’ve (sort of) been here before. Biodiversity Net Gain (BNG), as the policy wonks among us will recall, was first dreamt up by Michael Gove when he was Environment Secretary in 2018 and aims to make developers pay for the damage their projects cause. Under BNG regulations, which came into force around this time last year, all developments in the UK must deliver at least a 10 per cent increase in biodiversity when major building projects are undertaken. When BNG was first introduced, the government promised it would create areas of habitat “the size of Bromley” but environment charities worried that 10 per cent simply wasn’t enough to make a dent in nature recovery (the UK is one of the most nature depleted countries in the world).
There was also concern around the element of the policy which stipulated that developers would be allowed to buy ‘biodiversity’ credits from other developments, allowing them to offset the damage caused by their own project via the work of another. The Nature Restoration Fund has received a more favourable welcome from the climate and nature world – the Wildlife Trusts described it as “a valuable opportunity for the government to address some of the negative impacts of development”. But they warned, “it must not be seen as a get out of jail free card”.
Reforming the planning system is a noble undertaking. But it is not a silver bullet for fixing the housing crisis. Inflation, the high cost of construction and workforce issues will all influence the success or failure of this core Labour mission. The government also has to make sure it is building homes which are of high quality and ready for a future in which temperatures are rising and nature is depleting. In the midst of a twin housing and nature crisis, this is likely to prove a tricky act to manage.
This article was originally published as an edition of the Green Transition, New Statesman Spotlight’s weekly newsletter on the economics of net zero. To see more editions and subscribe, click here.
Content from our partners
