Planning and Infrastructure Bill

Debate between Lord Lucas and Baroness Parminter

Report stage
Wednesday 29th October 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, I very much support Amendment 130. It is absolutely crucial that we get this system to a point where developers see EDPs as something they can live with. At the moment, as I evidenced in a meeting that the Minister very kindly allowed me, they clearly do not. They see this as a huge additional complication, which will slow down development enormously. I very much support what the noble Baroness, Lady Freeman, said. No one who has ever tried to manage a garden would think you could model biological processes out in the wild. You can model the watering of a garden, but you cannot model what the plants are going to do; it requires observations on the ground. Natural England are not going down a road that will work.

That brings me to Amendment 122. I was on the Front Bench for MAFF when most of that department’s business was run through the EU. If you do not have control of what is happening in your own department, it produces a dysfunctional political process. You cannot respond to what people are saying from outside. You cannot even influence what is happening internally in the department. The department should not be doing this to itself; it should not be inshoring so much of its business to an unaccountable body, as we have seen with bat tunnels. There is nothing you can do with Natural England when it goes wrong. You cannot just pick up the phone and say, “Come on, be sensible, guys”. It does not work. What we are doing is producing an unstable political situation which will have to be unwound. Let us not create it.

[Baroness Parminter (LD)]

My Lords, given that time is short, I will contain our remarks to the standout amendment in this group, Amendment 130, moved so ably by the noble Baroness, Lady Willis of Summertown. It is a means to address a fundamental question we all have on the Bill: how do we help the Government deliver the win-win for nature and the economy by giving developers certainty about this new process, given that we are moving away from an established process which has served for many years, while at the same time ensuring that the environmental protections we want are locked in? The approach taken by the noble Baroness is to curtail the scope of this new process by saying that an EDP can happen only where it has been shown that those approaches will work, benefiting conservation at the strategic landscape scale.

I have to say that we, as Liberal Democrats, thought long and hard about supporting this amendment. It is our contention that we should always follow the science, so if there were scientific evidence that there could be conservation benefits for a species, for example, it would normally be our position to support that. Therefore, this approach to curtail it by area rather than evidence is not one that we would normally support. But as noble Lords will see, after thinking long and hard, we put our Front-Bench name to this amendment. The reason is that we are not convinced at this point in the debate that there are sufficient safeguards about how that scientific evidence will be considered by Natural England to ensure that the environmental safeguards that we all want will be in place. Therefore, we on these Benches will listen very carefully to what the Minister has to say in response to this amendment but, if the noble Baroness is minded to move to a vote on it, at this point in time, we would support her.

Planning and Infrastructure Bill

Debate between Lord Lucas and Baroness Parminter

Committee stage
Monday 15th September 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, I have Amendment 253 in this group. I very much hope that the Minister will be able to give me some comfort as to the Government’s intention towards the private schemes—after all, the Minister and I were both involved in the Environment Bill when it was going through. We set up a system where people were making 30-year commitments to look after a piece of land properly, and now the whole system appears to have been turned on its head. No one knows what its future is, nor whether they should be going ahead with the schemes that they have put together to provide the biodiversity net gain where it cannot be provided on the site.

One farm owned by my local council is entirely suitable for restoration of the best quality chalk grassland, but the scheme is dead in the water. Nobody knows what the Government’s intentions are. Will this be viable? When we get EDPs, will everything be undermined by Natural England doing it itself? Will there be a role for the private sector in this area? Nothing is certain any more.

When you set out to get people involved for 30 years, there really ought to be an understanding on both sides of the House that the 30 years should be respected and that we should try to keep things stable for that length of time. Can the Government give me, and the people I find myself talking to, a real understanding of what their intentions are with respect to all that the private sector has done to date and might do in the future? What direction are we setting out in and what comfort can the Government give that it is worthwhile for the sector continuing to do what it has started to do? I should be very grateful to hear.

[Baroness Parminter (LD)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, for his amendment. We cannot think about EDPs in splendid isolation. It is important that we as a Committee look at the wider context, including biodiversity net gain, that the EDPs will slot into. In that regard, it is incredibly important that, before we get to Report, the Government make clear their response to the consultation that they launched on biodiversity net gain, which closed before recess. If the Government were to decide to significantly change biodiversity net gain for the smaller sites that are up for grabs, it would have hugely detrimental impacts for the environment. It is important for us to know that before Report, so that we can then think about other amendments we might wish to bring forward.