Planning and Infrastructure Bill

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 25th June 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Earl, Lord Caithness. I have a sense of déjà vu, thinking back to when the noble Earl and I were working to get a focus on soil health in the Environment Bill, now Act, when the noble Earl was acting to push his own Government in the right direction.

I declare my position as a vice-president of the Local Government Association. I am the first member of the Green group in your Lordships’ House to speak, so I note that in the other place the Green MPs voted against the Bill at Third Reading. That was not because they did not think there were good elements in it, but there is so much damage being done to nature—and hence, as many noble Lords have said, to human health and well-being and to the state of the nation—that they could not support the progress of the Bill. I thought it was important to set out the position that we start from.

In the Minister’s introductory speech, we heard a couple of the central misconceptions that underpin the reasons why the Government’s approach more generally in the Bill will simply not work. It will be counterproductive. The noble Lord spoke with some glee about new roads. Well, we know that new roads simply create new traffic. You cannot build your way out of a traffic jam; all you do is create more traffic jams. The noble Lord spoke about the safe and decent homes the Bill is supposed to deliver. As the noble Lord, Lord Crisp, just said—and many others have said—what our large handful of mass housebuilders are building is anything but that. If people have not seen it, I point them to the article in the New Statesman this month about some of the absolutely awful and incredibly expensive homes that have been built in the Prime Minister’s own constituency that the owners are not able to get sorted out.

To pick up the points made by the noble Baroness, Lady Willis of Summertown, and many others, the health of nature is the health of human beings—we human animals living on this fragile planet in this terribly nature-depleted country. Speaking up for nature is speaking up for humans. As the noble Lord, Lord Crisp, just said, if we are going to have a healthy economy, we need healthy humans. We are speaking up for the economy, ultimately.

The Bill is disastrous for nature. I go to the briefing of the Wildlife and Countryside Link, but there are many briefings pointing out how the Bill undermines vital legal protections for nature. It is environmentally regressive and reduces the level of environmental protection provided by existing law.

I could take the rest of my time going through a very long list of the issues I want to address, but that would be a little dull. I will focus on a couple of points that help illustrate my general point that nature and human well-being are tied together.

We need to take a One Health approach to the Bill. I point to a briefing from the Sustainable Nitrogen Alliance, which says that the proposed environmental delivery plans will be insufficient to tackle nitrogen overloading. We need an integrated approach to nitrogen pollution that addresses, in addition to development, the impacts of intensive agriculture and wastewater and the risk of pollution swapping.

Coming back to my point about health, I go to UNEP, which notes that ammonia emissions, as well as contributing to climate change, are an important driver of fine particulate matter pollution, which reduces air quality and has increasing adverse effects on human health. I spent last weekend, in my leisure time, on a two-day course: the Field Studies Council’s introduction to lichens. I can highly recommend that to noble Lords. Any noble Lords who stand still too long in the Dining Room may find themselves bailed up by me to talk about that more. It was striking how much the tutor kept saying, “Well, you won’t find this or that wonderful species here. Everything is covered in nitrogen”. That is what our country is like. It is a human health issue as well as an issue for lichens.

In the other place, Sarah Champion MP talked about the right to grow. That is really crucial for human health; allotments and similar spaces are great for nature as well. I will mention the issue of landfill—historic and current—and the human health impacts of that; and Zane’s law is something noble Lords will be hearing more from me on. But I want to mention something that might be able to be cleaned up now before we get to that point. The Badger Trust points out that in Schedule 6, there are amendments that significantly undermine protections for badgers without improving the situation in any way for housebuilders. I hope we might be able to clean that up before Committee, so we will not have to dig through that detail.