Planning and Infrastructure Bill

Baroness Freeman of Steventon Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 11th September 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Helic (Con)]

My Lords, I support Amendments 152ZA and 261A tabled by my noble friend Lady Hodgson. These would require spatial development strategies and environmental delivery plans to take proper account of animal welfare as set out in the Animal Welfare (Sentience) Act 2022. This is not about adding extra bureaucracy; it is about recognising a truth that we often ignore. Planning is not just about where we place bricks and mortar; it is about the choices we make for the land, the habitats and the creatures that depend on them. At present, there is a yawning gap between what is promised and what is delivered.

The University of Sheffield has shown that in new developments, 83% of hedge-grown highways, three-quarters of bat and bird boxes and almost half the promised hedges never materialised. Trees specified on planning plans were found dead and not planted at all. There are fine words in planning documents, but in practice animals are left without space or shelter. This is why the warning of the Animal Sentience Committee must be heeded. In its formal response on 27 June this year, the committee rightly stressed that the Planning and Infrastructure Bill conceptualises biodiversity as an abstract environmental good but ignores the lived experience of sentient animals, which will be displaced, harmed and killed during construction. The image it gave was searing—a bulldozer driving through a badger sett, burying animals alive, justified by the promise of a new sett to be built a decade later, never to be seen. The committee made good and sensible recommendations on welfare impact assessments, construction and timetables that avoid breeding seasons, and practical measures such as swift bricks, wildlife tunnels and hedgerow highways.

The case of the brown hare teaches us what happens when welfare is absent from the statute book. Once abundant in England, hares are now in deep decline because we fail to legislate for a close season. Hundreds of thousands are killed in breeding months, leverets are left to die, and populations are down by 80% in certain areas. If that can happen to such a cherished and loved animal, we should not be surprised that less visible creatures fare even worse.

EDPs risk levies being paid at the expense of impacts on animal welfare. The Bill risks directly impacting protected species, with bats, birds, badgers and hares uprooted from their habitats, distressed, or destroyed altogether. Conservation is not only about biodiversity; it cannot exist without animal welfare.

We must do better. Yes, there is a need for new homes and better infrastructure, but we also want living hedgerows, thriving trees, wildlife corridors that actually function and a countryside that remains alive. These amendments do not hold back growth; they simply hold us to a higher standard of responsibility. By adopting them, we would show that planning for the future is about not only housing numbers but the kind of country we wish to be: one that values progress, but not at the expense of wildlife, and builds for people, while safeguarding the animals which share our land.

[Baroness Freeman of Steventon (CB)]

My Lords, I speak in support of Amendments 152ZA and 261A in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Hodgson of Abinger. She and the Animal Sentience Committee raise the important point that the lives of individual animals seem to have been overlooked in the Bill.

When we work in policy-making, we always have to weigh up whole-population decisions—potential benefits to one group against potential harms to another. Of course, we have to do that, but we never forget that those policy decisions involve individuals. We do not forget it when they are individual people, and anyone who has been close to an animal, such as a pet, knows that individual animals have their own emotions—they can experience fear, joy and pain. It is important that we bear this is mind. We discuss animal welfare matters when it comes to pets—we discussed the docking of tails in pet animals just last Friday. Whether it is a pet rabbit or a wild rabbit, they have the same experiences, so it is very important for us to consider whether there are ways in which we can acknowledge that in the Bill.

[Lord Berkeley (Lab)]

My Lords, I support Amendment 147 on chalk streams. I was brought up in the Chilterns and I have been studying some of the streams there for a very long time. As other noble Lords have said, they are the most wonderful bits of the countryside, with clear water—which comes and goes, but it is usually there.

I became involved in this when I opposed some of the work that HS2 was doing in trying to drill a tunnel underneath the chalk stream near Amersham. The Chiltern Society, which led the opposition, was very keen that HS2 put some boreholes down to check what the ground was like and make sure that drilling a tunnel close to underneath a chalk stream would not have any adverse effect on it. Of course, HS2, being the rather arrogant organisation it often was, said, “It is not necessary. We know everything that is going to happen there and it is all planned for. We won’t have any special protection apart from the normal tunnel construction”.

Of course, HS2 was wrong and when the tunnel got to underneath the stream just west of Amersham, contamination started, water levels dropped and there was a lack of water supply in some places. It said, “Oh dear”, and did nothing about it. It is all right now—I think it has all been solved—but my point is that if this amendment had been on the statute book 10 years ago, the local people and the experts would have had much more credibility in attacking a government organisation trying to build a tunnel than has happened so far.

There are probably many other examples and noble Lords have mentioned some, but it is important that we map these chalk streams and make sure that they are looked after, because they are very special.