Planning and Infrastructure Bill

Baroness Neville-Rolfe Excerpts

Committee stage
Monday 15th September 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Coffey (Con)]

My Lords, it is right that we are having such a comprehensive debate on whether Part 3 stand part of the Bill. The Whip will remind us that we are not here to do Second Reading speeches, and I agree with that, but he will remember that the advisory time limit at Second Reading was a mere five minutes to cover every single clause of the Bill. That is why we are having a debate, and trying to understand from the Minister what the effect of these clauses is supposed to be, especially as we know that, since the Bill came into this House, the Government have been forced to table amendments.

A test of this Bill—certainly of Part 3—would be whether the new Secretary of State at the ministry would stand by the assertion that Angela Rayner made when she said that there be no detriment on the basis of existing environment law compared to were this to go through. I appreciate that that is still sub judice but it would be helpful if the Minister might be able to articulate whether Steve Reed would stand by that assertion. It may be that that is part of what has led to the amendments, though, as we have already heard, perhaps the amendments do not go far enough. Certainly, the OEP was critical of the Bill—I do not need to go over its criticisms again—and some changes have been made.

My noble friend Lord Caithness talks in detail about Natural England. I intend to speak a bit more about that in the next group of amendments, but I want to give a bit of assurance to my noble friend. One of the reasons for having the environmental principles policy statement was specifically for the Government to set out how they intended these different things, such as the precautionary principle, to apply. I am conscious of what my noble friend says, but, specifically when it came to the precautionary principle—I know this because I wrote it—there is the issue of risk.

Traditionally, there has been a lot of back and forth about risk and hazard and what the right approach should be to the precautionary principle. By and large, Conservative or Labour Governments have taken a risk-based approach. I will give your Lordships a further example. If bleach was introduced today, almost certainly it would not be allowed, because the hazard would be too great. We do not do that; we do it on a risk-based approach. I am pleased to say that, in the government policy, which is still valid today, it says that

“in all cases, for the precautionary principle to apply, there must be sufficient evidence that the risk of serious or irreversible damage is plausible and real”.

I hope that reassures my noble friend.

There are various elements of Part 3 for which I want to understand and probe further what the Government intend to do. Clause 58 starts off by saying:

“When Natural England decides to prepare an EDP”.


But who is going to give that direction? Why is it up to Natural England to decide whether it is going to prepare an EDP? It would be helpful for the Minister to explain why the Government have come up with that phraseology. We will debate EDPs in a lot more detail, so I do not need to go into every intricacy of them now, but it would be helpful to get a sense of what the primary legislation is trying to get at. It feels a little like the designation of the expiration of SSSIs, where it is left entirely to Natural England to decide whether to look at an SSSI, whether to extend it and so on. That is not satisfactory either. It would be useful to understand the Government’s intentions in that clause.

It would be helpful to get some clarity on Clause 68(4) before I move on to Clause 86. Having accepted that a developer is going to pay the levy, Natural England can then

“rescind its acceptance … such that the developer ceases to be committed to pay the nature restoration levy”.

On the one hand, we are saying that the levy is mandatory; on the other, we are saying that it is not. In what circumstances has it been deemed that regulations might be needed to withdraw that? Perhaps the whole development comes to a grinding halt, but I think there will be several of us who are concerned that this is just another way to stop people paying towards the levy. I made this point in our debates last week that the chief executive of Natural England had come up with a series of assertions that it was not mandatory for developers to pay the levy and later that councils could assess the validity of the EDP being developed and the progress of it and make decisions on whether or not it was valid to grant planning consent. There are also other issues with Clause 59.

In Clause 86, Natural England is mentioned basically everywhere, and the Secretary of State is mentioned every now and again. The clause is saying that the Secretary of State can decide anyone has the power to exercise the functions. If that is the case, why have we gone into that level of detail about Natural England being granted all these compulsory purchase powers when really, at the stroke of a pen, they could be given to just one single person? That feels extraordinary.

So I am really concerned about Clause 86 in general. I am conscious that the Minister may want to elucidate on this clause in more detail, and I hope that she can explain what it is seeking to achieve. It may be that the Secretary of State wants Suffolk Wildlife Trust to develop the plan or some other body—it could be somewhere special in Cumbria. By the way, I congratulate the Minister on staying in her post given that she is the only person who has any connection to the countryside; I am sure even the Prime Minister realises that Defra needs somebody who actually lives and breathes the countryside.

However, the designated person will be defined in regulations, so it could be anyone. It is pretty stark to give such huge powers to just anybody. We have seen this in the Employment Rights Bill, where—as we finally discovered through debate in this House—a designated person or body, like the trade unions, could be given unlimited amounts of taxpayers’ money. We are seeing that here in this Bill too. It would be very helpful if the Minister could explain what, in seeking that the clause stand part, the Government are seeking to achieve.

I know people want to catch trains shortly after midnight so we should not extend this much further, but I want to mention aspects of the mitigation hierarchy and to get some clarity from the Minister. I recognise this has already been brought up a few times today. In the Commons, Matthew Pennycook was very clear that he did not believe the mitigation hierarchy was in any way fixed. Can the Minister clarify whether the principle of “do no harm” is being ripped up?

I will speak separately to my noble friends about parts of the reality of the River Wye. Some of it is just that the river is too hot because somebody has managed to cut down tons of trees, so there is no shade anymore, which has led to greater chemical reactions happening than perhaps Natural England would otherwise predict.

Finally, I will speak to some of the other amendments. My noble friends on the Front Bench have tabled Amendments 346DD and 346DE; they are familiar because they are very similar to amendments tabled by the last Government, of which I was a member. I would say gently to some of my noble friends that, when I was looking at some of these significant changes, I looked at a map and some of these parts of the country are tiny. Are there not some other parts of the country where we could consider building instead of going on such a controversial route as we took at the time? This Government have gone far further with Part 3 as it stands, but I look forward to some of the explanations on that.

I completely agree with Amendments 302 and 303, which my noble friends have been tabled.

[Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)]

My Lords, I support the general thrust of the amendments in the name of my noble friend Lord Roborough.

The focus of Natural England is bureaucratic and precautionary, as we heard from my noble friend Lord Caithness. We need to find a way around the freezing of housing developments by Natural England under its nutrient neutrality rules. This is a real growth killer in those areas. My noble friend Lord Roborough has tried to find an immediate remedy in some of his amendments; I encourage the Minister to look at them and perhaps come forward with some further amendments to this important Bill. I remind the Committee that page 6 of the Explanatory Notes says that the Bill

“intends to speed up and streamline the delivery of new homes and critical infrastructure”.

My worry is that Part 3 gives Natural England the power to bring about the opposite.

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, I have had a number of conversations with developers over the course of the past month or two. Their universal conclusion is that Part 3 makes it much harder to build houses. It adds huge levels of risk and uncertainty. It tears up the arrangements that they were half way through making—in order to get things done and deal with the environmental impact of housebuilding—and substitutes them with a regime where they just will not know what is happening. It will be really difficult to make commitments because so much could change if an EDP is imposed and because of the timescale of imposing an EDP. What will the consequence of an EDP be? It will make the whole business anti-business.

I really hope that the Government will take the chance of a change in the Secretary of State to look at this aspect of the Bill and say, “Even if it’s a good idea, we need to take it slowly and carefully, and we need to make sure that people can rely on it”, because, if you are setting out to build houses on any scale, you are taking a long-term decision. You need to know how the landscape will be for years in advance.