Planning and Infrastructure Bill

Baroness Willis of Summertown Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 25th June 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Willis of Summertown (CB)]

My Lords, I declare my interest as noted in the register as chair of Peers for the Planet.

When looking at this Bill, the one thing I think we can all agree on is that our planning system needs to be reformed, and in that sense, I welcome the Bill. But if we are to ensure a healthy and resilient future for people and the planet, we also need to ensure that our planning system, at the same time as delivering 1.5 million houses and major infrastructure, also delivers towards our environmental and climate targets.

We need a climate and nature duty which will run through the planning system and ensure consistency in decision-making by treating nature and climate targets as material considerations and giving them proper planning weight. Yet what we have in our current system is already too piecemeal, and now this Bill brings in yet another set of reforms which, if we are not really careful, will result in conflicting legislation and strategies all pulling against one another.

I know that other Lords have commented on this, but in this respect, it is Part 3 which is of most concern. If it is left as it is, it will lead to regression in the legal certainty for nature, a removal of the mitigation hierarchy, and conservation measures that can be delayed by a decade after the damage has been done. Associated with this, I have three specific concerns that will be very helpful to hear the Minister’s opinion on.

The first, as highlighted by the noble Baroness, Lady Young, is that the Bill fails to include any mention of protection of irreplaceable habitats such as protected blanket peatlands, ancient woodlands, chalk streams and species-rich grasslands. Currently, these habitats are given strict protection under the habitats directive and the Wildlife and Countryside Act, as well as protection under the mitigation hierarchy. In the Bill, the EDP proposal turns this process on its head. It would allow developers to pay a levy and skip straight to compensation. But how can you compensate or restore elsewhere when habitats can take hundreds, if not thousands, of years to restore? For example, let us take the SSI blanket peat bog on Walshaw Moor in Yorkshire. It has taken 6,000 years to grow to where it is now. At its current growth rate, if we destroy it, it will take 240 human generations later to see the peatland restored. This is clearly ridiculous, and allowing harm to those irreplaceable habitats in exchange for future compensation would be a grave misstep.

Secondly, the Bill views nature as important to protect only for its inherent value, yet we now have huge amounts of evidence, including from the UK Government, that the ecosystem services provided by nature are incredibly important for their role in climate mitigation, flood risk protection, pollination, clean water, clean air and good-quality soils. It is also now widely acknowledged, including by the Treasury, that if these natural capital assets are allowed to degrade any further or be destroyed, there could be a significant financial impact. For example, the Green Finance Institute in its 2025 report on nature-related financial risk—I recommend that your Lordships read it if you do not know this data—estimated that further deterioration of our natural capital assets could lead to an estimated 6% to 12% loss of GDP by 2030. So how will this Bill protect important natural capital assets?

Thirdly, and finally, there is no mention in the Bill of the need to preserve green spaces and nature in cities. This is a major omission, in my view, given the abundance of data and population-level evidence, including papers published, most recently in the Lancet and the British Medical Journal, demonstrating that green space in cities is critically important for the health and well-being of us humans. Provision of accessible green space within 15-minutes walking distance has been agreed in international legislation, so where is it in this Bill? Alongside any new housing development, there should be provision for green space within 15-minutes walking distance.

I firmly believe that it is possible to achieve nature-positive and climate-positive urban development, but we need to be clear about how it should be prioritised within the system and ensure that decision-making is more balanced and consistent.