Planning and Infrastructure Bill

Lord Roborough Excerpts

Monday 24th November 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Sentamu (CB)]

My Lords, if chalk streams are in a moment of crisis, this amendment does not bounce the Secretary of State into action. It simply says:

“The Secretary of State must, within 12 months of the day on which this Act is passed, by regulations made by statutory instrument, provide guidance”.


So, from day one, the Secretary of State has 12 months to do it. If it is urgent, what is put here is absolutely necessary in the sense that 85% of the entire world’s chalk streams are in England and the habitat could easily be damaged. Within those 12 months, the Secretary of State can consult and bring together a team of people who will give him good guidance as to how he can put it in a statutory instrument. I have read the House of Commons reasons for disagreeing this. I think they just need to get on with it.

[Lord Roborough (Con)]

My Lords, we on these Benches and many other noble Lords have challenged the necessity for Part 3 throughout the Bill’s passage through your Lordships’ House. The Government have made a number of amendments, which have improved the Bill, to reintroduce nature protections and give more comfort on the Bill’s operation in relation to nature and the rural economy. We also welcome the Minister’s assurances and commitments around the use of compulsory purchase powers.

However, we supported the restriction of EDPs to nutrient neutrality, water and air quality in Committee and on Report, as well as protections for our chalk streams. The application of nutrient neutrality rules by Natural England is the major restriction on planning related to the natural environment. Before I go on, I again draw the House’s attention to my registered interests as a farmer, landowner, forester, and a developer of housing, commercial premises, and renewable energy.

I am very grateful to the noble Baronesses, Lady Willis of Summertown and Lady Young of Old Scone, for pursuing these restrictions on EDPs, and all those who supported them. The Minister has been generous with her time and that of her officials throughout the passage of this Bill, and our discussions around these and other amendments have been thoughtful and constructive. I am grateful for the Government’s commitments and concessions laid out today. They may not go as far as we might have wished. However, these commitments will allow Parliament to scrutinise the progress of EDPs and hold the Government to account over their extension—although I doubt, as a hereditary Peer, that I will be here to be part of that.

I want to put two challenges related to nutrient neutrality to the Minister. The Government refused to accept my amendments that sought not to reimpose habitats regulations on Ramsar sites. My Division was narrowly disagreed with. I have made the Government aware that, since that debate, this issue is already restricting planning consent, with a further 550 homes likely to be blocked in Somerset, as the council anticipates the reintroduction of those regulations in this Bill. What consideration has the Minister given to preventing the Bill blocking new housebuilding in this way?

Natural England provided some interesting data in response to freedom of information requests. In 2023, it promised Ministers to unlock 40,000 homes from nutrient neutrality restrictions with £33.5 million of taxpayer funding. In responding to this freedom of information request, it disclosed that it has spent over £28 million, including over £4 million on administration, and generated enough units to unlock only 11,000 homes. The scrutiny of these EDPs will need to be forensic and rigorous before Natural England should be allowed and trusted to attempt them in far more complicated areas.

I agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Willis, that the Government have made thoughtful concessions. We on these Benches are satisfied that this will provide a good opportunity for scrutiny.

Chalk streams face urgent and growing pressures, as others have laid out in this debate, yet the tools we rely on to protect them are still not fully in place. The Government have pointed to local nature recovery strategies as part of the solution, but without the long-promised regulations giving them real weight in the planning system, they simply do not have the bite required. Given the scale of the threat from development footprints, pollution and overabstraction, we cannot afford further delay, nor can we wait until 2030 for the abstraction licence reforms to take effect. We must ensure that spatial development strategies can direct development away from vulnerable chalk stream catchments. It is a practical and necessary step to prevent irreversible harm to these globally rare habitats. Although we support Amendment 38B’s intent, we would not be able to support it in a Division today, for the reasons laid out by my noble friend Lady Scott, but we will look to find other avenues to push forward this agenda.

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

My Lords, I am very grateful to all noble Lords who have contributed to this debate, but I want also to give a general statement of thanks to everybody who has engaged with this Bill. We have discussed a huge variety of topics and gone through some very technical issues. I have been very grateful for noble Lords’ patience as I have sought to find answers to the questions that have arisen during our debates, but also for the willingness—which is the best aspect of this House—to move these debates forward constructively and helpfully. I have really appreciated that, and I am very grateful for the many meetings that we have had and the late nights that we have sat over the course of this Bill. I give you all my great thanks for that work.

I will respond now to some of the points raised in the debate. The right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Norwich mentioned that local nature recovery strategies do not capture the catchment area of a river. He points to the exact reason why we think the water White Paper and the Bill that will follow it are vital for the proper protection of chalk streams that we are all seeking. We know the main issues facing chalk streams. I cannot remember who talked about it—I think it was the noble Baroness, Lady Jones—but I too have stood in more than one chalk stream, because I live in Hertfordshire, where we have a lot of them, and I know that the issues of abstraction and pollution cannot be addressed in this way. They need to be addressed through the forthcoming water Bill, and my colleagues in Defra are keen to do that. The National Planning Policy Framework, which sets out planning policies and decisions, should protect chalk streams as valued landscapes and sites of biodiversity value, and local plans should identify, map and safeguard them as local wildlife-rich habitats.

I liked the phrase that the right reverend Prelate used, which was that housing and development should fly in formation with nature. I totally agree. I hope that, as we have gone through the process of the Bill, noble Lords will have noted that it is the Government’s intention, as we pursue the building of homes and infrastructure, to see a win-win for both nature and development in order to deliver what we need while protecting the important natural resources around us.

I am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Willis, for her remarks. I know that the concerns around EDPs are real. She spoke about our ambitious and bold new framework, but we have listened. In local government we have a test-and-learn approach, because we all learn from each other as well as from things we have done ourselves. I hope the noble Baroness and other Peers will agree that the commitments I have set out today enable us to do that with EDPs as well. I am grateful to her and the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, for all the work that they have done on this issue. Their flow chart was a great help. I was not trying to mark their homework, and I hope they will forgive me; we were just trying to expand the flow chart that they had made, to make it, I hope, more helpful. We will continue to work with them on that.

The noble Baroness, Lady Freeman, asked about consultation. Natural England is required to consult the public and any public authority that it considers relevant on a draft EDP for a period of at least 28 working days. Natural England must seek the views of relevant local planning authorities as part of its consultation. I am afraid it is not possible to give a timeframe for when we will return to the House ahead of the first EDP being developed. However, the noble Baroness will be aware that each EDP will need to include monitoring requirements that will form part of the draft EDP when put out for consultation, so she will see the timeframe set out as we bring those EDPs forward.

The noble Baroness, Lady Jones, said she did not like the Environmental Audit Committee or the Office for Environmental Protection, the organisations that I was looking to, to work with Natural England. Natural England will have the data, but those organisations will help provide the scrutiny for this. Without using those organisations, I do not know where we go with that, but I hope we will be able to convince her that they are organisations that can do this effectively. We are willing to listen to any suggestions that she may have.

I am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Grender, for her welcome for the EDPs issue. I understand that she may have ongoing concerns on chalk streams, although I hope I have reassured her on some of those points.

The noble Lord, Lord Krebs, referred to the plethora we now have of habitat regs, EDPs and biodiversity net gain. We need to simplify the guidance on this, and I hope that he will continue to work with us on that mission.

My noble friend Lady Young spoke about clarity for developers. That is exactly what we are trying to deliver as part of the Bill, and I am grateful to all Peers who have helped us to do that.

I hope I have reassured the noble Lord, Lord Cromwell, on the independence of scrutiny. We want to use organisations that are well respected to help with the scrutiny of the EDPs.

I will reply in writing to the noble Lord, Lord Roborough, on the habitat regs on Ramsar sites in Somerset. On the issue of Natural England data and unlocking homes, these things have a cumulative effect, so I hope that the money that Natural England has spent will help it to have the structures and processes in place to continue to work with us to deliver the homes that we all want to see. I hope that that work is ongoing. I look forward to working with Natural England and others.

In the meantime, I hope that I have been able to reassure noble Lords of our intention to protect our precious chalk streams. As noble Lords have heard me say many times, I live in Hertfordshire; it is definitely in my interests to protect those chalk streams. I believe that we now have the right processes in place, and I hope that the reassurances we have given over the sequencing of EDPs will help noble Lords not to press their amendments.