Question to the Department for Transport:

To ask the Secretary of State for Transport, what progress his Department has made on fulfilling its commitments on environmental mitigations for the Sevington Inland Border Facility.

My Department has already delivered biodiversity enhancements within the Inland Border Facility boundaries by implementing a landscaping scheme to achieve a positive biodiversity net gain as habitats mature.

The Department owns the adjacent land to the east of Sevington Inland Border Facility (IBF), known as Sevington East, and intends to use to further offset the environmental impact of the IBF development by creating a local biodiversity asset. Extended archaeological investigations have had an impact on the delivery of this. Those investigations and the work on land formations have now concluded and plans are being updated to deliver the seeding and planting for the biodiversity scheme later this year.