March 2025
The Planning and Infrastructure Bill would give Government leeway to allow developers to disregard a huge body of environmental law— the Habitats Regulations 2017 and the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981—in return for paying a Nature Restoration Levy.
These are fundamental nature protections that have stood the test of time. Not only do they protect bats, newts and spiders as well as otters, red squirrels and dormice. They also protect wildflower meadows, peatlands, woodlands, chalk streams, and sites of special scientific interest. You name the nature site or species and you can be sure that existing rules could be disapplied under the Bill.
The potential consequences of changes of this magnitude should not be underestimated. Getting this wrong could spell extinctions, habitats lost forever, and a natural capital crisis with serious consequences for our economic and environmental future.
Once you add in the tenor of communications coming from the Prime Minister and Chancellor, the situation looks scary. The two top politicians in the land have framed nature for failures of development. They have distorted a small number of examples to discredit nature protections, despite the overwhelming evidence that these environmental laws are effective and essential.
The potential for improvement
So why, then, are all nature-loving people not up in arms to oppose the bill? Well, from community groups to professional ecologists, many are rightly deeply concerned. But there remains an opportunity to make the bill a positive one for nature.
There are important reasons not to simply reject the bill out of hand. Steve Reed and Matthew Pennycook are taking a positive and collaborative approach. For the first time in a long time, the Environment Department and the Planning Department are speaking with one voice to say that the Government wants a “win-win” for nature and development—planning reform that could expedite sustainable growth at the same time and benefiting nature.
That is a significant prize to strive for. While environmental law in England is a strong defence against damage, it has not driven restoration of nature. The quid pro quo in the Planning and Infrastructure Bill is that developers may only pay the Nature Restoration Levy if there is an Environmental Development Plan in place that would lead to “overall improvement” for the nature feature affected.
That offers a tantalising prospect: polluters pay not just to offset harm from development, but to actually improve the state of the natural world. We’re left with two serious questions to answer: does the bill include steadfast safeguards against abuse? and are the potential environmental benefits great enough to justify the risks?
Are the safeguards good enough?
It seems an inevitable law of new legislation that bills give Ministers more power than they need and include fewer safeguards than they should. This bill is no exception. At the moment, the Environmental Development Plan approach is far too generous in the power it would give Ministers to short circuit environmental law in the name of development.
The “strategic” Environmental Development Plan (EDP) approach would allow development to harm a particular feature of nature if improvements elsewhere create benefits for that feature overall. In other words, you don’t need to worry about a single site or specimen if the overall habitat or species population benefits. This kind of approach could work well for some aspects of nature, especially “landscape-scale” issues like nutrient pollution or water availability. However, it is unlikely to work at all for other issues, including many protected species.
As drafted, however, the bill leaves too much leeway for EDPs to be applied to inappropriate protected features. It also gives too much freedom for developers to default straight to offsetting harm, rather than requiring them to try to avoid harm as a priority. Damaging development could go ahead on the basis of promises of future benefits that may never materialise. It is left largely to the Secretary of State to decide whether an EDP is appropriate, a subjective judgement that would likely prove difficult to challenge in the habitually deferential courts.
To stiffen the safeguards in the bill, we recommend amendments to:
Polluter pays
Once a developer has paid a levy set by Natural England, their duty is done. This should save time and effort for developers in spades. In return, the EDP must include measures “likely” to “outweigh” the harm. The question of by how much is left to the imagination—a wafer?
There should be enough benefit for developers in simplicity of the new approach to allow a bigger chunk of developer cash to be spent on nature enhancement. This should be combined with spending money better. Instead of lots of small, separate offsets, funds should be layered together to deliver much bigger, better nature restoration projects.
That requirement to go substantially beyond offsetting should be explicit in the bill. We know that all too often, a marginal “net gain” ends up being just about an offset on a good day. The bill should be strengthened so that the overall improvement test in Clause 55(4) requires “significant improvement”.
The ambition of the benefits should be as hefty as the scale of the risks of changing environmental law. Ultimately, the aim of the Environmental Development Plans should be to restore the underlying environmental asset so that, in many cases, legal thresholds no longer apply. The law shouldn’t just maintain current levels of river pollution, it should restore rivers so that nutrient neutrality rules are lifted. It shouldn’t be a life-support system for struggling species, it should be a rehabilitation plan. Of course, this would benefit development as well as nature.
The wider planning system
Even if Part 3 of the Bill is strengthened with safeguards and a bolder requirement for environmental improvement, the bill would still be a missed opportunity to incorporate the urgent need for nature-recovery into the planning system.
It’s time for a new purpose of planning, one that requires policies and decisions to be made in line with Environment Act and Climate Change Act targets.
It’s time for the promises of “30 by 30” – to protect 30% of the land and sea for nature by 2030 – to go beyond setting criteria and protect new places for nature to recover, and finally give proper protection to irreplaceable habitats like chalk streams and ancient woodlands.
It’s time for development to be “wilder by design”, with the bill requiring new Biodiversity Building Regulations to mandate accessible greenspace, swift bricks, hedgehog highways and green roofs.
The Planning and Infrastructure Bill could be a historical moment where the planning system is finally updated to recognise the crucial role of “critical natural infrastructure” in our economy and way of life, allocating space that nature deserves. That would chime with the tone set by Mr Pennycook and Mr Reed.
Or it could be a historical calamity, where false narratives of nature as a blocker drive deregulation and unsustainable development, unfettered from the laws that defend nature. That would be a terrible error, if Ministers were to mistake their anti-bat rhetoric for reality.
We hope that Ministers and Parliamentarians will choose this moment to achieve nature recovery and development, hand-in-hand.
Richard Benwell is CEO of Wildlife and Countryside Link
The opinions expressed in this blog are the authors' and not necessarily those of the wider Link membership.
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