Reed orders MPs to vote against environmental protections

Labour government is ignoring scientific advice on the risks posed by proposals in their new Bill, while senior ministers have been cosying up to lobbyists for developers, reports PAUL LUSHION, our environment correspondent

Croydon MP Steve Reed, the former environment secretary, in his new role as housing minister, is ordering Labour MPs to vote against amendments which would provide important legal protections from development for wildlife and the environment.

Conservation groups across the country raised the alarm about their serious concerns over the Labour government’s Planning and Infrastructure Bill.

Amendment 130 was added to the Bill by the House of Lords.

“Amendment 130 provides extra safeguards to stop development destroying wildlife and wild places where you live,” the London Wildlife Trust has said.

The Lords also agreed another amendment, Amendment 94, that gives added protection to chalk streams, such as Croydon’s River Wandle.

“But this won’t happen if MPs don’t vote to keep the Amendment in the Bill,” according to Richard Barnes, the head of planning and external affairs at the London Wildlife Trust.

The National Tust, the RSPB, regional wildlife trusts and other ecological organisations and environmentalists have said the Bill in its original form “could be disastrous for wildlife and wild places”.

But Reed wants what environmentalists have described as a “cash to trash” system, where developers pay into a fund in order to get planning permission to build on previously protected areas of natural habitat.

Studies consistently show that Britain is already one of the most nature-depleted countries in the world. Reed’s “Build Baby Build” Bill threatens to make that situation much worse.

Reed’s draft Bill removes protected animals such as dormice, badgers, hedgehogs, otters and nightingales, and rare habitats such as wetlands and ancient woodlands, from new rules which allow developers to sidestep environmental laws to speed up house building.

Under Reed’s draft legislation, developers will be able to pay into a national “nature recovery fund” and go ahead with their project straight away, instead of having to carry out an environmental survey and avoid, or mitigate, damage before putting spades into the ground.

The Lords’ amendment would mean the nature recovery fund is restricted to impacts from water and air pollution, meaning developers would still have to take the usual measures to mitigate damage to wildlife and habitats.

Reed, the MP for Streatham (and Croydon North if he can be bothered) has told Labour MPs to reject the amendment when the Bill returns to the Commons for the final stages before being passed into law next week.

Reed’s Labour colleagues, such as Croydon West MP Sarah Jones, have fobbed off constituents with misleading responses when they have raised their concerns over the withdrawal of vital protections for wildlife and habitat.

“I know that there have been concerns that the Bill will remove existing environmental protections and put irreplaceable habitat such as ancient woodlands at risk. I am pleased to confirm that this is not the case,” MP Jones’s stock response said.

“I believe that the Bill will ultimately deliver more for nature, not less.”

But environmental experts say that is simply untrue.

In a letter to MPs some of the UK’s biggest nature charities say the government rollback of environmental law “lacks any rigorous scientific or ecological justification”.

The environmentalists’ letter criticises Reed’s Bill, saying: “There is no credible, published, or well-established evidence that this model can simply be scaled or replicated for multiple species nationwide without risking serious ecological harm, legal uncertainty and increased costs for both developers and land managers.”

In the Commons yesterday, Green MP Dr Ellie Chowns described the government’s “zero-sum game” approach to development and nature as “a complete misconception”.

“Economic prosperity, social justice and environmental responsilbility, environmental protection can and must all go together. They are fundamentally interlinked,” the MP for North Herefordshire told the House.

“The Lords added sensible, evidence-based amendments to the Planning and Infrastructure Bill to strengthen nature protection. But the government rejected them.

“Ministers need to listen – to experts, to trusted organisations, and to the public.”

But according to The Grauniad, the only people the Labour government has been listening to are profit-hungry developers and their lobbyists.

The Grauniad reports that in the past year, Chancellor Rachel Reeves has not met a single environmental organisation or the body for professional ecologists to discuss the proposals in the Bill. In the same period, Matthew Pennycook, the housing minister, has had four meetings with environmentalists, compared with 16 with leading developers.

For more details about the Bill, click here

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