Prime minister Keir Starmer is doubling down on his determination to unblock the infrastructure planning system.
It can take years for power station or road building schemes to reach the starting block because of legal challenges or the discovery of rare species.
Legislation is to be brought to parliament this year to reduce the opportunity for legal challenges and to introduce an offsetting scheme to ‘mitigate’ wildlife destruction.
Starmer said: “For too long, blockers have had the upper hand in legal challenges – using our court processes to frustrate growth. We’re putting an end to this challenge culture by taking on the NIMBYs and a broken system that has slowed down our progress as a nation. This is the government’s Plan for Change in action – taking the brakes off Britain by reforming the planning system so it is pro-growth and pro-infrastructure.”
Those seeking to lodge legal challenges against infrastructure schemes will be allowed just one shot instead of three.
The current first attempt – the paper permission stage – will be scrapped. And primary legislation will be changed so that where a judge in an oral hearing at the High Court deems the case ‘totally without merit’, it will not be possible to ask the Court of Appeal to reconsider. To ensure ongoing access to justice, a request to appeal second attempt will be allowed for other cases.
The government has also set out plans to dilute environmental obligations. A new Nature Restoration Fund will enable developers to offset their environmental damage. Newts, bats and other protected species will no longer force the bulldozers to stand idle. Instead they will hand over money to pay for some good environmental deed elsewhere, much like the Catholic church used to sell indulgences in exchange for forgiveness of sins.
The government says that this approach will mean the burden of individual site-level assessments and delivering mitigation and compensation is reduced. In many cases, a single payment will enable development to proceed, it says.
A central government agency, Natural England perhaps, will administer this Nature Restoration Fund and “take responsibility for securing positive environmental outcomes”, creating new wildlife habitats elsewhere, for example.
Environment secretary Steve Reed said: “Nature and development have been unnecessarily pitted against each other for too long. This has blocked economic growth but done nothing for nature’s recovery. Communities and the environment deserve better than this broken status-quo.
“These reforms will unblock infrastructure projects while protecting the natural environment we all depend on. We can now look forward to 150 key infrastructure projects going ahead within the next few years while also providing more funding to protect and restore nature.”
Natural England chair Tony Juniper, a former director of Friends of the Earth and Green Party parliamentary candidate:, said: “It is evident that we need to take urgent action to address the worsening decline of nature, and we must also lean into the challenges posed by housing and infrastructure shortages.
“We will continue to work with the government to help deliver their plans – but the two key issues of today, nature and economic recovery, should not be pitted against one another, as we step up efforts to avoid losing what protected remnants of nature remain while also restoring some of what has gone.
“Instead, we should consider the huge opportunities which can be unlocked through better strategic planning which considers environmental improvements, economic development and green spaces for public enjoyment on a landscape scale.”
Others are less relaxed about the proposals.
Samantha Deacon, global lead in biodiversity & ecosystems at consulting engineer Ramboll, said: “Although actions are welcomed to fund nature restoration at scale and progress energy and transport infrastructure delivery, there is a risk that nature will be harmed at a local scale and opportunities are missed to create or maintain wildlife corridors or nature recovery networks alongside major infrastructure.
“As a minimum, it’s important that the mitigation hierarchy still apply to planned development to assess environmental impacts. This means avoidance and mitigation of harm towards valuable habitats in the first instance. If logic follows that the largest infrastructure projects lead to the greatest biodiversity loss, then – if the biodiversity net gain policy is applied – it could lead to the requirement for more restoration, and higher charges as a consequence. The mandatory use of biodiversity metrics to protect and restore nature is one year old and a flagship policy for the government, with other countries interested in its adoption. It’s important that this new policy maintains the UK’s standing on biodiversity net gain.
“A further risk is that this approach remains siloed. Strategic thinking could be undertaken by a body such as Natural England on biodiversity recovery, but to deliver the transformational change needed to create sustainable places we need to be looking for co-benefits between pieces of infrastructure and across delivery bodies to maximise value. A potential risk of this approach is that these opportunities are missed on sites during the energy and infrastructure delivery phase – making it harder to ‘retrofit’ in biodiversity at a later stage.”
Planning lawyer Ben Garbett, a consultant solicitor at Keystone Law, said: “A balanced approach that considers economic and environmental needs is crucial for sustainable development. However, stripping environmental organisations of their powers to delay construction on certain sites could result in short-sighted decisions that lead to irreversible damage to the environment and human health in those locations.”
