The Planning Bill gives developers the right to pay cash to trash nature – it must change
Campaigners and MPs, including Chris Hinchliff, gather in Parliament Square calling for urgent action to save chalk streams, June 2025 (Credit: Vuk Valcic/Alamy Live News)
4 min read
If the purpose of politics is to lay the foundations of a good life for all, the environmental measures in the Planning and Infrastructure Bill reveal a troubling lack of imagination at the heart of government.
For two decades, a commitment to a developer-led housing model based on private profit rather than public need has fuelled wave after wave of planning deregulation. This approach has not delivered the affordable housing our communities need – yet its cost for nature is etched across my constituency in North East Hertfordshire and throughout the country.
Fragmented habitats, species decline, over-abstraction and pollution of our rivers and chalk streams, ancient trees cut down on a whim – the scale of national decline is as astonishing as it is depressing. Research suggests that the UK’s natural capital – the stock of environmental resources, like our soil, water and woodland that underpin all economic activity and life itself – declined by a third from 1990 to 2014.
It is frankly insulting for ministers to continue to insist this will be a “win-win” for housing and nature
We are already one of the most nature-depleted nations in the world, and we can only spend what little remains of our natural inheritance once. If the government presses ahead with its proposals in their current form, the national account will soon be empty.
There is a kernel of a good idea in a nature restoration fund, to counteract harmful impacts from developments at an ecosystem’s scale. But the current provisions get it wrong by reducing obligations to avoid harm in the first place, failing to ensure that mitigating measures are in place before harm proceeds. This effectively gives developers the right to pay cash to trash nature.
I’ve proposed an amendment to the bill that ensures conservation takes place before any damage occurs – without this, species could be pushed closer to extinction before replacement habitats are established. The amendment also requires conservation efforts to focus specifically on the features being harmed, protecting irreplaceable or declining environmental assets. If the government truly intends to make developers pay for the damage they cause, this amendment is essential to ensure those proposals achieve that purpose.
It isn’t hard to see in the case of already highly polluted rivers or the remnants of ancient woodland how, without my amendment, this bill could soon lead to functionally dead ecosystems and more species disappearing from England’s landscapes.
It’s not surprising that most people who care about nature are so deeply concerned by this legislation. When academics, conservationists and ecologists are all raising the same alarm, it is frankly insulting for ministers to continue to insist this will be a “win-win” for housing and nature.
Picking a fight with the millions of members of the RSPB, National Trust and Wildlife Trusts, and labelling them “blockers” to be bulldozed is a bizarre echo of Liz Truss’ ill-fated war on the ‘anti-growth’ coalition.
It also couldn’t be further from Labour’s heritage. The history of the labour movement is suffused with a passionate love of nature, rooted in the history of rural dispossession and class struggle, which has always rejected the notion that the countryside should be the preserve of the wealthy.
We should treasure this golden thread that runs through socialist politics: from the Kinder Scout trespass to countless other acts of defiance, working people have fought for their right to access and enjoy nature. That history must not be forgotten. It would be a betrayal of all that was hard-won to hand our natural heritage over to developers to be destroyed in the name of a quick buck to the super-rich.
The radical past shows us a different way: a belief that the good life for the working class involved a closeness to nature. This went beyond the now widely recognised benefits to our physical and mental health from access to clean air, tree-lined streets, common land and a world full of life, to a profound belief in the spiritual wellbeing of our nation. That could hardly be in starker contrast to the soulless estates of concrete and plastic thrown up by big developers, where more space is given to car parking than playing fields for children.
If Letchworth Garden City could spring into life without felling a single mature tree, we can now build the homes we desperately need to clear our housing waiting lists in harmony with nature too.
Chris Hinchliff is the Labour MP for North East Hertfordshire
