Select committee seeks to challenge “lazy narrative” that nature is a blocker to housing delivery

The report by the Environmental Audit Committee said nature was by contrast a necessity for building resilient towns and neighbourhoods.

In Environmental Sustainability and Housing Growth the cross-party committee said there was a “lazy narrative” that nature protection obstructs housing delivery. 

It said measures in the Planning and Infrastructure Bill, would neither allow the Government to meet its targets on the environment nor housing. 

Severe skills shortages identified in ecology, planning and construction would make it impossible for the Government to deliver on its housebuilding ambitions, the committee added.

MPs said they heard “repeated concerns” that the presumption in favour of sustainable development, would lead to the environment being sidelined and could also lead to unsustainable and speculative development.

The report said the current definition of the presumption should be changed to give greater weight to sustainability.

Biodiversity net gain needs more time to succeed and the committee warned against new wide-ranging exemptions. 

Its chair, Labour’s Toby Perkins MP, said: “The Government's target to build 1.5 million homes by the end of this Parliament is incredibly ambitious.

“Achieving it alongside our existing targets on climate and sustainability – which are set in law – will require effort on a scale not seen before. 

“That certainly will not be achieved by scapegoating nature, claiming that it is a ‘blocker’ to housing delivery. We are clear in our report: a healthy environment is essential to building resilient towns and cities. It must not be sidelined”. 

Perkins said much better incentives were needed for people to construct and live in carbon-friendly homes, or to retrofit existing ones, and called for measures to boost manufacturing viability of climate friendly construction products and alter the tax burden in favour of climate friendly homes. 

The report said local planning authorities were severely under-resourced in ecological skills, while the staff of Natural England were “stretched to their limits”, and the skills needed to deliver the ecological aspects of planning reforms “simply do not exist at the scale, quality or capacity that is needed”. 

It recommended a pilot programme for local ecological resource hubs for local authorities facing acute resources challenges, and a realistic analysis of the construction workforce required to deliver housing targets and the skills that will be needed.  

Richard Broadbent, environmental lawyer at law firm Freeths, said: “It is good to see that the Environment Audit Committee challenge the narrative that nature is a ‘blocker’ to housing delivery, arguing instead that a healthy environment is essential for resilient communities.

“That this is not axiomatic and has to be spelt out by the committee to people who really ought to know better is a sad reflection on the sharp turn in rhetoric over the past year which has tried to make nature conservation a wedge issue politically.

“As anyone with even a moderate grasp on reality can see, both we and the communities we live in flourish most when we have access to both good quality development and thriving and functioning environments.  When we have the opportunity to, we move to places which do this well. We move away from places which do not.”

Broadbent said the real barriers to delivering homes and a healthy environment were not environmental protections, “but the complex, systemic details of how our planning and delivery systems operate”.

Legislating on the basis of that environmental protection obstructs new homes “risks creating new [problems], undermining both our housing ambitions and our environmental commitments”, he added.

Mark Smulian