The Government has announced that it will publish a Planning and Infrastructure Bill this year which will aim to unblock required infrastructure whilst, at the same time, supporting nature recovery at scale.
As things stand in the planning system, infrastructure projects have to mitigate or compensate for environmental harm it may cause to certain sites an species. This has to be proposed at the planning stage, before permission is granted. However, the Government has said that this delays infrastructure projects and increases their cost. The Government therefore wants to speed up projects that will deliver much-needed infrastructure, such as wind farms and railways, but also find a way to support nature recovery.
As a result, it proposes to establish a Nature Restoration Fund. The fund will allow developers to meet their environmental obligations faster and at a greater scale by "pooling contributions from developers to fund larger strategic interventions for nature", according to the Government announcement. This plan should reduce the "burden" of individual site-level assessments and "delivering mitigation and compensation is reduced". Then different bodies such as Natural England will look at actions needed to drive protected sites and species recovery at a strategic level, not a site-by-site level.
Announcing the aims, 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.
"As part of the Government’s Plan for Change, 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."
Commentators believe the plan will block campaigners from using "excessive" legal challenges to planning decisions for major infrastructure. Others think that the plan will prioritise economic growth over environmental protection.
Richard Benwell, Chief Executive of the Wildlife and Countryside Link, said "Under no circumstances should the Government’s proposals open the door to unsustainable developments in return for vague promises of future gains. But done well, there’s a real opportunity here to improve the way developers fulfil environmental rules while multiplying investment and protection for nature recovery.”
