Planning for nature? Environmental safety and planning reform below the highlight

By Professor Ben Clifford
29 October 2025

Environmental safety and planning reform below the highlight

Over the summer season, the most recent in our sequence of roundtable discussions on planning reform on the UCL Bartlett School of Planning debated the problem of place of nature within the planning system. We’d chosen the subject as one to debate firstly of the educational yr, little realising fairly how well timed these points would develop into with growing controversy surrounding provisions within the Planning & Infrastructure Bill that will transfer from a website based mostly mitigation for potential impacts on protected habitats to permitting builders to contribute right into a pooled fund to be spent on priorities recognized by Natural England by means of new Environmental Delivery Plans. 

Alongside the invoice proposals, over the previous yr we’ve seen more and more anti-environmental rhetoric from senior authorities figures together with the Prime Minister seemingly blaming bats and newts for the shortage of supply of infrastructure and housing to the Chancellor of the Exchequer apparently telling enterprise leaders how she’d intervened to permit housing growth to proceed even when it threatened a uncommon protected species. This is even though the UK is without doubt one of the most nature-depleted countries on this planet and biodiversity loss is without doubt one of the a number of crises with extreme potential implications for our wellbeing in future.

In our dialogue, we thought of the best way that we appear to lack a shared imaginative and prescient and understanding for what we would like the planning system to realize and a mannequin of what good really seems like on this area. One remark was that the present strategy doesn’t really appear to work that nicely, however it’s in fact potential issues may be even worse if we didn’t have the present environmental protections we do. The present strategy appears poor at coping with oblique, cumulative impacts like air and water air pollution and habitat fragmentation versus simply defending a very powerful websites from land take.  Certainly the Lawton Review in 2010 on making area for nature made the argument in regards to the want for a panorama scale technique, not simply particular person protected websites, which can nearly maintain the road to guard additional lack of biodiversity however not really promote nature restoration.

There has been some further government amendments to the Planning and Infrastructure Bill, however issues in regards to the proposed reforms nonetheless abound. A specific subject could possibly be if viability evaluation is utilized to the Nature Restoration Levy which means that in observe these contributions then get decreased, in addition to broader issues about adequate sources together with ecological experience to implement the brand new system. Meanwhile, the phrases of the commerce cope with the European Union imply the United Kingdom can not have weaker environmental protections than the EU and concerns about this have been raised.

Generally, there seems to be an absence of mutual belief at current, with authorities consultations seeming to be more and more instrumental slightly than productive. A continuing conveyor belt of coverage flux or rumoured change probably undermines earlier reforms which might take time to mattress in, for instance ripple results of uncertainty round Biodiversity Net Gain apparently laying aside buyers who wish to get into the marketplace for off-site provision. Meanwhile, earlier research for Wild Justice has discovered that about 50% of ecological enhancements secured by means of planning permissions haven’t really been delivered in observe.

It will even be fascinating to see how issues like local nature recovery strategies align with the brand new strategic spatial development strategies and the local growth plans being ready below the rising devolution preparations. At the identical time, there are questions as to the place precisely huge questions of land-use can be debated and joined-up. Could the Land Use Framework for England assist right here or will this been seen as a DEFRA undertaking in a nonetheless fairly siloed authorities construction?

Recent debate on planning reform appears extraordinarily slender, and even dispiriting, with some fairly hostile rhetoric in opposition to any constructive position for planning and an obvious perception that we should ‘build baby build’ to ship the financial development the Chancellor so desperately wants. Yet we desperately want to consider land-use within the spherical, about what nature means for society and the resultant position for the planning system in defending and enhancing the atmosphere, and the way we’d obtain higher outcomes that meaningfully deal with each urgent societal and environmental crises. How lengthy the present surge in Green Party membership in England lasts stays to be seen, however there’s an fascinating debate available about the way to convey collectively socially-focussed financial and environmental issues as an actual win-win. 

In 2021, the UK authorities commissioned Dasgupta Review argued we’ve usually ignored nature as an ingredient in understanding financial development and that we have to convey economics and ecology along with biodiversity at is core. This shouldn’t be divorced from how we strategy planning reform. Whilst there are definitely points with how our planning system works at current, there’s additionally a hazard of creating issues worse with rushed or inadequately labored by means of reforms with the potential to each fail to ship the housing that’s really wanted and to additional injury the atmosphere, a lose-lose scenario.

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