18
Examination of witnesses
Ben Kite and Joseph Lewis.
The Chair: Welcome to the House of Lords Built Environment Committee evidence session in our inquiry on the impact of environmental regulations on development. Our witnesses today are Ben Kite, who chairs the strategic policy panel at the Chartered Institute of Ecology and Environmental Management and is the managing director of Ecological Planning and Research, and Joseph Lewis, who is head of policy at the Institution of Environmental Science.
Please could members and witnesses keep their answers fairly brief and to the point so that we can get through all the questions we have in the time available to us? We will start with a question from Lord Mawson.
Q96 Lord Mawson: Good morning. What challenges for the natural environment are created by housebuilding and major infrastructure development?
The Chair: Decide among yourselves who will go first or second, unless somebody has a specific supplementary to one of you.
Ben Kite: First, it is important to recognise that development presents both challenges and opportunities. Land use planning and the budgets that it can generate can drive positive change as well as negative change. Challenges that tend to be associated with negative environmental change are such things as habitat loss and severance, loss of connectivity of habitats, release of non-native species, disturbance from human activity, recreational activity, predation by pets, noise, vibration, changes in habitat management for the future, changes in air quality and water quality.
Broadly, major infrastructure projects tend to be less frequent, but often they have to go where they have to go, so there is less opportunity to avoid some of those challenges by choosing the right location, whereas housing, at least in theory, should go through a range of different sifting processes as part of local plan development to direct them towards sites that are more suitable, thereby hopefully avoiding some of those challenges.
Joseph Lewis: I agree with Ben. Ultimately, it is not just that nature and developments can work together; it is that they must work together. We must find a way that they can work together, because naturally we need new housing, but we also need to reconcile that with meeting the environmental targets for our future demands. It is also a matter of public expectation, because people want environmental challenges like water pollution, air quality, everything that Ben has mentioned, to be solved. An industry that exists to serve people needs to serve all their needs. The IPBES values assessment published last year reminds us that nature underpins all the natural systems that benefit nature today, what we might call ecosystem services, any of which could be jeopardised by unregulated development.
In answer to the question, the challenge for the natural environment and development is whether everyone can continue to access those resources without taking away the sole benefit of a subsection of people.
Lord Mawson: I work with housebuilders and developers on quite large sites. Sometimes the narrative that you can get in this building, for example, is very anti-developer, very anti-housebuilding. But my experience is rather the reverse of that: that if you build proper relationships with them, there are interesting opportunities in this that you can develop if you get into the business model and the devil in the detail. You have mentioned a bit of this. Are there examples that you could refer to? I am concerned that the dialogue needs to move on in these kinds of relationships.
Ben Kite: If processes work the way they should, they direct development towards more suitable sites. When I say, “more suitable”, I mean that a lot of the country has suffered through the last few decades from a range of pressures that have resulted in environmental degradation, whether that is from intensive agricultural activity, previous development, contaminated land, or what have you. If we pick up those sites and prioritise development towards them, if they are in the right place—if they are near to population centres, provide access to services for people, are sustainable locations—they present the opportunity to take a poor environmental baseline and fund improvements to it, such as habitat creation.
Some of the sites I work on in my day job have brought up the creation of large new country parks with habitat creation in them. That is partly to serve the needs of the people who are going to live there by providing an attractive green open space for public well-being and amenity, but it also creates the opportunity for habitat creation within those spaces. It is very important to recognise that development can be a positive or a negative depending on how cleverly it is implemented.
The Chair: Is that implying effectively that development should take place only on previously developed land?
Ben Kite: No, not at all. I gave the example of intensively managed agricultural land. Modern farming techniques in particular can be quite detrimental to the natural environment. Through the use of agrichemicals, regular ploughing and so on, those places can also be biodiversity-poor. I do not think it is as simple as just choosing a type of land for development; you have to look at sites that are available case by case and pick the sites with the greatest opportunities and the fewest challenges.
Q97 Lord Berkeley: You mentioned agriculture briefly. Can you comment on issues—you have mentioned some of them—such as biodiversity net gain, nutrient neutrality, water neutrality and other major ones that affect both agriculture and housebuilding development generally? Is the balance between the way those industries are affected by the environmental regulations the right one, or are developers suffering at the expense of the farmers who some people say get away scot free? Is the balance right?
Joseph Lewis: It is hard to say that housebuilders are paying a significant price. A 2021 study in the Journal of Housing and the Built Environment shows that, between the global financial crisis in 2017 and 2022, pre-tax revenue and profit rose year on year for the nine largest UK housebuilders. Even the Financial Times reported earlier this year that one developer “aside from one outlier year during the Covid-19 pandemic when construction activity ground to a complete halt” has reported a return on average capital employed that “consistently nudged 30% in the preceding five years”.
I think the truth is that although perhaps profits are down in some instances and there is a decline in the amount of profit that is being made, it is not really about environmental regulations. Much of it is about the fact that, ultimately, construction is an industry that faces a natural decline in growth due to the limited availability of land to use, so naturally, as we use more of our land for different purposes in the UK, that is something we have to face.
The Chair There is no natural decline in land, though.
Joseph Lewis: When I say, “natural decline”, I mean in the availability of land, not in the quality of land.
The Chair: The availability of land is decided by planning authorities.
Joseph Lewis: The availability of land is decided by how big an island we live on, ultimately. So although planning authorities are deciding this, at the end of the day we have fewer and fewer places to build houses over time.
The Chair: Well, over a very, very long time.
Joseph Lewis: I completely agree.
The Chair: I do not quite share that characterisation. You could equally say that housebuilders are not in a natural decline because the demand is so strong and rising, but anyway. Sorry, I interrupted Lord Berkeley, because I did not quite follow that.
Lord Berkeley: Maybe Mr Kite could respond.
Ben Kite: Yes, please. If I could address the particular challenges to development that you mentioned, such as nutrient neutrality, I think it depends to a degree on your perspective. If you look at the way those regimes operate, they ask developers to effectively consume their own smoke. If you are contributing nutrient pollution, you offset the amount of nutrients that you are generating. A lot of the regulatory regimes that have slowly developed—such as SANGs in the Thames Basin, for example—and are providing alternative recreational spaces were based on similar principles. If you are contributing recreational pressure to a designated site, you need to offset at least that amount of recreational pressure. You need to achieve a position of no net increase in the problem.
One perspective is that development is not paying the price for what has gone on before, because it is only being asked to consume its own smoke. However, as has become particularly stark with nutrient neutrality, there is no more environmental wiggle room, because what has gone on before has effectively pushed environmental boundaries, the environmental safe limits, with nutrient pollution, nitrogen, phosphorous in water courses and coastal waters.
That has forced development to the position where it has been made to bring about no net increase of the problem, because what has gone on before—primarily, agriculture in respect of nutrient neutrality—has taken us to the point where environmental systems cannot support any more pollution. From another perspective, what has gone before has highlighted the fact that we are hitting those environmental boundaries and something has to be done.
Lord Berkeley: Should farmers be restricted in what they do so that they can contribute their part to nutrient neutrality and everything like that?
Ben Kite: I think there is considerable room for improvement in agricultural practice. How best to bring that about—whether it is by incentives or going straight to regulation—is a matter for debate. Generally, though, with both the examples I just gave—nutrient neutrality and recreational pressure—the emergency brake that has been applied to development in those stems from the habitats regulations, which ultimately come from the habitats directive, which protects our most internationally important designated wildlife sites.
The specific problem in the way we have approached the implementation of that directive has been that Article 5 asks member states to take action to deal with existing pressures on designated sites, and Article 6 effectively requires us not to bring about plans and projects that add to those problems. The UK has taken inadequate proactive action, in my view, under Article 5, and we have ended up in a situation where environmental boundaries are being pressed and as a consequence no further schemes can come forward. That is fundamentally the problem, in my view.
There are some interesting tools to deal with that kind of thing. For example, Natural England has come up with something called a site nitrogen action plan, or a shared nitrogen action plan, where you take a site-focused approach and you work out what the main contributors to pollution on that site are. Sometimes it might mean, with nutrient pollution for example, that the two nearest farms that are badly run and very close are contributing 80% of the problem. If you dealt with those two farms, you would create headroom for more farms to open or extra farming to happen elsewhere. It is that kind of proactive approach that needs to be majored on if we are to alleviate the pressure that regulation places on new development.
Lord Berkeley: That is very interesting.
The Chair: Lord Berkeley’s question was essentially whether the development industry and housebuilders in particular were paying the price for historic agricultural practices. You seem to be answering it with a resounding “yes”. That is how I summarise what you said.
Ben Kite: With respect, I think it is slightly more nuanced than that. It is partly yes, because of past agricultural practice.
The Chair: Because of past agricultural practice, new development under Article 6 is all on the developer—in this case, the housebuilder, although it might be developing a factory or something.
Ben Kite: Yes, but Article 6 still only asks the development to deal with its own contribution to the problem. It is not asking development to deal with the retrospective problem.
The Chair: The problem such as it is—it might be confined to consuming their own smoke—arises from past historical practice, which has pushed the environmental boundaries to a limit. That is what you seem to be saying. That is fine. I just want to be clear in terms of this question.
Ben Kite: I think we are saying the same thing in a slightly different way, so I will concede that, yes.
Lord Berkeley: You talked about emergency brakes. Is there any means of an emergency brake on the current farming practices?
Ben Kite: Not to my knowledge, no. I am slightly out of my depth answering that question, to be honest with you, because my expertise is in land use planning rather than the regulation that applies to ongoing agricultural operations, but my understanding is that existing operations are rather harder to regulate than new development projects.
Lord Berkeley: Grandfather rights, maybe.
Ben Kite: Yes, perhaps.
Q98 Baroness Thornhill: Chair, it is relevant to come in here rather than pick this up later. For councils that have had the moratorium served on them in effect, in view of what you have just said, what is the route out? Some councils will go, “Whoopee, we don’t need to build”. That is not really acceptable. I know that is being celebrated in certain parts. Where do we go with that real conundrum?
Ben Kite: There is a range of different answers to that question. It is not one thing; it is a collection of things that need to be done together. First, action needs to be taken to deal with wastewater discharge. Certainly since 2010 there have been significant increases in wastewater being discharged into rivers and the coast. The evidence suggests that. More needs to be done there. I appreciate that upgrading wastewater treatment infrastructure costs money, but my understanding of the way investment cycles work for water companies is that the five-year investment cycle is supposed to take account of the investment necessary to upgrade the infrastructure to keep pace with population growth. That has not happened despite the price theoretically being set to enable that. That is one existing source of pressure.
Better farming and better advice to farmers on the appropriate use of agrichemicals and fertilisers in particular is quite important. Not so long ago we had groups like the Farming and Wildlife Advisory Group who were able to provide independent advice to farmers on the use of fertilisers. Those sorts of sources of independent advice are in shorter supply. New development also has to play its role in bringing forward water-efficient developments, looking at opportunities for improving treatment and the cleaning of surface and groundwater as part of development. All the treatment weapons—SuDS in attenuation basins, swales and those sorts of features, which can be added into development to improve the quality of water leaving those sites—and more have to come together to provide the solution.
The Chair: You seem to be saying that housebuilders are also suffering from the historical failure of the water companies to invest or to achieve the objectives that their investment plans set for them.
Ben Kite: To a degree, yes, I think that is the case.
Joseph Lewis: Looking retrospectively, there are many factors, many pressures, that have led to where we are now. The bottom line is that regardless of where we choose to place the blame for this, we need to make decisions looking forward prospectively about how we can ensure that the system does not do so in the future.
Specifically on Baroness Thornhill’s question about the new development that Ben raised and promoting it where it would not otherwise happen, there are two additional measures that would help on this. The first is that currently local authorities are significantly underresourced. They lack capacity and local expertise within local authorities to make these kinds of determinations to know that there is an opportunity to have a nature-friendly development option available to them.
The second brings us back to Lord Mawson’s point earlier about collaboration. Bringing developers together with expertise from the environmental perspective at an earlier stage in the design process allows us to come to the table with projects designed to meet social and environmental needs, rather than later on in the process trying to mitigate a project that already has a plan, which is much less likely to face approval.
Q99 Lord Faulkner of Worcester: Good morning. Thank you for coming to see us. I would like to ask you about air quality and whether you feel that developers are doing enough to ensure that air quality improves as a result of their activities. If not, what more could they do?
Ben Kite: Looking back over the last four decades, the UK has made great strides in dealing with acid deposition. That has been borne out primarily through reductions in sulphur dioxide emissions, and NOx to a degree. The UK is doing less well in nitrogen deposition and ammonia pollution. Those are oxidised and reduced forms of nitrogen mainly that, again, add nutrients to the environment, albeit through the air rather than through the water.
There are some pretty disturbing statistics about the expanse of land in the UK that is over what is called the critical load or level. In environmental science there are points called the critical load or level above which harm may occur. That is the amount of pollution a habitat can metabolise and tolerate before negative things start to be made manifest. In excess of 70% or 80% of our designated sites are over their critical load or level for nitrogen pollution for at least one of their interest features, so that shows how systemic and widespread the issue is.
Again, the majority of that pollution comes from agriculture, so the majority of the solution must come from the agricultural sector as well, in my view, but development can have a role in easing that pressure. That is primarily to do with tackling transport-related contributions to nitrogen deposition. For example, more houses means more cars on the road. On particular roads those vehicles are associated with emissions of oxides and nitrogen and ammonia to an increasing degree along the road corridors.
Understanding that through the local plan process when you are bringing forward very large projects and putting solutions in place to address that—that can be modal shift, providing the infrastructure for electric cars and green travel, public transport, building and designing new places to live that are cyclist and pedestrian friendly to reduce the need to get in the car; all these things and more—can contribute proportionately to the overall solution with a proportionate responsibility for the blame.
Lord Faulkner of Worcester: Can you see a situation arising where developers are told that they are not to provide parking facilities, garage facilities, for petrol-driven vehicles and they are insisting that perhaps only electric vehicles would be allowed?
Ben Kite: It is very difficult not to provide parking spaces for petrol-driven vehicles, because ultimately it is the same: you can park an electric car or a conventional combustion vehicle in a parking space. The problem is that if you do not provide parking spaces in sufficient proportion, people park on roads and you get all sorts of problems. It is primarily about driving a change in society and cultures so that people have fewer cars and use cars less often and helping to transition the vehicle fleet to more environmentally friendly modes of transport.
Current data suggests that there is a slight danger period in the short to medium term. Ultimately, we want to get to vehicles, like electric and hydrogen vehicles, that do not emit at all, but part of the route to that involves things like hybrid vehicles in the middle. Those emit far less, but they also have different characteristics. Selective catalytic reduction technology in hybrid vehicles basically removes some of the pollution in the emission and turns it into ammonia, primarily for human health benefit, because ammonia in that form is less damaging to human beings, but ammonia is a plant nutrient and it adds to the nutrient problem in the environment.
Conventional combustion engines emit their ammonia when they are switched on in the driveway, and therefore confine it to your garden and your driveway, but a hybrid vehicle will emit its ammonia at the point at which the battery runs out and the engine switches on, which is on the road network. That will create some challenges for environmental modellers in the future to work out which designated sites along that road network, which priority habitats, will be affected by some of those problems.
Lord Faulkner of Worcester: Is it feasible to imagine that when a new development is approved by a planning authority it insists that there should be a public transport provision, a bus to serve the area or some other form of public transport?
Ben Kite: That is quite often already the case. A lot of the projects I have worked on have made contributions to public transport, to bus routes. A lot of them have charging points for electric vehicles. To what extent they have to do that is typically a matter of national and local policy and a negotiating process with the local authority so that the development is still viable once it has invested in that technology. My experience is that that is already happening and developers are being asked to do it.
Lord Faulkner of Worcester: Anything to add, Mr Lewis?
Joseph Lewis: I think perhaps we are getting a little bit too focused on the details on the individual site level and need to bring it back to the bigger picture here. There are no safe levels for something like PM2.5, so minor mitigations will not be what solves this. We need to err against creating built environments where we cannot have a safe environment again. That is really about taking us back to tying individual sites to a more strategic level of air quality. That is about properly utilising local plans at a strategic level so that we are not missing the cumulative effects of individual sites’ air quality contributions to air pollution.
It is a much more strategic question, and that is at the heart of a lot of the issues that we face in the built environment. There is a significant disconnect between the policy level at government level, at national level, even at local level with policy implementation on the ground. It does not reach the individual sites, and we need to fill that gap on a fundamental level before we get into specifics like transport and exactly how that will work.
Q100 Lord Mawson: I agree with that. Listening to the conversation we have just had, I am working with colleagues on a 3,000-home development at the moment in another part of the country. You can see all the disconnects and you can see in an estate just up the road, built in the 1960s, all the things we do not want to see. There is the danger of the processes and the systems of the state with the best will in the world repeating absolutely what went on then and lessons not being learned and good farmers who want to do the right thing.
The Chair: The question is?
Lord Mawson: I am trying to have a conversation about it, because we will never get into the detail of this unless we have these kinds of conversations. The detail in the real world is that there is often the will from good people—some of the environmentalists locally—but the systems and processes are militating against the very conversations. I can hear you digging into this a bit, so I wondered if that is your experience.
Joseph Lewis: Absolutely, Lord Mawson. I agree. I think we need to solve this problem. The problem is that at the moment we default to bringing in environmental expertise, which includes air quality expertise, significantly later in the process. We need to give reasons in regulation to bring in that expertise at the design stage if we want to start solving these problems. I completely agree with you, Lord Mawson: everybody in this is trying to create environmentally positive outcomes. It is just that the system we have does not lend itself to that.
Ben Kite: I will go one step further and say that the design stage itself is too late. When local plans are being written up for districts and boroughs, we need to be directing development to places that have good access to services, to sustainable transport, like train stations for example, so that there is much less need for people to get in the car. Part of the problem is that the burden of environmental investigation has been gradually shuffling down the food chain so that decisions are being made about how much development and where and then they are locked in before proper environmental information is inputted to the process.
Q101 Baroness Thornhill: From what you just said, is the new system under the national development and management plans and the local plans the right way to go, or will that create a conflict?
Joseph Lewis: The IES’s EIA working group has just put out a quite strong thought piece that covers a lot of the evidence about what that system specifically should look like. Perhaps it would be more appropriate if we sent that as some supplementary evidence.
Q102 The Chair: I also have a question, again coming back to this thing about agriculture. This is not a question of blame, incidentally, Mr Lewis. This is a question of who should be remedying the harms—we have a polluter-pays principle—and why the remedies are falling on one party rather than another. You have referred repeatedly to agriculture as the source of historical pollution that has taken us to the boundaries. Is Natural England focusing on the wrong part of the problem when it spends so much of its time on developers and apparently so little on agriculture?
Joseph Lewis: In the first instance, I apologise if I have misconveyed my position on this, because I think we are a lot closer than you perhaps think we are in our opinions. I think the answer, though, is that we face a situation where we need to have remedies across the system as a whole. It is not sufficient to place the burden of resolving this issue solely on agriculture. Because, whilst I agree 100% with you that we need significant changes in agricultural practices to better reflect—
The Chair: That is not quite the question. I am talking about Natural England and your observation of Natural England. Is it misfocusing its attention?
Joseph Lewis: If you want specific insight into its decision-making, it would probably be able to provide one, but my understanding of the situation is that within its remit it looks at all considerations and all means by which to improve the state of the natural environment. Do I think it is doing a sufficient job in some instances? Perhaps it could do better, but in its focus I think it currently looks within its remit at all considerations that it has the resource and capacity to look at. If it had significantly stronger resource and capacity it could perhaps open itself up to the kind of considerations you might be looking at.
Q103 Lord Best: That naturally takes us to environmental regulation and how it all fits together. The question is whether environmental regulation is sufficiently joined up. Where, ultimately, does the decision-making lie, because we have Natural England, the Environment Agency, the national regulators, but Ben Kite told us that the local plan at the local level is really significant—what you write into that plan, the policies that you put there at the outset before a developer starts designing the scheme, knowing what the constraints are. Where ultimately do you turn if you want to develop a piece of land with these conflicting pressures on you?
Joseph Lewis: It is a very difficult question. I think developers are put in a difficult position on this. As we have talked about, we need to be significantly more joined up on this. If we look at the system as it exists now, the kind of joined-up approach across different regulatory regimes that you are talking about that you hope exists somewhere does not significantly exist. We need a significantly better move towards a joining up of regulation, not only across regimes but across scales—that we take that journey from policy design to implementation that currently leaves developers making decisions that are not optimal for the environment.
The environmental challenge of the next 20 years will be all about policy implementation. We have what the OEP referred to in its report as an abundance of environmental plans, strategies and policies, often presented without context or explanation of how policy measures interact. Exactly as you say, what we need is regulation as the clear and practical tool to translate those ambitions not only into real outcomes on the ground but into something that is parsable to developers and the public to achieve those goals. The OEP has a lot to say on the governance, but really this is the importance of regulation: it ought to provide clarity and to join up all the different regimes we have to ensure that we get a single route to social and environmental outcomes.
Ben Kite: There is significant evidence that there is a degree of silo thinking going on between different government departments. The Making the Most of England’s Land report, which the House of Lords Land Use in England Committee published last year, has some very interesting suggested solutions centring on a land use commission and a framework to draw all the different competing priorities for land together so that they can work together. I think that is the right direction.
The planning White Paper published in 2020 suggested a zonal system where you have land that is protected, that is not developed, land that is targeted for growth where there is a lot of almost unfettered development, it seems, and something in the middle called regeneration where there is development happening according to some rules. That is not the right way to go, because land is multifunctional. Any piece of land that you look at might need to provide homes, provide food, attenuate floodwater, sequester carbon—any number of things. I do not think that the ideas of separating those out into different areas of the country so that you have biodiversity away from where people live and people cannot access it are following the right route. We need to bring them together and have a conversation about how we get the most multifunctional benefits out of the land.
Historically, housing targets have been passed down from central government, and district and local authorities then write their local plan, deciding where the housing will be directed, which sites are most suitable. Then they go through a process of calling for sites and go through issues and their preferred options, and they end up with their local plan. That whole process bears the prospect of improvement, because it is not sufficiently informed right at the beginning with the best environmental outcomes. It is usually what is politically most palatable, with an environmental assessment done and retrofitted at the end, which has limited influence in the design of that local plan. All those things form part of the solution to the problem you identify.
Q104 The Chair: I have a couple of questions. I think I can guess the answer to one of them from your comments so far. Are changes in environmental regulation well communicated to developers and infrastructure promoters?
Joseph Lewis: There are a lot of examples where they have been quite poorly communicated, and at times communication is better than at others. Certainly something like the environmental impact assessment regulations require a competent expert. Digging into a definition of exactly how that is expected to work has been dodged as a question historically. It falls to the sector and professional bodies like the IES or CIEEM to set those standards. It leads to a lot of inconsistency, and that is the challenge of communication here.
There has been a lot of ambiguity in the kind of changes we are seeing with environmental outcomes reports coming in as a successor regime to EIA and SEA, not only whether this will be a new regime that prioritises growth and development or one that prioritises environmental outcomes, but what kinds of environmental outcomes—when and how consents will apply. We are only starting to get those questions now. I agree that there has been a significant communication challenge around this.
Ben Kite: I largely agree. I think communication is better now than it has been in the past. That is primarily to do with the online world that we live in these days with online government advice that is updated regularly for developers to have access to. I think Natural England has tried very hard to communicate biodiversity net gain, with presentations and roadshows and what have you. So it has been better more recently than in the past. Despite that, companies like mine have found ourselves in a position where we have had to visit developers to give them presentations and CPD on things like biodiversity net gain and nutrient neutrality and found when we have got there that it comes as a surprise to some of them. There is still more to be done.
Q105 The Chair: It is good that it is improving. Changing the focus slightly, I want to ask about the role of ecologists in assessing environmental impacts. We are particularly interested in whether the use of data could be improved. The role of ecologists is partly the measurement of biodiversity, the measurement of improvements in biodiversity and so forth. Unless you are going around counting individual organisms, this is fundamentally a data-type activity.
Ben Kite: The role holistically involves understanding the environment so that you know what is there at present and what the trends are, predicting what the impact of those trends will be as a result of a project, putting solutions in place to mitigate anticipated problems and deliver benefits where that is possible, and then monitoring the result and feeding that data back in so that we can learn from what worked and what did not. Within that there is certainly scope for better use of data.
At the moment, records of protected and notable species and habitats, for example, are collected locally—that is probably the right solution—by local record centres that pool all the knowledge of different environmental groups into one record centre that serves Hampshire, for example. There is scope for all of that to be drawn together nationally. You would need to come up with some kind of mechanism for the people who do the data collecting still being paid for that data, but I do not see any reason why that is not possible, why there could not be some kind of national portal where you can pay a subscription fee or something like that and access data from many national databases that all is pooled into one place, and the subscription fee pays all the individuals for collecting it. That is one area where there is certainly scope for improvement.
The other main one is monitoring. It is how we learn. We need to know what works and what does not, otherwise we are effectively saddling developers with a cost burden for something that might be a waste of time. We need to make sure that what we ask them to do is effective and will work. Monitoring has only recently started to be routinely asked for in planning decisions and environmental decisions. Quite often the data is generated by the ecologists that are commissioned to do that monitoring. It is sent into a planning register somewhere, or to Natural England if it is part of a protected species licence, and then it disappears. That is not universally true; Natural England has made great strides recently, for example towards making data from hazel dormouse protected species licences available through the People’s Trust for Endangered Species to carry out analyses, work out trends, that kind of thing.
We need more of that, basically. We need somewhere to pool monitoring data where it is easily accessible to anybody who wants it for the purpose of improving development and environmental decisions.
The Chair: That is very helpful.
Lord Berkeley: To be clear, I think you are suggesting that all the data you have been talking about, which is sometimes historical or sometimes monitoring, should be available in the public realm, possibly by charging for it, possibly by not. Full transparency would save a lot of people a lot of money if they did not have to start everything from scratch again.
Ben Kite: Yes, absolutely. There is a lot of work involved in gathering, collecting and filtering that data, because a lot of data that is submitted to record centres is flawed, and we do not want decisions being made on flawed data. Money needs to be put into that somehow, so you need to charge for it in most cases. Some kind of public gateway or domain where monitoring and data is gathered and pooled and made available to the widest possible audience, anybody who wants to use it for bringing about better decision-making, would be a positive thing.
Q106 Lord Carrington of Fulham: The impression I am getting, listening to the evidence—it may be a totally false impression; if it is, I would be very grateful if you would correct, because I do not think I would be the only person getting it—is that everything is awfully cosy. We have talked principally about housing, but I think by extension you are also talking about people doing major infrastructure projects and so on. Those who are attempting to improve the environment and the ecology are all wishing to go to the same direction and are all pushing in the same way, they all work productively together and it is hunky-dory.
I want to follow the money a little bit. If you get a major project, which I suspect applies to pretty much every project, they will come under financial constraints at some point, if only because of cost overruns and the troughs and peaks in the housing market if it is a housing development. You just have to look at the major railway developments that we have—HS2 for instance, but others as well—or road developments where the costs run way out of control. There must become a conflict between the people who are trying to balance their books and the people who are trying to balance the ecology. Is that true? Is that what is happening, or is it my initial impression of the cosy relationship with everybody trying to achieve the same goal?
What I am really asking is whether there will not be an awful lot of developers who are gaming the system and an awful lot of ecologists who are trying to stop any sort of development. The demonstrations out in Parliament Square, for instance, would try to stop everything happening, whether it is good or bad, just because they do not like change.
Joseph Lewis: I will not comment on the last part of the question, but I will focus on the thrust of the question in general, which is about the possibility for a conflict. Currently that is the situation we see a lot of the time, although there may be some best practice on this in some cases. What I would put to you is that the significant cost that accrues for a lot of projects is not bringing in the environmental side early enough. As Ben said, if half way through a project you bring in an environmental impact assessor who tells you that you need to apply significant mitigation to the project, it is likely to drive up the cost of your project. God forbid, it might mean that you lose the project altogether if it is not possible to do it in an environmental way. If you bring them in at a much earlier stage it is a safeguard against losing profits.
The reason why they do not—it is partly a narrative issue as well—is because historically there has always been the feeling that you do not bring in environmental assessment until a certain point. Best practice is changing that, and regulation might be able to as well. That is really the issue here: we focus too much on an individual project site and do not look at the bigger picture and bring in expertise early enough to safeguard not only environmental outcomes but potentially profits.
Ben Kite: My experience is that culture among developers varies quite widely between different companies, and it is also changing over time. Some developers still see environmental regulations as being burdensome. All they want to know from an ecologist is what they have to do to get the project through. That has changed more and more, certainly over the course of my career. When I first started practising as an ecologist, I was quite often an unwelcome adviser. More and more often now, the conversation is about the value that sensible environmental information can bring to a project by expediting its process through consent, getting consents more quickly and swiftly because you have done the right thing—you have headed off the environmental problems and there is no concern among regulators.
Also, and this is reflected in several comments I have had from developer clients, when you create a better place that people want to live in, that is paid back by the market. People will buy those homes and will pay more for them because it is a nicer place to live. You are also helping society not to bear the cost of creating places that are not good places to live because they have an effect on mental and physical health, well-being, productivity, work and so on.
It is neither of the two extremes that you paint. It is neither a cosy relationship nor one of diametrically opposed objectives. It is somewhere in the middle. The way in which ecologists and developers work together depends on the ecologist and the developer, but it is improving.
Lord Carrington of Fulham: I can understand that that would happen if you have a project, everybody gets together right at the beginning and can predict exactly what they will come across as the project develops. Of course, that is not the way these things work, is it? As a project develops, you suddenly find the newts or the bats, or you find that you have a wood that you thought was planted in the 19th century that is actually an historical growth of trees that has been there since time immemorial. At that point, there becomes an incentive for both sides to take up entrenched positions, does there not? The developer will try to hide the problem perhaps, if they are a crook, and will try to say that this is not there, there are no newts and we will put them in a box and take them somewhere else.
The Chair: The box they were brought to the site in.
Lord Carrington of Fulham: Precisely, and that was the other point: that the problem could be created by somebody who just wants to stop the project. How do you get round that?
Ben Kite: Again, it boils down to the attitudes of the developers involved. Some of them may want to try to hide, but in my experience the majority of them will look at the problem and say, “How can we turn that into an advantage? How can we work that into green infrastructure? How can we make that part of our SuDS and our drainage strategy for the site?” Ultimately, we avoid those conflicts if we do what Joseph has suggested and involve environmental information much higher up the process, so that we can avoid the most sensitive sites in the first place and direct development to places where it is best put. That reduces the potential for developers that are not interested in doing the right thing to have the opportunity not to. Of course you have rogues, but it is getting better.
Joseph Lewis: I will add two other things that I think are shields against some of the more absurd elements of where this could take us in the ‘box examples’ that we are looking at. The first is data. There is a case for a strong monitoring network to know what environment and assets you have, where you have them, when you have them, and the rate of decline and treatment in those assets. Secondly, it feeds back to local plans and having a good sense of the land in a local area and the kinds of purposes and, as Ben said, the multiple purposes that any given area of land should be working towards in the big picture.
Q107 Lord Best: I think you just answered my next question. You want to move everything upstream and do things early, but what is the trigger? Where is this early stuff, and is the answer that it is in the local plan? Local plans have to be more specific in including biodiversity net gain, nutrient neutrality and the rest of it. This has to be in the local plan so that everyone can see it before they start out.
Joseph Lewis: There is a pipeline. You need a top-level land use framework, governance-level documents, across the country. That filters down to the local plan and exactly what that is, and that is the link we talked about earlier. In that context you need to look at the project site as not an individual parcel of land. Nature does not recognise the lines that we draw on maps. We need to recognise it as part of a bigger picture, and that all needs to be part of the conversation going in.
Q108 Baroness Thornhill: I think our excellent guests have largely answered this question. What future changes to environmental regulations do you envisage will affect developers’ abilities to build housing and major infrastructure? You have kind of answered that all the way through, but could you focus on actual process and structural barriers—I do not think we have heard much about that—that really do block the cultural, behavioural trend that Lord Mawson and you have talked about? There are big arguments in the Chamber at the moment about on-site versus off-site provision and all these issues. We are getting some very rigid positions, and I would be interested in your take. You can take one each, in the interests of time.
Joseph Lewis: Your choice then, Ben.
Ben Kite: I will do on-site versus off-site, if I may.
Baroness Thornhill: That is what I thought.
Ben Kite: Generally, I am in favour of going through a hierarchy where you deliver environmental benefits as close as possible to the point at which the impact occurs and work outwards. because otherwise the logical conclusion is that places where people live end up being biodiversity-poor, uninteresting, uninspiring places to live, and nature deprivation, if you want to call it that, only increases. If we want to encourage a generation of people who understand the natural environment, care for it and improve future stewardship, we cannot separate people and nature. We have to have the two together.
For that reason, I am in favour of going on-site first and then moving out. The more landscape-scale strategic approaches have their merits because they can be joined up; they can connect wood A to wood B and make sure that it is part of a wider renaturalisation of an entire river corridor, and that kind of thing. It is not that we should not be thinking about that. It is a cascade process. It is doing what you can on-site first so that you are not depriving people of their own natural heritage, and then moving to contributing to the more landscape-scale schemes. That is my preference.
Baroness Thornhill: Is the structure there for developers to know about this bigger thing that they could contribute to? We have had other evidence, I know, but I am interested in your view.
Ben Kite: The Environment Act should be working on that, because it made it a duty for local authorities to publish local nature recovery strategies. They should be identifying the assets in their districts or boroughs, which ones are in a bad condition, which are in a good condition, and the opportunities. Forward-thinking, enlightened local authorities will join the two and say, “That’s what we need to achieve. That’s our local nature recovery strategy. Let’s cost the implementation work that’s necessary to bring about the positive and then sell that to developers as a biodiversity net gain tariff so that we’re doing something strategic and joined-up and making the two duties effectively cancel each other out”. That is where the real opportunity is for local authorities.
Joseph Lewis: Process barriers? Unfortunately, the answer is that it is quite specific in a lot of cases when you dig into the details of the process. I will pull out the commonalities of a few of them to talk about some of the common issues that we are likely to see as these kinds of environmental regulations develop in the future.
The first is the data issue that we have already talked about, so I will not labour that point any further, other than to say that it relies on having the resource, capacity and expertise to gather and monitor that data.
The second point is about ambiguity. Ben mentioned local nature recovery strategies. There is a degree of ambiguity in how that duty is being implemented and the differentiation between them. That is where we return to the point we have already made about linking between different scales andlocal authorities and having that journey from policy planning to implementation. These are the considerations that will prevent us from having these kinds of barriers in the future, because in their absence you will see that there is a lot of ambiguity that leads developers to work in one local authority and then not know exactly how something is implemented in a different one.
Bringing it back to the big picture, we have got quite good at mitigation in a lot of projects at this point and it will not necessarily be stopped, but it might still be a barrier to environmental outcomes if we do not factor in the connectivity, fragmentation and ecosystem-level approach that goes behind the project level. There are different kinds of process barriers. We could probably give more detail if we had more time.
Q109 The Chair: You have described an ideally collaborative system with early recognition and early intervention in a planned structure that I can see is very amenable to large housebuilders, which tend to produce monocultural houses. We may replace natural landscape with monocultural housing. We have seen a very large decline in the number of small and medium-sized housebuilders. How applicable and relevant is it? How can they engage with this system on smaller sites and hope to survive, given the very large upfront commitment of money and time that is required, at risk, which they find hard to sustain?
Joseph Lewis: I appreciate that it is not a problem that has easy solutions to it. There is one thing that could help towards this. If you migrated more ecological and environmental expertise into local authorities, and if that became the default position, small and medium housebuilders could have less upfront cost of meeting environmental regulations if they had more access to that expertise through the local level. That would help, but it would not solve it.
The Chair: If it were free.
Joseph Lewis: If it were free, indeed.
The Chair: We spent yesterday on the levelling-up Bill ensuring that it would not have to be free, anyway.
Ben Kite: I will go back to the answer I gave a moment ago about on-site versus off-site biodiversity delivery. I was really answering with big sites in mind. They have much more space and bigger budgets to do something meaningful on-site. Smaller developers with small plots that can fit only a couple of houses on them are much less likely to have the opportunity to do something meaningful for biodiversity in that space. That is where hopefully the Environment Act can offer something to small developers, because it can effectively solve the problem for them. It can say, “You can’t do it on-site. Here’s a local tariff that will fund this larger scheme, the local nature recovery strategy, so you don’t need to go through the cost, delay and expense of commissioning your own experts, having your own studies done and so on”. That is chiefly where the opportunity lies.
The Chair: Thank you both very much for the time you have given us today.
