Built Environment Committee

Corrected oral evidence: The impact of environmental regulations on development

Tuesday 2 May 2023

10.30 am

Members present: Lord Moylan (The Chair); Lord Best; Lord Faulkner of Worcester; Lord Goddard of Stockport; Lord Greenhalgh; Lord Mawson; Baroness Thornhill; Baroness Warwick of Undercliffe.

Evidence Session No. 11 Heard in Public Questions 110 – 117

Witnesses

I: Dr Richard Benwell, Chief Executive Officer, Wildlife and Countryside Link; Jackie Copley, Planning Director, Campaign to Protect Rural England.

Examination of witnesses

Dr Richard Benwell and Jackie Copley.

The Chair: Welcome to this meeting of the Built Environment Select Committee in the House of Lords, and to this public evidence session on the impact of environmental regulation on development.

Our witnesses today are Dr Richard Benwell, Chief Executive Officer of the Wildlife and Countryside Link, and Jackie Copley, Planning Director at the Campaign to Protect Rural England.

Please could members and witnesses keep questions and answers brief? The first question comes from Lord Goddard of Stockport, who is joining us remotely.

Q110 Lord Goddard of Stockport: Good morning, Richard and Jackie. My question is quite brief; what role do community groups play in supporting public engagement in environmental assessments and/or regulations?

Jackie Copley: I am going to take the lead, because CPRE The Countryside Charity has a rich history in enabling local communities to better engage with the planning system.

We feel that community groups play a very important role in the planning and environmental regulation system. They serve both a proactive and a reactive role; proactive in so far as responding to strategic local plan and neighbourhood plan processes, but also a reactive role when development applications are submitted. They look at the proposals and take a view on whether the outcomes are positive or negative, and if it is the latter, they look at how they can articulate.

CPRE tries to ensure articulation is done in a positive way that can help meaningful change, not always swiping out at development, but ensuring that there are changes to design or mitigations to have mutual benefit. In some cases, however, it is considered that environmental outcomes would be so harmful that the development ought not to go ahead.

In terms of the changes that are being progressed, we welcome the 25- Year Environment Plan, and the overarching goal of leaving the environment in a better state is a laudable objective. We hope that the communities can get involved in helping to deliver the 10 goals identified in the Environmental Improvement Plan.

Dr Richard Benwell: I agree, for the sake of brevity.

Lord Goddard of Stockport: They do play a vital role; it is that link between community, officers, planners, and the wider society. Sometimes they get bad press, accused of objecting for the sake of objecting, but on the other side of that coin they do sometimes offer that valuable check and balance. Getting that balance right is a concern to people.

I believe they are not there to stop development, but to get proper sustainable development that benefits everyone. The message I am getting back from the panel is that it is an excellent tool, but it needs to be managed with expectations as well.

Jackie Copley: Yes, agreed.

Q111 Baroness Warwick of Undercliffe: My question follows on in a way and I hope you both will answer because, from your experiences, you know how community groups operate—

The Chair: Diana, before you speak, being a new member to the Committee—

Baroness Warwick of Undercliffe: I beg your pardon, and apologise to the Committee, I have to declare an interest; I am the chair of the board of the Property Ombudsman.

Committee groups often come together around a particular project, a particular interest of theirs. How far do you feel that they have the appropriate skills and resources to follow through on developers to contribute to the effective implementation, particularly of environmental regulations?

A corollary of that is: to what extent are they undertaking enforcement or monitoring activity which might be more appropriate elsewhere? Richard, would you like to kick off on this, as you have obviously had a lot of experience of this?

Dr Richard Benwell: Perhaps I will start with the latter question, on whether community groups are playing too large a role in bearing too much of the brunt of monitoring requirements.

We are in a country of a fantastic heritage of citizen science, and that can offer a huge input and insight for the planning process. I think of organisations like the British Trust for Ornithology, where millions of hours of expert volunteer time contribute to fantastic datasets that have been running for decades and are the envy of many other countries; these things can really input to, inform, and inspire good planning decisions. More latterly we have seen lots of great citizen science around things like water pollution where people are going out to monitor the state of our rivers for nutrient and chemical pollution. That is fantastic, but it is unfortunately something that we have seen less supported by government over recent years, with less investment in local environmental records centres or less support to volunteering programmes like breeding bird surveys, for example. There is an important role for government to enable that citizen science that can potentially be used to help identify hotspots of pollution where more targeted monitoring and enforcement action can follow.

The corollary—the flip side—is that you have to complement that great citizen science and monitoring with really good expert agencies. Over the past decade, that is where the denuding of the ability of Natural England and the Environment Agency to properly monitor and enforce environmental law, and check the state of the natural environment, has been a real problem. The Environment Agency has seen cuts of 60% in funding from 2010 to 2019; Natural England cuts are more like 70%.

We have recently seen some of those reversed, but it really saw a big decline in the ability of those agencies to intervene and to offer their expert advice early in the planning process, and also to properly monitor and enforce. In many cases, this has led to a real dearth of data on the state of our natural environment. We have to support and enable citizen science, and we have to complement it with strong expert agencies that have the wherewithal to do their job properly on the monitoring and enforcement side.

We have seen that start to change in the last spending review cycle, but most of the changes for Natural England and the Environment Agency have been on capital budgets and big project spending. They are still short on the revenue and resource spending needed to support boots on the ground to help make sure that the planning process is not snarled up later down the line by lack of information and by fights that could have been avoided by proper expert input early on.

Baroness Warwick of Undercliffe: Therefore, you see that the community groups having to pick up that responsibility has somehow become a default position: do you have any particular examples that spring to your mind as very obvious ways in which this has happened?

Dr Richard Benwell: Water pollution is the obvious example at the moment, where it has been citizen science that has helped to both collect the data that has been needed to reveal the extent of sewage pollution and chemical pollution in our rivers, but also to crunch the numbers coming out of water companies who have been holding on to lots of data evidencing the scale of the problem for a very long time. It took normal members of the public going out and doing the testing and the number crunching to reveal the extent of the problem; it is only thanks to that that we now see a response from the Government, taking strong action with the Plan for Water, and the Environment Agency.

That should continue in future, of course, and it can help us by identifying potential areas where there are leaks or too much pollution flowing into rivers, so that those agencies can then take targeted action to tackle a problem. It can help identify where there may be problems, even if it is not necessarily of a scale of evidence that might be upheld in court.

Baroness Warwick of Undercliffe: Thank you. Jackie, would you like to add something?

Jackie Copley: Not to repeat but just to add to what Richard has said: community groups have a complementary role. Local people do know their areas, so they will be aware of certain types of wildlife, and if development proposals come through with Environmental Impact Assessments that do not pick up on species that are known to exist, that obviously causes issues or concerns but it is not a substitute for proper regulation.

There needs to be a strategic approach. CPRE has gotten involved with things like stargazing to look at tranquillity and understand the impacts of light pollution so there certainly is a role. CPRE very much think there ought to be robust regulation; it is something that does need to be resourced adequately because there is a public good in it, and if we want positive outcomes as well as development of housing and infrastructure, we need to get the balance right. We cannot proceed with an underfunded regulation and then expect to yield positive outcomes.

Q112 Lord Greenhalgh: Richard, you alluded to the need for someone to step in to do the number crunching around water pollution. My question is very brief: to what extent is sufficient data on the environment readily available?

Dr Richard Benwell: At the simplest level, we know the most important statistics: 15% of species are at risk of extinction in this country and 41% are in long-term decline. If that is not a clue that we are not dealing with the biodiversity crisis properly, then I do not know what is. That gives us that sort of high-level data.

When it comes to the data that we need to plug into the planning system, which is what I think you are pointing towards, there is a dearth of data at the strategic level. At that level of catchment planning we should be able to look at the integrity of an ecosystem to see whether it is properly connected, whether it is functioning across a landscape, and we ought to have been able to pick up on problems like the nutrient problem early on. The ability to plug into things like Strategic Environmental Assessment would help us plan more intelligently at the strategic level.

Hopefully, the forthcoming land use framework will enable us to do some of that and to identify some of those structural environmental needs that we need to plan for as much as development in the planning system, such as: what does it take to make an ecosystem function at the landscape level? How do we make sure that is properly interconnected, habitat to habitat? That is where we are probably weakest in the system, and you can see that, for example, in the fact that 68% of Sites of Special Scientific Interest (SSSIs) have not been visited or monitored in the last six years. There are still major gaps in our ancient woodland inventory. We do not properly understand that strategic level of planning.

At the more detailed level, again, there are gaps in our knowledge about the state of the natural environment at the local level that ought to be filled to help support local plans properly. Those gaps will hopefully be filled through the Local Nature Recovery Strategies process.

One final piece of the puzzle: post-project monitoring and enforcement is a really big part of the data problem that is becoming more and more important, particularly with net gain, where we are allowing developments to take place on the understanding that a certain amount of habitat will be created or improved on site to allow that project to be consented. At the moment, the monitoring and data needed to test whether that actually takes place and is preserved for the long term is simply not there. One of the biggest questions about the generally positive proposals that are coming through with biodiversity gain at the moment is how communities and local planning authorities will be equipped with the sort of data and testing facilities that they need to make sure that that happens properly.

I know we are aiming for brevity, but I have one last point, if I may. Of course, you need folks to be able to interpret and handle the data, and we are entering a world where digitisation should be able to help with that standardisation at the local planning authority level, but there is still a lack of expertise to help people properly interpret what are often complex datasets. We have all heard about the lack of local planning authority access to ecologists; about half have access to some ecologists, and only about a third have in-house ecologists. That needs to improve so that, where the data is present, there is somebody to help interpret it properly.

Jackie Copley: That is quite comprehensive. To add to that, I am a chartered town and country planner and I often find the Defra processes and planning through the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities are quite siloed. When a planning application comes through and you are trying to understand the climate change or ecological impacts, there are different processes and different datasets. I always refer to the Defra MAGIC map; it is a really good tool where a lot of data is mapped, such as the existence of protected habitats and the like. It would be very helpful if they could be brought together to have some kind of co-ordination across the piece.

Lord Greenhalgh: You have highlighted data gaps locally but also, more importantly, large gaps at the strategic level. What needs to happen to overcome those gaps?

Jackie Copley: A strategic land use plan to tie together the functions of Defra and—

Lord Greenhalgh: Bring in Whitehall to tie those together?

Jackie Copley: Yes, it would help us understand what our environmental capacity is and how we can best deliver development needs in appropriate places and in appropriate ways, and how we could performance-monitor impact on the environment. That would be helpful.

Dr Richard Benwell: I agree, the land use framework the Government has promised could be a really important tool for this. To do it properly, it needs to be a cross-departmental land use framework. We are hearing lots of talk that it would be about Defra only; that would not do the job. It needs to cover all land uses, so it cannot just be about the stuff that Defra owns, like farming and such—it needs to cover food, production, farming development, and environmental need. It also needs to have those big environmental goals, 30x30—the promise to protect 30% of land and sea for nature by 2030—and the Environment Act 2021 targets, baked in at the top.

If you complement that with local nature recovery strategies that are legally linked to the local development planning process—as Lord Randall is proposing in the Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill—that would help to underpin a bottom-up strategic planning dimension across the local planning authorities; you are complementing the sort of top-down land use framework with a bottom-up process of data gathering and reconciling different competing land use needs from the bottom up. If the Lord Randall amendment in the Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill is agreed, that would be an amazing package.

The Chair: May I just ask, you said the Government had promised to introduce land use framework; I did not know they had promised to do so.

Dr Richard Benwell: I think it was first announced in response to the food strategy and has been reiterated in a couple of places. We are expecting it later this year.

The Chair: That is my ignorance. We can find out a bit more about that.

Ms Copley, you talked about Defra and DLUHC as if there were, if not tensions between them, then as if they were operating in parallel universes. I am exaggerating slightly, but that is the impression you gave. You then suggested that the solution to this would be the land use planning framework; but is the problem not rather that they are operating in different worlds? We are interested in this question of what we can learn about how they collaborate.

Jackie Copley: There is more overlap than is currently the case in practice.

The Chair: I do not understand that.

Jackie Copley: Sorry, at the moment, local plans identify how much development should take place over the next 15 years, and there are environmental impacts arising from that. I attend Local Nature Partnerships, a grouping of environmental stakeholders, and they are coming out with very good aims about reducing carbon emissions and have targets for reversing decline. Through the local plan process, the aims are there but sometimes the environmental information regarding impacts is not fully understood at that stage.

From a practical point of view, when planning land use you need to understand what the environmental impacts are. For example, CPRE undertook research on the use of farmland and the loss of best and most versatile land through the planning process. Despite the National Planning Policy Framework setting out that it wants to protect best and most versatile land, we are seeing a loss, and an acceleration of loss. This is considered not appropriate when we have an increasing supply of brownfield sites in urban areas.

Our environment is impacted through farming uses, provision of infrastructure and housing, but the processes of regulating issues are often done separately and local planning authorities lack resources and often do not enforce planning consents in a way the public would hope them to do. There are gaps in the process, and, as a consequence, deficits in the way our environment is being regulated.

The Chair: This is a good point to say to both of you; if there is any information you would like to give us that we do not have time to cover today, we would be very grateful to receive it in writing, and it will all go into the evidence base when we come to write our report.

Finally, you referred to something called Defra's MAGIC map; is it actually called that?

Jackie Copley: Yes, it is called MAGIC map, and it is a fantastic tool.

The Chair: We need to start making enquiries about the MAGIC map; you have given us a very helpful lead.

Q113 Lord Best: I would like to dig a little deeper into the same issue of there being lots of different parties here, a lack of understanding of who is actually in charge and whose decision is final. It may be that we have already got there with your view that strategic land use plans would do the trick, with local plans possibly overriding at the local level but not overriding it becoming reconciled with the strategic use plan. I am not sure how those two quite lock together.

Could you illustrate how we would bring the communications and the co-ordination into one place? Just take the nutrient neutrality issue which is very topical; 74 local authorities are now unable to develop new homes—my passion—so bad news. In this particular case, I think it is Natural England, but who is in charge and whose decisions count at the end of the day? Can we be clear on that, all of us who engage in this?

Jackie Copley: CPRE would definitely prefer to see a local-led planning system, in so far as local plan-making is an important tool in overall planning. For example, we have a national housing target of 300,000 homes, a figure that has never ever been justified, and when you look at the data it is a mystery as to why we are planning for that many houses. When you look at 2014 data using the standard method, you only get 217,000 homes. If you were to use 2021 census data, the figure would be half of that. Nationally, it feels that a target has been put forward and then local authorities are almost having to retrofit this figure irrespective of environmental capacity.

Local housing requirements ought to be decided locally, using up-to-date data; that is best practice. It is poor practice to be relying on a dataset that is almost 10 years out of date. That is one issue.

In terms of having something strategic and overarching, both Defra and DLUHC have a strategic land use function but they often do not work together, and that is what the national framework would do. It would understand river catchment issues, coastal issues, town and country planning issues, and give some kind of sense of what the needs for our energy infrastructure are and what we need in terms of strategic transport infrastructure, to give local authorities beneath some kind of understanding.

At the minute, we have a ‘predict and provide’ model where it is not thoroughly based on understanding. In terms of a survey analysis, plan, we just need to have that overarching steer because, at the moment, it is probably leading to more farmland loss than is actually required.

Lord Best: Just a comment in passing: the Centre for Cities have a new report out, and they think we need 442,000 homes a year for 20 years. This is not least to catch up with all the other countries—the comparable amount of housing that they have built for their populations—so it does not go without—

Jackie Copley: Challenge.

Lord Best: Some challenge, the 300,000, yes.

Dr Richard Benwell: May I just to add a word on nutrient neutrality in particular? I agree with Jackie that what you need for most of the planning system is a way for arbitration to happen between competing interests that is informed by strategic priorities set by land use framework, for example, and enhanced by local understanding. Of course, in some cases, decisions abut against the law and that is where we have come to with nutrient neutrality. The reason that those houses have been temporarily stopped is because it is illegal to consent a development that would have an adverse effect on one of our most important nature sites. It is really important that we have that backstop of regulations so that our tiny remnant of intact, natural, or semi-natural, habitat remains protected.

The question is: how did we come to this sorry state of affairs where local decisions over planning have been stopped because our environment is in such a parlous state? One of the things that it would be great for Parliament and government to get to grips with is how to do the strategic planning early so you avoid that legal backstop altogether. The answer there is to take a proper approach to, say, catchment planning and look at the various sources of pollution that were adding to the problem as we reached that threshold of significant effects on the natural environment. That ought to have been done much earlier in the process. For example, we ought to have been looking at the permissions given to intensive livestock management or poultry sheds and at making sure that, when buildings and development went ahead, proper provision was made for things like sustainable drainage and clever catchment approaches to avoid adding to already overburdened sewer systems. We ought also to have been making sure that water and sewerage companies were properly investing in their network to make sure that some of those issues that we have all heard so much about did not reach the blast points that they are at now with hundreds of thousands of sewage overflows a year.

I do not think anybody wants to be in this backstop situation we are in where we have hit the legal threshold to protect those vital bits of natural green infrastructure. The answer is to properly integrate environmental protection in the planning system early, so that you integrate land use and development decisions and the need for nature well upstream and avoid these sad situations where, unfortunately, local decision-making has been gazumped.

Q114 Baroness Thornhill: To some extent we have covered bits of my question, but I will ask anyway to give you an opportunity to add something. To what extent is the current system of public engagement in the planning system effective in reaching a compromise between community groups and other key actors in the development process? I would also like to add: is compromise what you are really after and necessarily a good thing?

The second part of the question, which we have just been talking about and I would really like you to elaborate on, is how do we achieve this bottom-up approach? What do you perceive as the barriers and blockages to a more up-front, collaborative way of working? The proposals that are in the pipeline—the change from the EIAs towards the environmental provision, and particularly local policies versus National Development Management Plans—on balance, do you see them as a good thing?

Jackie Copley: CPRE has been working with the Better Planning Coalition, and that has bodies from housing groups and local councils as well as environmental NGOs; the idea has been to look at having a collective voice to stop fragmentation in the environment sector, so we are coming out with clear asks. In terms of the planning reforms, there were six key asks: democracy, affordable housing—it is very important that we have affordable housing provided—understanding climate change, biodiversity, beauty and heritage, and health and well-being; those are the six guiding principles.

Compromise means what the NPPF is seeking to achieve, which is a balance of economic, social and environmental factors. Unfortunately, the NPPF, as written, is very weighted in favour of housing delivery above and beyond other considerations. Addressing that balance and making sure the environment is more of a priority in the future is an important part. Yes, that is what I see compromise as being, because when I have worked with local groups, even if a development has gone ahead, so long as some improvements to the environmental outcomes have been secured, the process has helped. It has acted as mediation, because they can see that their voices have been heard and they have helped to improve the development. The planning system can yield good outcomes, but at the moment there is a distrust that there is an inherent bias; rather than identifying brownfield, for example, it is identifying more greenfield development.

Baroness Thornhill: Even though brownfield is the top of the hierarchy for development in every plan for decades?

Jackie Copley: Yes, it should be but we are going backwards; we are declining. CPRE does an annual update, and we are seeing more brownfield sites coming forward. Up to 1.2 million houses could be provided on brownfield and the use of it is reduced to 38% of what it was 10 years ago, so the system clearly needs to be refined to enable that change. There are obviously some brownfield sites that have biodiversity value and ought to be allowed to come forward for the environment; that is not an issue. There are brownfield sites in cities that need the investment. It is helpful in terms of getting more sustainable neighbourhoods and enabling walking, cycling and provision of public services. It is too much of a compromise to push development out into rural places and in that sense CPRE would say that, if we get a more robust strategic plan, we will get better outcomes.

Dr Richard Benwell: Lady Thornhill, you have pointed us towards the levelling-up Bill and, if I may, I will make three very quick points about this. Environmental outcome reports could do some good, but we do not like the way that they are being handled at the moment, which is to give Ministers very broad enabling powers without any detail about what would actually happen with the environmental outcome reports. They would replace Environmental Impact Assessments and Strategic Environmental Assessment. They also have the leeway to amend or supersede the habitats regulations. Of course there are ways in which some of those laws could be improved; we have some proposals for how the habitats regulations could be improved to take account of more projects and plans to better integrate adaptation to climate change, for example. It seems disproportionate to give pretty much carte blanche for the Government to come up with its own plan for doing that without setting up proposals for the House in advance. We would like to see, a non-regression clause built in there or more fulsome proposals brought forward to be considered properly by Parliament.

It is worth saying that, in its report released a week and a half ago, the National Infrastructure Commission took stock of major infrastructure developers and asked them whether they would like a bespoke approach in the UK to these systems, and they found the answer was broadly no.

We could end up doing more harm than good by doing this in a broad enabling framework rather than taking a sensible stocktake approach of where the regulations work and where they can be improved.

The other two very quick points on the Levelling-Up and Regeneration Bill would be that you can inform the sorts of compromise that we have been talking about by giving people better say and information in that strategic planning process early on. I point again to the idea of Local Nature Recovery Strategies, which were an excellent innovation in the Environment Act 2021, but they remained incomplete because there is only a very weak duty to have regard to them in making plans and then a further “have regard” duty in integrating those plans into planning decisions. To correct the record, I said before that it was Lord Randall's amendment which would fix that by linking them to the local development plans, but it is Lady Parminter's amendment.

There is an excellent amendment in the name of Lord Randall to implement the Glover proposals for National Parks and AONBs because, if there is anywhere where compromise needs to happen, it is in those places. We have so often seen people's interest in landscape and natural beauty hit up against development need and environmental need. There were excellent proposals made in the Glover Review that have yet to take legislative effect. Amendment 367, I think it is, to the levelling-up Bill would do that by requiring AONBs and National Parks to have nature restoration as one of their purposes and to implement that through their management plans, along with relevant public bodies. It is having that guiding light, duty and purpose that would help unite the family of Defra public bodies around environmental restoration, to then inform compromise on the ground.

The other place that is absolutely vital is, of course, at sea. I do not know whether you are considering planning at sea, but we are aiming to have 50 gigawatts of new renewables over the next couple of decades. That could have a massive effect on the ability of communities to go out and fish, and also on environmentally protected areas. If there is anywhere that we need a better approach to strategic planning in forming individual consenting decisions with top-down nature and renewables goals, it is at sea; this does not stop at the coastline.

Q115 Lord Faulkner of Worcester: Good morning; I would like you both to answer this, if you would. Do you think that the public sufficiently understand the balance between the economic and the social benefits arising from development and potential development? If they do not, what should be done about that?

Dr Richard Benwell: Very briefly, because CPRE know far better than we do on this: there are some really interesting findings from the People's Assembly for Nature that recently reported, with the People's Plan for Nature—a citizen assembly process that looked at some of these questions. What we find from that is that lots of folk have a very instinctive understanding of the need to balance developments against environment. We find that people's concern for the natural environment continues to rate very highly in opinion polls, even in the midst of a cost of living crisis. The issue is always that we also need to balance the needs of future generations and, as Jackie mentioned earlier, the NPPF notionally balances the economy, social concerns, and environment. The presumption for sustainable development tends to do so in a way that gives greater weight to present interests over future interests and that is something that a more strategic approach to incorporating environmental need in the planning system could help to rebalance.

I am not sure if that is what you are getting at, Lord Faulkner, but hopefully it gives an introduction for Jackie's more fulsome answer.

Jackie Copley: CPRE would say that the public very much understands but feels short-changed on delivery of housing and jobs because, when greenfield sites are allowed for housing, it very rarely achieves affordable housing; we have a rural affordable housing shortage. The operation of the NPPF is not achieving what is required. When we look at the standards in terms of energy efficiency and design standard, there has been a drop; people expect there to be new houses coming forward, but there is the issue of location and making sure there is not a compromise too far, that we are not losing irreplaceable habitats.

The Chair: Are these not matters for the local planning authority? The location of the houses and the quantum of affordable housing required, and other Section 106 benefits, are there to be negotiated by the local planning authority.

Jackie Copley: They are but, as I said before, at the moment it is a mandated use of the standard method, unless there is an exceptional circumstance to choose something else. In terms of numbers, it is a centralised approach to the way local authorities establish what the housing requirement is; there is a speculative push.

The Chair: I thought the Government announced a couple of months ago that they were scrapping local housing targets.

Jackie Copley: The proposed changes to the NPPF were for four-year supply rather than a five-year plus buffer, which would be helpful, but I think the local communities are very well aware. A lot of communities are engaged in neighbourhood plans themselves; they do accept and are trying to seek which sites in their locality would be best suited for the purposes of employment and jobs. There is unfortunately this whole narrative going through that a lot of development is being steered to rural locations, or rural fringe, where it would be better located elsewhere. The public is welcoming of growth, jobs and houses, but it is all to do with location and impacts.

If we want to have better environmental impacts, we need to be very careful about what we allow, where and for why. I agree with you—it is a local decision-making process we have—but what we are seeing, in cases where you have an up-to-date local plan, is that, because of the way the housing delivery test operates, more often than not, housing policies are being silenced very quickly. That enables permissions to be sought on greenfield sites never intended for development, so there is a loophole whereby developers can argue sites that are in the land supply out. It is a very difficult prospect for a local authority to say, “Here is our housing land supply, it is robust”, because they are constantly being signed up to a very high target. Even though they have sites in that have gone through Strategic Environmental Assessments and been identified as being the most sustainable sites, there is a constant erosion of the housing land supply, because developers can say, “Well, that one is not coming forward because of deliverability issues” and it is making it very difficult. The point is, if we have sustainable development coming through then that is fabulous, but it is not sustainable; that is what the public does not like.

Lord Faulkner of Worcester: Do you think that your own organisation can do more to spread the message?

Jackie Copley: Yes. CPRE do not get involved in every single planning argument; we have a priority checklist. If it is in the local plan, we do not get involved. There is one issue at the moment in Cheshire East to do with peat; Natural England has recently updated its own guidance and it now has standing advice not to develop peat. That is a moving circumstance where we are now more aware of the impacts of developing on deep peat. Should that be an allocation? That probably needs to be revisited.

I mentioned Local Nature Partnerships before and I think a lot of the public do not know they exist or the good work that they are doing. I wonder if there could be scope for local communities to engage more with Local Nature Partnerships. Often in the application process, developers will say, “We have consulted on our proposals”, but they will typically have gone out in August when most people are away for a two-week window and it is not an engagement. It is more, “This is what we are proposing to do on this site”, and it does not really give the ability for plans to be altered as a consequence of that engagement. I do not quite know how, but I think there could be better mediation and maybe someone like CPRE could be that helping hand. At the end of the day, if we can get win-wins where suitable development is coming through, that is good.

Q116 Lord Mawson: Is the housebuilding sector unfairly bearing the brunt of environmental regulations and community criticism over other significant contributors, such as agriculture?

Just a couple of other points linked to that: is there an overconfidence in the accuracy of a lot of this data that you and others are quoting? I know from experience in our universities that, if suddenly the Government says there is a problem with squirrels and nuts, all this research appears around it because it is all part of their business model. I wonder how much you have looked into those business models and the unintended consequences.

My third point is that much of this has been about what Government can do; is there an overconfidence in what they can do and what are the limits of Government?

Dr Richard Benwell: Gosh, that is a big philosophical question at the end. Government can regulate, communicate, and create taxes and incentives. The Government need to be looking at all those levers to make sure that all responsible sectors are playing their part in nature's recovery. The Government now has a legally binding target to halt the decline of nature by the end of the next Parliament; if it is serious about doing that—if that was not an empty promise—then it will need to concentrate on every major sector of the economy and look at what they can contribute to change. At the moment, sometimes the housebuilding sector gets hit and, as I mentioned before, taking a more strategic approach can help to share out that burden.

What the Government ought to be doing now is looking at the targets that are set for air and water pollution and biodiversity, and allocating the effort needed to achieve those targets to responsible sectors to see what they can do. You are right, the Government can create an enabling, empowering approach for business to make a difference. We have seen that happen in the climate change field, where we now have a trillion pounds of investment in the renewables economy. We are a world-leading player in that field; we need to start to do the same for broader environmental recovery.

When it comes to some of the headline issues about where problems arise, I think about a third of the issue on water pollution comes from development and about 40% comes from agriculture, and the remainder comes from things like urban runoff. There is definitely a major role for the development sector to play in that issue. The same for climate change, where decarbonising the built environment, making sure that we are focused on energy efficiency and efficient new homes, is essential for meeting net zero.

Every sector occasionally feels overburdened. I know that the water sector occasionally feel they get shouldered with all the blame, and farmers individually are asked to do a huge amount for nature. The question is what government can do to stack the incentives so the green choices become the natural and profitable choices in each of those sectors. For the development sector, that means more intelligent planning, making sure that nature recovery is built into the fabric of buildings with net zero and with brilliant ideas like Hannah Bourne-Taylor's swift bricks, and it means rewarding companies who go further to make sustainable design choices early.

Finally, on your question about data, how much confidence do we have? We do not have anywhere near enough information to make the granular choices we need at the moment. What we do know is that the trend for our natural environment is on a downward curve and has been, relentlessly and implacably, for decades. While we may not have the integrity of data that we yet need on the ground—and that is why it is important to invest in that data collection and agencies—what we do know is that if we are serious about creating a liveable future and avoiding extinctions and further decline of wildlife, then serious effort is going to be needed across every polluting sector of the economy to turn things around.

Jackie Copley: Yes; I think you covered everything quite well. Just to add, CPRE would say that the housebuilding sector is not unfairly burdened. There has been an issue with smaller housebuilders—there has been a shrinkage in terms of the ability of smaller local builders to get involved in the market—and maybe there is something that could be done in terms of incentives and grants to enable more entrance.

Again, a land use strategy might help to fairly attribute responsibility in terms of land management, agriculture and housing developers to understand issues. Previously, successive Governments have been involved with quite serious urban regeneration programmes. They have been properly resourced; they have had political commitments and they have yielded very good results. Clearly, housing completions are a priority for the NPPF and houses are getting delivered. If a similar approach was put to environmental outcomes, we probably would have a better performance against those. Perhaps local authorities should reintroduce brownfield targets to focus intention so that they are actually progressing urban regenerations at a better rate. In places like the north-west, the north-east, Yorkshire and Humberside—those areas that have an industrial legacy—they are hard hit. They need investments in central urban places. It is a win-win, we would get the delivery and we would get the environmental outcomes as well. Yes, I appreciate the Government has a limit, but a recommendation for an integrated land use plan that cuts across both departments would helpfully balance responsibility.

Q117 The Chair: We are doing well in terms of time as we come to the last question, which was really trying to tease out of you the extent to which we could reduce the amount of litigation that is involved in planning and environmental disputes; what would give community groups greater confidence in decisions made by responsible authorities and dissuade them from the need for seeking legal redress through the courts?

Jackie Copley: There needs to be integrity in information. When development requirements are planned, it needs to be done on robust data; it needs to be up-to-date evidence because that is the best available information, and it should inform projections for building in the future. That is one thing. The second is understanding that local people need to have early involvement, because what often happens is that you have a local plan process, and then all of a sudden somebody is made aware that that a site is coming forward for development and they have missed the opportunity. We cannot even help because that democratic process has already happened and the principle of planning is there. What you can perhaps do is try to seek better environmental outcomes as in design or retention of trees. Early community engagement is the key.

The Chair: Having been responsible for local plans at a local planning authority—and there are others around the table with similar local government experience—I can say everything possible is done to encourage and stimulate local engagement at the earliest possible opportunity. There are always people who come forward years later and say, “I had no idea”, and sometimes it is because they have only just moved in.

Jackie Copley: Yes, true.

The Chair: They were not there to be consulted, but you have to take that into account as well; the population is not static. Local government certainly do everything they can. I am looking towards at least two others with that experience.

Baroness Thornhill: Chair, even when you do it absolutely and you think that you have nailed down a site next to a railway station and there is big community involvement, when the actual planning application comes through it is still mayhem.

Jackie Copley: Do you have anything to add?

Dr Richard Benwell: That was a great answer from Jackie. It is worth adding that, with major and critical national infrastructure projects in particular, early application of environmental requirements, proper data gathering, making sure that habitats regulations assessments are done early, up front and openly—that is a proven way to save time and money. It is usually when those things are left until late in the system for major infrastructure development that we start to see legal challenges creeping in which lead to delays and excess costs.

The Chair: But are they? With major infrastructure development, you would normally be going through not a local planning process but say a DCO process, which is front loaded in terms of all of those inquiries. If you were lacking a habitats assessment, for example, the inspectors would not normally admit the DCO application—our specialist adviser is a former planning inspector who sat on some of them. They would send you back to start again until you produced the documents.

Dr Richard Benwell: It is sometimes about the quality of the evidence rather than when the steps have been taken.

Jackie Copley: Yes, I would also like to mention third party involvement in certain assessments because sometimes, when developer-led assessments have been provided, they are very site-specific. Sometimes the impacts to nearby nature have not been fully appreciated and you get community groups locking horns with the developer over the information because they may be aware of ground-nesting lapwings or something that has not been picked up on the survey. The ability for some environmental reports to be included might be something that could improve the process.

I cover the geography of Lancaster, Greater Manchester and Liverpool City Region; there is the Greater Manchester Ecology Unit in Manchester and they have the Merseyside Environmental Advisory Service in Liverpool, which are third parties. They look at and approve the process that a developer would choose, but not always the actual data that has gone into the assessments, and that is where some of the planning arguments can become unstuck. I do not know if, in the future, there is any way of having a mechanism where local people can be involved at an early stage so that their issues relating to site-specific species can be drawn upon rather than later on in the process.

The Chair: Does it concern either of you that the Government are so woefully missing their housing target? Jackie, I suspect I can answer the question for you because you would say that you do not agree with the housing target, and you have explained why. What can be justified as a lower number?

Jackie Copley: I would say that whatever the figures justify is the number. If it was double, then where are those houses coming forward? If they are coming forward in urban environments and fulfilling affordable housing needs, that would be a more sensible approach. But, it is ultimately for transparency and accountability, whatever the national figure is, it needs to be justified. As far as I am aware, the 300,000 figure has never been justified.

Baroness Warwick of Undercliffe: Excuse me, Chair, but is it not a particular target but rather the lack of housebuilding full stop that is the issue? Almost every commentator or organisation indicates that there is a major shortage, and specifically of social housing.

Jackie Copley: In most authorities where I have been involved in the performance of housing completions, using the housing delivery test, there are targets being achieved. CPRE does not want to stop houses coming forward; it is just a case of where and making decisions about location to make sure you are getting the most sustainable sites.

Baroness Thornhill: Jackie, how do you stop that? I get fed up every time I hear, “Oh, we want the right homes in the right places”. For those of us with local government experience, that tends to mean, “Not in my backyard”. I understand your argument and I absolutely agree with the hierarchy that we have, but how do we make that shift given that the infrastructure levy is actually going to reward developers who build in nice greenfield sites because that is where the highest value—on the current modelling that has been done—is reputed to be? Brownfield sites, certainly in the north of England and parts of the country that need the better housing, are going to be very low value sites and they are not going to get their moneys.

Jackie Copley: You will be aware of the Oliver Letwin report; he undertook an inquiry looking to see what the issues were. CPRE undertook a report in 2016 where Glenigan—an independent consultant—did research looking at over a thousand development projects, and they actually time-tracked them. Those that were on brownfield land came forward 30 weeks in advance, so the myth that brownfield sites can have abnormal costs or issues that stop them coming forward was borne not to be the case.

There are issues of some larger development concerns—not progressing development in accordance with the permissioned land that they have. It is not necessarily one for the environmental sector, but for the actual house building sector. If you have large concerns, sat on land with permissions, why are those permissions not coming forward? That could be for a range of issues to do with labour shortages; inflation; the market is jittery, so if it feels there is a recession, it will not bring forward houses as quickly as it perhaps it otherwise would. There are also issues about maintaining house prices, not undermining unit value by oversupplying. It is not necessarily an environmental point; it can be issues among the [housing] sector itself.

Lord Mawson: You also have some local authorities encouraging dependency cultures, which actually prevent land values developing, which needs to happen in the north of England to really track investment. The blame is not in any one place; it is quite a complex mixture of things.

I agree with you about collaboration; there needs to be understanding at a deeper level and collaboration between all parties at a very early stage. The problem with the machine we have at the moment is that it sets one against another, unintentionally, actually at a very early stage.

The Chair: With that very valuable point, I am going to draw this public evidence session to a close. We have run on beyond our formal questions, but it was very valuable. We are very grateful to both of you for the time that you have given us.