This article was first published on The ENDS Report on Tuesday 1 April 2025.
---
The Planning and Infrastructure Bill, which held its Second Reading on 24 March, is Labour’s major reform to England’s planning system, promising streamlined consents for infrastructure, 1.5 million homes, and economic revitalisation.
Its overarching aim is laudable. Yet, as conservation scientists and legal experts concerned about the ecological crisis, we urge MPs to scrutinise ‘Part III’ of the bill with alarm as the draft legislation progresses to its next stages. This segment of the bill, ostensibly designed to reconcile development with nature recovery, threatens to exacerbate ecological loss, while impeding the housebuilding revolution that the government says it is aiming to catalyse.
The wider bill should proceed, but Part III must be paused for consultation, as is usual for major policy changes such as this.
The UK is one of the world’s most nature-depleted nations. Since 1970, species populations in this country have declined by nearly 20% on average, with 16% of our species now at risk of extinction, according to Natural England. Against this backdrop, the Planning and Infrastructure Bill risks entrenching, rather than reversing, nature’s decline.
The element of the bill related to nature – Part III – has the laudable aim of integrating development with strategic nature restoration at a landscape scale. We agree with this aim, but as currently drafted, it is undermined by fundamental flaws in its design.
The core mechanism for delivering this strategic restoration is Environmental Delivery Plans (EDP), administered by Natural England and decided, and brought into legal effect, by the secretary of state for housing, alone. These enable developers to pay a (currently unquantified) levy into a fund for strategic nature recovery projects, without ensuring projects are implemented, and without measuring their environmental impact.
This sidesteps the Environment Act’s five Environmental Policy Principles, which the whole of the government needs to abide by, particularly the principles of prevention, rectification at source, and the precautionary principle. It does this by decoupling compensation for nature loss from the measured harm that a development is causing, and, on the face of it, removing any requirement for measurement at all.
The levy, meanwhile, burdens developers with inevitably complex and opaque costs, potentially delaying projects and stifling nascent private nature markets critical for funding biodiversity enhancement.
The Bill enables an EDP to be created for any environmental feature that may be impacted by development, such as a protected species or nutrient pollution. However, this approach neglects ecosystems’ interconnected services - water purification, carbon sequestration, pollination, and climate resilience.
This reductionist approach ignores nature’s holistic role in human wellbeing, a cornerstone of contemporary ecological science. Worse, the absence of integration with climate planning is a major hole in the framework. EDPs must have regard to the Environmental Improvement Plan but not the Carbon Budget Delivery Plan - despite land use driving 25% of global emissions - and each new home emitting 50 tonnes of embodied CO2.
This silos biodiversity from climate action, squandering the potential of nature-based solutions to tackle the twin crises.
The economic toll compounds these ecological failings. Part III’s dual regulatory burden - complex levies and unpredictable needs for inconsistent surveys - will escalate costs and delays. Compulsory purchase orders will deter landowners from voluntary conservation, draining levy funds and risking judicial reviews.
Housing delivery, an important national priority, may falter as developers await clarity on EDPs and levy schedules, potentially years distant. The highly respected Chartered Institute of Ecologists and Environmental Managers (CIEEM) also warns of ecological harm and system strain, deeming Part III a retreat from existing protections. CIEEM highlights the dangers of untested rollout – devoid of consultation, impact assessments or pilots – which may even court illegality under the Bern Convention.
MPs should now demand answers as the bill travels through the Commons. Why hasten Part III without consultation, impact assessment, evidence, dialogue or testing?
Contrast this with the introduction of biodiversity net gain, which was carefully tested and rolled out over years, so that planning authorities and developers could factor the new requirements into their strategies in an organised way.
There are other questions too. How does the bill avert harm to ecosystems and promote the nature recovery we so desperately need in this country? How does it align with the “spirit and substance” of the Climate and Nature Bill – which ministers have said they will deliver?
Pausing Part III is not obstructionism. It is a plea for due process, given the scale and impact of this section of the bill could have on the developer experience, our economy, and our environment. We need to ensure that, as we deliver the housing the country needs, we also safeguard a natural world that is already struggling under so many pressures – including, increasingly, climate change.
We urge the government to consult widely, assess the bill’s impacts, and craft a solution that honours our commitment to halting and reversing the loss of nature in this country – for all our sakes.
Prof. Dame E.J. Milner-Gulland is Oxford’s Tasso Leventis Professor of Biodiversity, directs the Interdisciplinary Centre for Conservation Science, with a research focus on nature positive, species and ecosystem recovery, and tackling the drivers of biodiversity loss worldwide.
Natalie Duffus is a DPhil student at the University of Oxford with a research focus on the ecological outcomes of Biodiversity Net Gain.
Sophus zu Ermgassen is an ecological economist at the University of Oxford with a research focus in biodiversity finance and sustainability.
Alexa Culver is a lawyer with RSK Biocensus, specialising in the environment and nature-markets.
---
