Catastrophic consequences for nature

Letter published by the West Sussex County Times, 5 September 2024.

Dear Sir,

Catastrophic consequences

In a letter to ‘Nature Conservation Organisations’ dated 20 July 2024, Angela Rayner MP, Deputy Prime Minister and Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, and Steve Reed MP, Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, state that

“Nature recovery remains a top priority alongside the need to overhaul the planning system”, caveated with the flawed and ill-judged assertion that:

“Environmental assessment and case-by-case negotiations of mitigation and compensation measures often slow down the delivery of much needed housing and infrastructure”.

Could it be that Labour intends to adopt and impose the developer-driven Proposal 16 of the Conservative Government’s ‘Planning for the Future’ White Paper, August 2020?

Proposal 16 set out an intent to use “National and local level data made available to authorities, communities, and applicants in digital form” in place of site-specific on-site surveys, without which the impact of development on nature cannot be properly assessed.

Given that case-by-case consideration of mitigation and compensation measures underpinned by up-to-date data is essential for sound decision-taking, and that national and local biodiversity and ecology data sources do not have data for each and every potential development site and the data that these sources can provide is often out-of-date, removing the requirement for on-site surveys and survey-informed mitigation and compensation would have catastrophic consequences, not only for nature, biodiversity and ecology, but also for the nation’s economy and health.

Angela Rayner and Steve Reed should read ‘The Economics of Biodiversity: The Dasgupta Review’ (July 2021) with its fundamental conclusion that “nature, and the biodiversity that underpins it, ultimately sustains our economies, livelihoods and well-being, and so our decisions must take into account the true value of the goods and services we derive from it”.

Yours faithfully,

Dr R F Smith

Trustee CPRE Sussex