Labour MP Warns: Watered-Down Environmental Plans Are ‘A Dead End’

England’s nature is one of the very few things the public is near-unanimous in its affection for. Nature makes 82% of adults happy – approval ratings us politicians could only dream of.

That’s what makes the government’s latest misstep on environmental protections so baffling. An unpopular government picking fights with something the public overwhelmingly loves is a dead end. You won’t win.

Ministers are proposing to weaken the Habitats Regulations following a series of flawed recommendations in the Fingleton Nuclear Regulatory Review.

This follows months of drawn-out rows over the government’s Planning and Infrastructure Bill. Ministers initially pitched what amounted to a developers’ charter – ripping up environmental protections and handing developers a licence to pay cash to trash nature.

Unsurprisingly, attempting to bonfire protections a majority of the public already consider insufficient, while picking a fight with the millions of members of the Wildlife Trusts, RSPB, Woodland Trust and others, did not work out.

Ministers begrudgingly accepted concessions, including key points I was suspended for having the temerity to propose, and dropped the “cash to trash” principle.

It beggars belief that, having learned this lesson the hard way, the government is now seeking to resurrect the same failed logic through the Fingleton Review. It would abandon the long-standing like-for-like principle, allowing environmental damage in one place to be waved through in return for a fixed fee and vague promises of restoration elsewhere.

It sounds like the start of a bad joke: how many ministers does it take to realise you can’t pick up and relocate irreplaceable habitats and at-risk species like a car park or a bus stop?

Fingleton goes on to recommend removing the duty on Local Authorities to support National Park’s and National Landscape’s. The recommendations rest on a combination of flawed logic and outright nonsense about the development of Hinckley C.

Fingleton overstates the cost of a fish deterrent system by a factor of fourteen. Nature, repeatedly framed by ministers as the cause of spiralling costs, accounts for just 0.1% of the project’s increased budget. And while the review claims only a handful of fish a year would be saved by the deterrent system, the figures rely on analysis from the developer EDF. The Environment Agency’s assessment puts the true figure at 4.6 million fish per year – 182 million fish over the next 60 years.

The truth is that considerable time and expense could have been avoided had the project not been sited on one of our most sensitive and internationally significant habitats and accepted from the outset that protecting our natural heritage is non-negotiable. The answer to that failure is not to rip up environmental protections that exist to prevent ecological disaster. A more honest appraisal might have a little more to say about the role of developer incompetence.

We must be clear: our natural environment is already at breaking point. The UK is one of the most nature-depleted countries in the world, with one in six species now at risk of extinction. The Wildlife Trusts are right to warn the government not to turn a nature crisis into a catastrophe.

I spent years working in the charity sector to protect our green spaces – it always felt like an uphill battle under a Conservative government receiving massive donations from housing developers. The election of a Labour government – a party on the side of people and planet was meant to change that.

As the Office for Environmental Protection sounds the alarm about government failures to meaningfully progress towards statutory targets for restoring the health of our rivers, it could not be clearer that we need to stop wringing our hands in sorrow and then continuing on in the same destructive habits because we lack the will and imagination to do better. We need to start seriously putting our money where our mouth is.

So, it’s time to say enough is enough and set out our red lines for nature:

• No further weakening of environmental protections
• No funding cuts to environmental bodies
• No More Collapsing Biodiversity: A fully funded nature rescue plan to meet legally binding recovery targets

We’ve got to be honest about what we’re up against. The developer lobby is well-organised, deep-pocketed, and wants environmental protections, along with democratic rights in the planning system, filleted for the sake of easier profits.

Our strength lies in the millions of people who understand that nature is the bedrock of our economy, that the nature crisis is inseparable from the climate crisis, and that our green spaces, rivers, national parks, ancient woodlands, every hill and hedgerow brings joy and wellbeing to people every single day. They’ve got millionaires; we’ve got the millions on our side.

It’s time to silence the broken record blaming wildlife for problems it didn’t create. To boost prosperity, build houses, or deliver energy, we don’t need to cut standards, corrode protections, or silence the voices of those raising concerns. That approach will fail and leave our country trashed. There are no green shoots of growth here – only red lines crossed for nature.