My Lords, I will not get drawn into the geopolitical issues of international trade on the planning Bill, but I will address the points in the Amendment.

The Government shares the ambition of the noble Lord, Lord Offord, and the noble Baroness, Lady Bloomfield, who moved his amendment, to make nuclear development faster and more cost effective, and the plea of the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, for SMRs. My noble friend Lady Hayman mentioned AMRs as well, which are important. Quite simply, we cannot grow the economy in the way that we want to without rapidly tackling the clean energy issue on all fronts, including nuclear. That is about not only clean energy but providing us with energy security and lower energy prices, which will help not only businesses in our country but households as well. It is important that we get on with that.

I fear that the solutions proposed in this amendment—I appreciate that it is a probing amendment—would potentially invite problems of their own, and risk undoing the growth we have seen in public support for new nuclear. I look first at allowing the Secretary of State to disregard environmental impact assessment requirements, where doing so would

“secure the provision of the generating station in an economic, efficient, proportionate and timely manner”.

We should remember that environmental assessments include not just impacts on wildlife but also take account of the impact on communities—noise, air quality, human health, and so on.

An application for a new nuclear power station will include proposals for mitigation measures designed to limit or remove any significant adverse environmental effects that it would have. This amendment could remove any requirements for those mitigation measures, which simply means that the significant impacts would not be managed. Like the noble Lord, we recognise that environmental assessment is in need of reform, which is why we are already carefully considering how to bring forward environmental outcome reports that will allow us to ensure that EIA is proportionate and to reduce the risk that these assessments are used to unduly delay development coming forward.

Allowing the Secretary of State to exempt nuclear power station projects both from the habs regulations and from any requirement to pay into an EDP could leave our most important protected sites and species at risk of irreparable harm. Simply providing for these regulations to be disregarded is probably the wrong approach and risks removing the need for even the most common-sense consideration of environmental impacts and actions to address these.

As I hope I have already set out to noble Lords in these debates, the nature restoration fund will allow developers to discharge their environmental obligations around protected sites and species more quickly and with greater impact, accelerating the delivery of infrastructure at the same time as improving the environment.

The planning regime must support new nuclear, so we have introduced a transformative draft national policy statement on nuclear energy. It is important, therefore, that both this policy statement and the overarching national policy statement for energy are considered when deciding applications for new nuclear power stations. This amendment would remove the centrality of these national policy statements in determining applications for those power stations, which would only slow down and confuse the decision-making process. The habitats regulations must be applied sensibly, which is why the overarching national policy statement for energy has already introduced the concept of critical national priority projects. This creates a presumption that the importance of low-carbon energy infrastructure is such that it is capable of amounting to imperative reasons for overriding public interest. We recognise that we need to go further and the nuclear regulatory framework—my noble friend Lord Hunt, referred to it, I believe—must avoid increasing costs where possible. We have therefore launched the Nuclear Regulatory Taskforce, which will report later this year.

The Government remain firmly of the view that, when it comes to development and the environment, we can do better than the status quo, which too often sees both infrastructure delivery and nature recovery stall. I hope that, with this explanation, the noble Baroness, Lady Bloomfield, on behalf of the noble Lord, Lord Offord of Garvel, will be able to withdraw the amendment.