The Lord Bishop of Norwich:

Moved by The Lord Bishop of Norwich

At end insert “, and do propose Amendment 38B in lieu—

38B: After Clause 52, insert the following new Clause—“Chalk streams(1) The Secretary of State must, within 12 months of the day on which this Act is passed, by regulations made by statutory instrument, provide guidance to strategic planning authorities on how they must, in delivering their planning functions, take into account the need to define, protect and enhance chalk stream habitats.(2) A statutory instrument containing regulations under this section may not be made unless a draft of the instrument has been laid before, and approved by a resolution of, each House of Parliament.””

My Lords, I am grateful for the strong support that my earlier Amendment 38 gained on Report. Chalk streams are globally rare habitats of which we have 85% in England. We simply must protect them and other irreplaceable habitats, because we have lost so much of this nation’s nature already.

I pay tribute to the Minister for her hard work on the Bill and for engaging with me, the noble Baronesses, Lady Grender and Lady Willis, and the noble Earl, Lord Caithness, together with Minister Pennycook, the Minister for Housing and Planning. I know that the noble Baroness values chalk streams in her native Hertfordshire. I am grateful that she recognises the positive intent of this amendment, and I listened very carefully to the three commitments that she gave. But I am still concerned, even with those commitments.

First, the commitment around local nature recovery strategies is a positive thing, but the problem is that local nature recovery strategies do not cover the whole catchment area of a river. The flow of the whole river is so vital for these ecosystems and for biodiversity. There can be abstraction in some places but then pollution in others.

Secondly, there is mention of including

“explicit recognition of chalk streams in the new suite of national policies for decision making

I noticed the phrase “explicit recognition”. That is different from “explicit protection”, which would be so much stronger. Will the Minister state that protection is needed, not just recognition, in these national policies?

Finally, while the vital white paper on water is awaited by your Lordships’ House, and then a subsequent Bill, the problem is that the time keeps slipping into the future. Time is of essence for the protection of our chalk streams.

I am sorry to be a little troublesome, but with this amendment I am seeking to elevate statutory protection for chalk streams, which should be protected outside of and above the planning system. The intent of my amendment is to ensure clarity and certainty over what developers and planners must do when development is proposed that would adversely impact on chalk streams.

At present, developers are understandably confused by chalk streams, and indeed other irreplaceable habitats. There is no clear statutory defined list of chalk streams and no consistent approach to their protection. Instead, we are relying on conflicting, shifting and overlapping non-statutory planning policies to protect some of our most cherished natural heritage. This adds cost, risk and uncertainty for developers and puts significant pressure on an already overloaded planning system.

Chalk streams, like other irreplaceable habitats, are too important to be swept up into the maelstrom of competing interests fought out across the ever-shifting sands of planning policy. Irreplaceable habitats need elevated and nationally consistent protections so that developers and planners know exactly where they stand—and that is what I am calling for today.

My amendment would ensure a clear, consistent national approach to protecting these jewels in the crown—an approach that could not be overridden at the whim of, say, some future Minister, for short-term political convenience. This would also give reassurance to an increasingly concerned public that these precious national nature treasures should not be damaged or destroyed.

Housing and infrastructure development needs to fly in formation with nature. I look forward to the debate and the Minister’s response, although I may then wish to test the will of the House. I beg to move.

My Lords, Motion K1 is in my name. I have a whole speech written but I am not going to give it because I greatly appreciate the words that came from the Minister.

The concerns around the EDPs are critical. Even this morning I had many emails in my inbox from all walks of life—from builders, nature conservation people and even other Peers—saying, “Please push on this one”. These EDPs are a very ambitious, bold new framework and we simply do not know how successful they will be. Therefore, this Amendment is to say, please can we try it on the thing that is the biggest blockage first, then sequentially work on it once we have the evidence base? The Minister, other Peers and I had a very constructive meeting and an exchange of letters. The Government have listened in this case. We will start with nutrients and build from that, but we will learn on the way with the evidence. It is very important that this evidence comes back to this House and that an independent body looks at that evidence base, so that Natural England is not marking its own homework. That has always been a concern for many.

I thank the Minister for such helpful discussions. I believe that we will end up understanding how EDPs will work to effect for the biggest blockers, but for nature as well.

I want to speak briefly to Motion K1. I too will not be giving the speech that I prepared, in the light of the assurances from the Minister, for which I am very grateful as this is a very important area. However, I hope that she can give a couple of clarifications.

First, the Minister mentioned public consultation on EDPs. How will that work? This independent evaluation of the evidence is so important, so it would be good to hear exactly how that public consultation will be done. It is fantastic that, as my noble friend Lady Willis just mentioned, the evidence is being assessed by an independent body, but who exactly is doing the monitoring and gathering the evidence? Is it Natural England, or are independent bodies doing it? Who is then assessing the evidence? Is that independently done?

Secondly, over what period is the monitoring of these first EDPs to be done before the report comes back to the House? It is important that we get the longer-term evidence before we commit to any more. The example of great crested newts has been given multiple times. It is a great species for doing district-wide licensing, but it has specific characteristics which means it is good for that, and we have a lot of knowledge and good data. The ponds for them are dug before destruction of their existing habitat, and there is a minimum 25-year commitment to those ponds. It is not clear that this will be the case for the new EDPs. It would be great to hear about the evidence-gathering periods and what period is anticipated for the commitments.

My Lords, I rise to support very strongly Motion H1 in the name of the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Norwich. I have two concerns about the Government’s response. The first is the issue of protection. That is not present at the moment; it is severely lacking. I have visited chalk streams and seen streams that are probably beyond recovery. It is still happening, so there is a real need for urgency to protect the rest of what we have, and perhaps to instigate measures to recover them.

Secondly, the Minister mentioned two organisations that, in my view as a Green, have been largely discredited in their protection of the environment: Natural England and the Environment Agency. Somehow, neither of them actually does what it is meant to do, and certainly not within the parameters of what one would expect. This is urgent: you cannot just keep leaving it to consultation and finding out more facts and details—it has to happen.

My Lords, I thank the Minister for the considerable amount of time she has given to so many of us in these discussions, particularly on Motions H1 and K1 in this group.

First, on K1—this is the wrong order, but I am going to do it that way anyway—I particularly welcome this new and additional commitment from the Dispatch Box to concentrating on nutrient pollution. That is a very welcome development today, and I support the noble Baroness, Lady Willis, in her response to that.

With regard to H1, sadly, we feel there is still progress to be made. The Minister will be aware that the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Norwich has looked at and reflected on the criticism made in the House of Commons of spatial development strategies and their use, and has therefore provided us with an Amendment this evening which uses guidance, backed by regulation. We believe that this approach is technically right and that it is possible to do this.

The second point is about time being of the essence. The Minister expressed frustration at the pace at which protection of chalk streams was moving under the previous Government. We are very much at the 11th hour, and time is so precious that embedding something in this legislation, even now, rather than waiting for a white paper or a Bill next year—goodness knows how long that will take—is the very kernel of the argument for pressing the House of Commons to think again.

We are here in numbers. If the right reverend Prelate decides to test the opinion of the House, I hope that the Conservative Benches will join with us and the Cross Benches and express a strong opinion on this.

My Lords, I rise to speak very briefly to Motion K1. I join others in thanking the Minister for her statement from the Dispatch Box, which meets many of the concerns we had, and for the time she and other Ministers spent discussing this with us.

I just wanted to allude to one part of her statement, on the development of guidance. A lot of the devil will be in the detail of how builders actually receive guidance and respond to it. One is particularly concerned about small builders, who do not have a legal team to interpret the guidance or spend a lot of time trying to understand it.

My noble friend Lady Willis and I have spent quite a lot of time trying to understand how the pieces of the jigsaw fit together: the habitat regulations, the nature restoration fund, the EDPs and the biodiversity net gain requirements. We have produced our own flow chart, the Minister has provided flow charts, and we are still somewhat in the dark.

It is of course possible that the combined brains of two Oxford professors are not enough to tackle the complexity of this matter, but we have given it quite a lot of effort. Therefore, I very much welcome the Minister’s stating she will involve us both in helping to simplify the guidance in a way that will actually make it useful and practically helpful to builders and developers, particularly those running small businesses.

My Lords, I too thank the Minister for the discussions and assurances she has given us on Motion K1. I was rather fond of Motion K1 and would have preferred the amendments in it being in the Bill—it represented a fair compromise. The reasons why it is very important are threefold. One is partly to provide some pacing for Natural England, because there is a real potential for it to overextend itself and not do any of the EDPs very well as a result.

Secondly, there needs to be proper evaluation, because this is a very new and untried system. The monitoring and evaluation should be not just about biodiversity but about whether this works for developers, because the whole point of the exercise is to try to unlock delays, and it is quite a complicated system for developers to operate in. So, on the early ones, we need to really examine our conscience and see whether they are delivering both for biodiversity and for speeding up the development process.

Thirdly, clarity for developers is important, and I very much welcome the fact that there will be a pipeline in the annual report that will enable developers to see what EDPs are likely to come up for development in the future. The usual situation, of course, is that when middle ground has been filled by concessions and assurances, you ask yourself why they cannot just be expressed in statute, since they meet many of the points that we have raised.

However, I recognise that this is probably as far as we will get on this one. I welcome the assurances and concessions that have come in the direction of the concerns that we have expressed.

My Lords, on Motion K1, I want underline what the noble Baroness, Lady Freeman, said about the need for independence in the monitoring and evaluation. The noble Baroness, Lady Willis, referred to it, but I am not sure that the Minister did so—forgive me if I missed it. Can we please hear from her on this, just to put it beyond doubt?

On the remarks of the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, about the need for flowcharts, we are definitely going to need a definitive agreed one.

My Lords, if chalk streams are in a moment of crisis, this Amendment does not bounce the Secretary of State into action. It simply says:

“The Secretary of State must, within 12 months of the day on which this Act is passed, by regulations made by statutory instrument, provide guidance”.

So, from day one, the Secretary of State has 12 months to do it. If it is urgent, what is put here is absolutely necessary in the sense that 85% of the entire world’s chalk streams are in England and the habitat could easily be damaged. Within those 12 months, the Secretary of State can consult and bring together a team of people who will give him good guidance as to how he can put it in a statutory instrument. I have read the House of Commons reasons for disagreeing this. I think they just need to get on with it.

My Lords, we on these Benches and many other noble Lords have challenged the necessity for Part 3 throughout the Bill’s passage through your Lordships’ House. The Government have made a number of amendments, which have improved the Bill, to reintroduce nature protections and give more comfort on the Bill’s operation in relation to nature and the rural economy. We also welcome the Minister’s assurances and commitments around the use of compulsory purchase powers.

However, we supported the restriction of EDPs to nutrient neutrality, water and air quality in Committee and on Report, as well as protections for our chalk streams. The application of nutrient neutrality rules by Natural England is the major restriction on planning related to the natural environment. Before I go on, I again draw the House’s attention to my registered interests as a farmer, landowner, forester, and a developer of housing, commercial premises, and renewable energy.

I am very grateful to the noble Baronesses, Lady Willis of Summertown and Lady Young of Old Scone, for pursuing these restrictions on EDPs, and all those who supported them. The Minister has been generous with her time and that of her officials throughout the passage of this Bill, and our discussions around these and other amendments have been thoughtful and constructive. I am grateful for the Government’s commitments and concessions laid out today. They may not go as far as we might have wished. However, these commitments will allow Parliament to scrutinise the progress of EDPs and hold the Government to account over their extension—although I doubt, as a hereditary Peer, that I will be here to be part of that.

I want to put two challenges related to nutrient neutrality to the Minister. The Government refused to accept my amendments that sought not to reimpose habitats regulations on Ramsar sites. My Division was narrowly disagreed with. I have made the Government aware that, since that debate, this issue is already restricting planning consent, with a further 550 homes likely to be blocked in Somerset, as the council anticipates the reintroduction of those regulations in this Bill. What consideration has the Minister given to preventing the Bill blocking new housebuilding in this way?

Natural England provided some interesting data in response to freedom of information requests. In 2023, it promised Ministers to unlock 40,000 homes from nutrient neutrality restrictions with £33.5 million of taxpayer funding. In responding to this freedom of information request, it disclosed that it has spent over £28 million, including over £4 million on administration, and generated enough units to unlock only 11,000 homes. The scrutiny of these EDPs will need to be forensic and rigorous before Natural England should be allowed and trusted to attempt them in far more complicated areas.

I agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Willis, that the Government have made thoughtful concessions. We on these Benches are satisfied that this will provide a good opportunity for scrutiny.

Chalk streams face urgent and growing pressures, as others have laid out in this debate, yet the tools we rely on to protect them are still not fully in place. The Government have pointed to local nature recovery strategies as part of the solution, but without the long-promised regulations giving them real weight in the planning system, they simply do not have the bite required. Given the scale of the threat from development footprints, pollution and overabstraction, we cannot afford further delay, nor can we wait until 2030 for the abstraction licence reforms to take effect. We must ensure that spatial development strategies can direct development away from vulnerable chalk stream catchments. It is a practical and necessary step to prevent irreversible harm to these globally rare habitats. Although we support Amendment 38B’s intent, we would not be able to support it in a Division today, for the reasons laid out by my noble friend Lady Scott, but we will look to find other avenues to push forward this agenda.

My Lords, I am very grateful to all noble Lords who have contributed to this debate, but I want also to give a general statement of thanks to everybody who has engaged with this Bill. We have discussed a huge variety of topics and gone through some very technical issues. I have been very grateful for noble Lords’ patience as I have sought to find answers to the questions that have arisen during our debates, but also for the willingness—which is the best aspect of this House—to move these debates forward constructively and helpfully. I have really appreciated that, and I am very grateful for the many meetings that we have had and the late nights that we have sat over the course of this Bill. I give you all my great thanks for that work.

I will respond now to some of the points raised in the debate. The right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Norwich mentioned that local nature recovery strategies do not capture the catchment area of a river. He points to the exact reason why we think the water white paper and the Bill that will follow it are vital for the proper protection of chalk streams that we are all seeking. We know the main issues facing chalk streams. I cannot remember who talked about it—I think it was the noble Baroness, Lady Jones—but I too have stood in more than one chalk stream, because I live in Hertfordshire, where we have a lot of them, and I know that the issues of abstraction and pollution cannot be addressed in this way. They need to be addressed through the forthcoming water Bill, and my colleagues in Defra are keen to do that. The National Planning Policy Framework, which sets out planning policies and decisions, should protect chalk streams as valued landscapes and sites of biodiversity value, and local plans should identify, map and safeguard them as local wildlife-rich habitats.

I liked the phrase that the right reverend Prelate used, which was that housing and development should fly in formation with nature. I totally agree. I hope that, as we have gone through the process of the Bill, noble Lords will have noted that it is the Government’s intention, as we pursue the building of homes and infrastructure, to see a win-win for both nature and development in order to deliver what we need while protecting the important natural resources around us.

I am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Willis, for her remarks. I know that the concerns around EDPs are real. She spoke about our ambitious and bold new framework, but we have listened. In local government we have a test-and-learn approach, because we all learn from each other as well as from things we have done ourselves. I hope the noble Baroness and other Peers will agree that the commitments I have set out today enable us to do that with EDPs as well. I am grateful to her and the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, for all the work that they have done on this issue. Their flow chart was a great help. I was not trying to mark their homework, and I hope they will forgive me; we were just trying to expand the flow chart that they had made, to make it, I hope, more helpful. We will continue to work with them on that.

The noble Baroness, Lady Freeman, asked about consultation. Natural England is required to consult the public and any public authority that it considers relevant on a draft EDP for a period of at least 28 working days. Natural England must seek the views of relevant local planning authorities as part of its consultation. I am afraid it is not possible to give a timeframe for when we will return to the House ahead of the first EDP being developed. However, the noble Baroness will be aware that each EDP will need to include monitoring requirements that will form part of the draft EDP when put out for consultation, so she will see the timeframe set out as we bring those EDPs forward.

The noble Baroness, Lady Jones, said she did not like the Environmental Audit Committee or the Office for Environmental Protection, the organisations that I was looking to, to work with Natural England. Natural England will have the data, but those organisations will help provide the scrutiny for this. Without using those organisations, I do not know where we go with that, but I hope we will be able to convince her that they are organisations that can do this effectively. We are willing to listen to any suggestions that she may have.

I am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Grender, for her welcome for the EDPs issue. I understand that she may have ongoing concerns on chalk streams, although I hope I have reassured her on some of those points.

The noble Lord, Lord Krebs, referred to the plethora we now have of habitat regs, EDPs and biodiversity net gain. We need to simplify the guidance on this, and I hope that he will continue to work with us on that mission.

My noble friend Lady Young spoke about clarity for developers. That is exactly what we are trying to deliver as part of the Bill, and I am grateful to all Peers who have helped us to do that.

I hope I have reassured the noble Lord, Lord Cromwell, on the independence of scrutiny. We want to use organisations that are well respected to help with the scrutiny of the EDPs.

I will reply in writing to the noble Lord, Lord Roborough, on the habitat regs on Ramsar sites in Somerset. On the issue of Natural England data and unlocking homes, these things have a cumulative effect, so I hope that the money that Natural England has spent will help it to have the structures and processes in place to continue to work with us to deliver the homes that we all want to see. I hope that that work is ongoing. I look forward to working with Natural England and others.

In the meantime, I hope that I have been able to reassure noble Lords of our intention to protect our precious chalk streams. As noble Lords have heard me say many times, I live in Hertfordshire; it is definitely in my interests to protect those chalk streams. I believe that we now have the right processes in place, and I hope that the reassurances we have given over the sequencing of EDPs will help noble Lords not to press their amendments.

The Minister gave me encouraging reassurance about independence and referred to two bodies that would be doing the monitoring and evaluation. Could she repeat for me—I think I missed it—which bodies they are? Are they fully independent of Natural England and the Environment Agency?

I have not made an approach to these organisations, so I do not want to commit them to doing this, but if the Environmental Audit Committee or the Office for Environmental Protection wanted to get involved in the scrutiny of EDPs, we would be very happy to facilitate that.

My Lords, I thank all who have contributed to this debate and in particular the Minister, for her customary care in the answers she has given us.

What we agree on, across all sides of this House, is that chalk streams are precious, irreplaceable habitats that are gravely endangered. I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Roborough, for giving a sense that he would like to continue to press this in other ways. My view remains that we need clear legal protections for chalk streams and other irreplaceable habitats so that developers and planners know where they stand and the public can be reassured that protections will not easily be wiped out overnight. With this in mind, I seek to test the will of the House.

Ayes 81, Noes 132.

Motion H1 disagreed.

Motion H agreed