Labour’s Planning and Infrastructure Bill aims to allow companies to pay to trash the British countryside. It will do away with existing checks and balances in the planning system and establish a legal framework allowing developers to destroy irreplaceable natural ecosystems.
Corporations will pay into a planned Nature Restoration Fund in order to ‘offset’ the environmental devastation caused by their projects. Crucially, they won’t have to undertake local restoration work in the habitats they have damaged. Instead they will simply pay into the fund which will undertake projects elsewhere.
A group of ecologists, economists and government advisers signed an open letter urging Labour to cut damaging sections from the Bill. They wrote:
“The nature levy [offset scheme] is not a tool for ecological recovery: it is a licence to kill nature, with no evidence to suggest this would in any way help our economy”.
In fact, even Tony Juniper – the head of Natural England, the body tasked with administering the proposed Nature Restoration Fund – says that many of the government’s claims being used to justify the Bill were “not necessarily fully backed by evidence”
Bats and newts are not ‘the problem’
Labour’s Rachel Reeves has attempted to make light of the environmental damage that the Bill could cause, saying that she wants to cut red tape so that developers can “stop worrying about the bats and the newts”. We should worry about bats and newts. Both are indicator species, much-loved by the public. Despite the lobbying by developers, bats and newts only actually feature in a tiny fraction of development applications. Maligning them as a block to paving over the countryside is scandalous. Labour’s disparaging rhetoric hides the true cost of this Bill: it is the biggest threat to biodiversity and the UK’s precious wildlife that we have seen for a generation. The Bill is deeply destructive and a bigger threat to nature than anything the Tories could cook up in almost 15 years of Conservative rule.
Labour say that this Bill is about creating housing for the poor, but the people who will really benefit from it are the bosses and shareholders of the big corporations involved in these ‘nationally significant’ infrastructure projects, the companies involved in road building, prison construction, nuclear energy and oil and gas pipelines. It’s not us who will decide what’s ‘nationally important’. It’s the politicians who will do so in close cooperation with corporate CEOs. Nature will pay the price, as ancient, unique habitats are destroyed.
Five reasons we need to stop this Bill for the good of British wildlife:
1. The Nightingale
Journalists and wildlife protection organisations are warning that Britain’s Nightingales may be a casualty of the proposed Bill. In 2015 the sweet-songed Nightingale, a summer visitor here that winters in West Africa, was listed as Critically Endangered and included on the UK’s ‘Red List’ of endangered species. Once widespread, there are just around 5500 breeding pairs left in the UK and populations have decreased by 90% in the last half century.
That’s why campaigners have been organising to protect 100 Nightingales breeding at a disused army training camp at Lodge Hill near Strood in Kent. In fact this Ministry of Defence property is the UK’s best site for breeding nightingales. The RSPB have been campaigning for years to protect it and in 2013 the government agreed to declare it a Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI). However, Medway Council wants to build homes on the site. Homes England applied to build 5000 homes on Lodge Hill in 2017. Current plans are to build houses around the edges of the SSSI, but the Planning and Infrastructure Bill would allow developers to bypass concerns from wildlife defenders and build directly on top of Lodge Hill. The proposed wording of the Bill would remove protections from SSSIs, Special Areas of Conservation (SACs) and protected Ramsar sites. Payments into the Nature Restoration Fund would simply amount to greenwash that would do nothing to help the Lodge Hill nightingales.
RSPB Nightingale expert Joseph Beale told The Guardian:
“They [the nightingales] won’t move somewhere else, they’ll just go, we will lose them. Nightingales only tend to set up home when they hear others of their species sing. So they’ll fly over, and hear another nightingale sing, and know that means the area is good for nightingales. If this area falls silent, it will stop being used by them, and they won’t just set up somewhere new. This is a special area – nature has chosen it – let’s just protect it.”
2. Wetlands and wading birds
Many of the UK’s precious wetlands will be under threat if the Bill is passed. Wetlands are havens for many species of wading birds, including Black-tailed Godwits and Spoonbills.
The Black-tailed Godwit is a rare bird in the UK, and is categorised as threatened on a global scale. It is classified as ‘Red’ on the UK’s list of ‘Birds of Conservation Concern’ and is protected in the UK under the Wildlife and Countryside Act, 1981. The Spoonbill used to breed in East Anglia during Medieval times, but were lost to the UK because of hunting and habitat destruction. They are slowly returning to the UK to breed (there were just over 70 pairs recorded in 2024), but progress could be reversed if wetland sites are again threatened with development.
And several of the UK’s protected and hugely important wetlands could be threatened if the Bill is passed. These include Portsmouth’s Tipner West tidal wetland, the Humber Estuary in Yorkshire, Dibdean Bay in Hampshire and Wolborough Fen in Devon. They are vital habitats for migratory shorebirds. On top of shorebirds, they provide a temporary or permanent home for thousands of other birds including ducks, herons and egrets, the rapidly declining Lapwing and the Spoonbill. All of these habitats have been threatened by planned housing projects and have only been saved until now by their protected status.
3. Orchids and Turtle Doves
Early Purple and Common Spotted Orchids are just two of the species that will be threatened by a planned 8,400 home housing development that will endanger one of the UK’s only truly ancient woodlands near Sittingbourne in Kent. Cromer Woods is also home to a host of threatened species including Otters, Water Voles, Corn Bunting, and the Critically Endangered Turtle Dove (a once common species whose population has crashed by 99% between 1967 and 2020).
Along with housing, Quinn Estates wants to build a rubbish tip, a hotel, a road and schools. Labour’s planned Bill could strip away its protections and enable the plans to go ahead, despite fierce opposition from local people who love the woods.
4. The badger
The UK’s badgers have already been decimated by a government-sanctioned cull, based on flawed science. The Labour government admits the cull is ineffective at controlling bovine tuberculosis (bTB) but still refuses to stop it. Protect the Wild sees the badger cull for what it is, an unjustifiable attack on a protected species. We recently gathered over 100,000 signatures calling on Labour to stop the killing.
Over a quarter of a million badgers have been murdered in the cull since it began in 2013. If passed, Labour’s Planning and Infrastructure Bill could be another blow to Britain’s badgers by destroying badger habitats. On top of that, the government is proposing damaging changes to the Protection of Badgers Act.
According to the Badger Trust:
“Proposed amendments to the Protection of Badgers Act will enable the killing or taking of badgers, or sett interference, for the purpose of development, preserving public health or safety or for reasons of overriding public interest.”
Under the new proposals, developers will be able to destroy setts if they contribute to the Restoration Fund. Companies paying a Nature Restoration Levy won’t help displaced badgers. If the plans go ahead it could be devastating for the already long-suffering UK badger population.
5. Fuelling climate change and social injustice
If all that wasn’t enough to make up your mind against this Bill, you might be persuaded by the fact that the plans will contribute to climate change and social inequality too.
The government has been promoting this Bill by promising to build new housing. But a glance at the list of ‘nationally significant’ projects show that bulldozing through these projects at the expense of nature will not just destroy ecosystems, but fuel the climate crisis too. The planned infrastructure schemes include the Heathrow third runway, oil and gas infrastructure, massive expansions of roads and motorways. It’ll benefit false technofixes to climate change like Drax’s Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS, or BECCS – Biomass with CCS) from their biomass plant in Selby near Doncaster. Falsely sold as green energy, biomass causes deforestation to provide wood pellets and drives climate change too.
Of course, nuclear power plants at Hinkley Point and Sizewell are also on the list. Nuclear power can be highly dangerous to produce, and accidents at nuclear sites have devastating and long-lasting effects on human populations and the environment. If that wasn’t enough, the generation of nuclear energy also generates huge amounts of toxic radioactive waste that there is still no viable solution for disposing of. Since they had to stop dumping it in the sea, European governments are trying to ignore the problem of managing this waste by storing it across Europe or shipping it to poorer regions. Wherever it is done, managing nuclear waste is requiring more and more land. The expansion of nuclear energy is clearly a threat to natural habitats on many levels, both in the UK and globally.
As the inequality in our society worsens, the state needs to step up repression and control of its citizens. The Conservative government announced a massive prison building programme in 2016, planning 10,000 new prison places and six new mega prisons. The scheme was a massive cash cow for private companies like Keir, Mace and many more. Thankfully, the Conservatives’ prison building plans fell massively short. However, Labour – not to be outdone- is pledging to lock up 14,000 more people. Their answer, to silence opposition within the planning system by making prison construction schemes into projects of ‘national importance’. The government is already imprisoning a record number of protesters, many of them are locked-up for taking action against ecological destruction and our reliance on fossil fuels.
Kill the Bill
Protect the Wild has launched a petition calling on Secretary of State Steve Reed to scrap the Bill. It reads:
“The UK is already facing a biodiversity emergency. One in seven species is at risk of extinction, and 41% are in decline. Yet this Bill weakens local environmental protections and turns nature conservation into a pay-to-destroy scheme. Developers will be given a green light to bulldoze through fragile ecosystems for short-term gain, with no obligation to repair the damage where it occurs.”
We need 10,000 signatures to force Reed to respond to our petition. Please sign it here. More than that, we need a strong, resilient and creative movement to oppose this Bill, which represents the biggest attack on British wildlife of our lifetimes.
Image of common nightingale via Orchi at Wikimedia Common, Spoonbill created by AI,.orchid via Charlie Moores,
