Stop the Planning and Infrastructure Bill 2025 to Protect Nature

We think the Planning and Infrastructure Bill 2025 threatens irreplaceable habitats, weakens environmental protections, and ignores pressures on public services. We urge the Government to withdraw it to protect nature and our communities.

We think the Planning and Infrastructure Bill 2025 would let developers destroy vital habitats by paying a levy, weakening protections for nature. Ancient ecosystems cannot be replaced. We think the Government should prioritise restoring empty homes, protecting green spaces, and investing in communities, not pushing through what we think is deregulated development that could harm people and the environment.

The Planning and Infrastructure Bill, which will speed up and streamline the delivery of new homes and critical infrastructure, is integral to delivering the improved prosperity our country needs and the higher living standards working people deserve. It will play a vital part in delivering the government’s Plan for Change milestones of building 1.5 million safe and decent homes in England, and fast-tracking 150 planning decisions on major economic infrastructure projects, by the end of this Parliament. The government has no intention of withdrawing the Bill.

We 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 sustainable housebuilding and nature recovery stall. Instead of environmental protections being seen as barriers to growth, we are determined to unlock a win-win for the economy and for nature.

The current approach to discharging environmental obligations is too often delaying and deterring development and placing unnecessary burdens on housebuilders and local authorities. It requires housebuilders to pay for localised and often costly mitigation measures, only to maintain the environmental status quo. By not taking a holistic view across larger geographies, mitigation measures often fail to secure the best outcomes for the environment.

The Nature Restoration Fund (NRF) established by the Bill will end this sub-optimal arrangement. By facilitating a more strategic approach to the discharge of environmental obligations, leveraging economies of scale and reducing the need for costly project-level assessments, it will allow us to secure better outcomes for nature, deliver planning consents more quickly, and ensure that the aggregate cost to developers is no greater than the status quo.

The NRF will provide funding for Natural England (or another designated delivery body) to bring forward Environmental Delivery Plans (EDPs). The EDP will set out the relevant environmental obligations that will be discharged, disapplied or modified as a result of making the payment, and the conservation measures that will be taken to address the impact of specified types of development on relevant environmental features—a specific protected feature of a protected site, or a specific protected species.

When making a decision on whether to make an EDP, the Secretary of State must be satisfied that the conservation measures set out in the EDP materially outweigh the negative effects of the proposed development. In determining whether the proposed conservation measures will address negative impacts and contribute to an overall improvement in the environmental feature, the Secretary of State will benefit from the views of consultees and, where applicable, the expertise of Natural England in preparing the EDP.

The Bill sets out that the specific environmental obligations which may be discharged by EDPs are only those stemming from certain provisions within the Conservation of Habitats and Species Regulations 2017, the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981, or the Protection of Badgers Act 1992.

The provisions in the Bill will not reduce existing protections for irreplaceable habitats set out in the National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF). Those protections provide that where development results in the loss or deterioration of irreplaceable habitats, development should be refused, unless there are wholly exceptional reasons and a suitable compensation strategy exists. EDPs can be used only to discharge specific environmental obligations, while developers are still required to comply with wider environmental obligations. Crucially, under the Bill network measures could never be used where to do so would result in the loss of an irreplaceable habitat as this would inherently not pass the overall improvement test.

The NPPF is also clear that strategic policies should make sufficient provision for green infrastructure. Green infrastructure is a network of multi-functional green and blue spaces and other natural features, urban and rural, which is capable of delivering a wide range of environmental, economic, health and wellbeing benefits for nature, climate, local and wider communities and prosperity.

The government also wants to see more empty homes brought back into use across the country. Local authorities have strong powers and incentives to tackle empty homes. They have the discretionary powers to charge additional council tax on properties which have been left unoccupied and substantially unfurnished for one or more years. The government outlined its intent to strengthen local authorities’ ability to take over the management of vacant residential premises in the English Devolution White Paper published in December 2024. Further details will be set out in due course.

Ministry of Housing, Communities & Local Government