Members of Parliament will be debating the Planning and Infrastructure Bill at its second reading on Monday 24 March.

We encourage all members in England to engage with your local Member of Parliament (MP) ahead of this debate to highlight the flaws in the Bill, and in particular to relate how the Bill will affect you, your organisation and the local environment within your constituency.

Earlier this week, Government published a new policy paper for England on ensuring that regulation supports economic growth.

The Government posits that the current regulatory landscape is not functioning as effectively as it should and sets out the steps it intends to take, including - inexplicably - to remove reference to the Bat Mitigation Guidelines.

As we have previously highlighted, the core principle behind the Bill – identifying environmental challenges early and addressing them proactively through state-led intervention – could, in theory, be a positive step towards the government’s twin goals of streamlined delivery of critical development and better outcomes for nature.

However, the execution of this concept is critically flawed. As currently drafted, the Bill threatens to cause unnecessary and irreparable ecological harm while simultaneously imposing additional costs, uncertainty and delays on developers due to the uncertainty around the nature and scope of the proposed Environmental Delivery Plans (EDPs).

The proposed Bill, whilst containing some important principles which would be of benefit to both the economy and the environment, is currently significantly flawed and needs an urgent rethink. In our view, the Bill is a regression on current levels of environmental protections.