CIEEM urges Peers to amend Part 3 of the Planning and Infrastructure Bill so that it focuses exclusively on diffuse and cumulative environmental impacts – specifically nutrient neutrality, water quantity, water quality and air quality – and excludes protected species and impacts to protected features of protected sites through impact mechanisms other than diffuse cumulative impacts (e.g. direct loss or destruction).

This targeted approach would ensure that the Bill can achieve its intended aim of delivering the Government’s stated aims of tackling strategic, system-level environmental challenges without undermining existing environmental protections or creating perverse incentives for developers to destroy ecologically important habitats and species without making any effort to avoid or mitigate harm.

Restricting Part 3 to diffuse impacts will:

• Enable landscape-scale restoration to tackle complex, cumulative impacts.
• Provide developers with certainty and clarity, rather than greater complexity and risk.
• Avoid undermining some existing and emerging nature markets (such as private nutrient mitigation schemes) – although achieving this comprehensively would also need a further amendment, to avoid impacting for example nutrient offsets and similar, that requires Natural England to integrate any existing private solutions into EDPs.

Please see the appendix in the paper for further explanation of our main concerns with Part 3 of the Bill, which unfortunately are not all capable of being addressed by the amendments tabled thus far.