The £100million Bat Tunnel…
As you all know by now (mainly because I won’t shut up about it) the Planning and Infrastructure Bill is going to change things a lot in the development industry. At the second reading of the Bill on Monday, attention was drawn to a £100million bat tunnel with "no evidence that high-speed trains interfere with bats" and the tunnel was being built to appease the Whitehall advisory body, Natural England.
As you know, the Prime Minister (Batman to my Robin) had declared war on NIMBYs. The Government said: "The new common-sense approach doesn't allow newts or bats to be more important than the homes hard-working people need, or the roads and hospital this country needs”.
Under the Bill, it is proposed that a number of these “advisory bodies” who delay planning applications (sometimes for years) will be stripped of their powers that is delaying up to 150 road, rail and energy schemes. These regulators will no longer be able to demand that developers mitigate environmental harm before construction can begin.
The current rules mean developers are required to identify and meet environmental obligations on a project-by-project basis, which misses opportunities to find strategic solutions. The new approach removes the need for individual site-level assessments and mitigation, with development able to proceed after a single payment to the Nature Restoration Fund in most cases.
The fund is expected to be managed by Natural England (actually giving them work other than being Moaning Myrtles), which will look at overall actions needed to protect sites and species in the country. This could include using the money to reduce water pollution or securing nesting habitats to increase the population of a certain species. The fund will help developers to meet their environmental obligations faster and at greater scale by pooling contributions for larger interventions.
The same model will be applied to other bodies like Sports England, the Theatres Trust and the Garden History Society. Angela Rayner said: "We need to reform the system to ensure it is sensible and balanced, and does not create unintended delays - putting a hold on people's lives and harming our efforts to build the homes people desperately need.”
However, instead of it being mandatory to get the opinion of such bodies, their scope will be "narrowed to focus on heritage, safety and environmental protection". The Government has also identified issues like consultees failing to engage "proactively", taking too long to provide advice, re-opening issues that have already been dealt with, submitting automatic objections which they later withdraw, and submitting advice for "gold-plated" outcomes that are unrealistic and difficult to achieve.
However, new developments must still meet the high expectations to create the homes, facilities and infrastructure that communities need but in a meaningful and tangible way. All sounds confusing? Call me!
Henry
07736121014