The scale of lobbying of ministers by developers on Labour’s landmark planning changes, which seek to rip up environmental rules to boost growth, can be exposed as campaigners make last-ditch attempts to secure protections for nature.
The government published its planning and infrastructure bill in March. Before and after the bill’s publication the chancellor, Rachel Reeves, and housing minister Matthew Pennycook have met dozens of developers in numerous meetings. The body representing professional ecologists, meanwhile, has not met one minister despite requests to do so.
The government’s planning bill will reach its final stages before it is given royal assent in the coming days, after months of tussling between ministers, nature groups and ecologists.
The government has promised to rip up the rules to allow 1.5m homes to be built by the end of this parliament as part of its push for growth.
As last-minute wrangling over the reforms continues, peers have secured a key amendment that would ensure species such as dormice, nightingales and hedgehogs, and rare habitats like wetlands and ancient woodlands, continue to be protected from harm by development.
Katherine Willis, the peer who put forward the successful amendment in the House of Lords on behalf of nature organisations and ecologists, said the changes would reduce the risk the bill posed to the natural world, but also help developers. She urged MPs to vote for the amended bill next week.
“It provides a pragmatic way out of what are the real things that are blocking development and is a win-win amendment because it will help developers build houses, but also means that the vast majority of nature, the things the public really care about, will be protected,” she said.
But the government has shown little sign of wanting to compromise. It has previously whipped its MPs against a string of amendments, and suspended one Labour MP for speaking out for nature.
The Guardian can reveal the scale of the lobbying by developers in face-to-face meetings with the chancellor and other ministers that has been going on for months, while professional ecologists have found it hard to gain any audience.
“Access to ministers has been difficult,” said Sally Hayns, the chief executive of the Chartered Institute of Ecology and Environmental Management. “We asked for a meeting early on, and were initially turned down. We asked again in July and finally had a meeting in the autumn with civil servants. We haven’t had a face-to-face meeting with a minister at all.”
In contrast, just a week into her tenure Reeves hosted high-level discussions with housebuilders Berkeley, Barratt and Taylor Wimpey and has continued to have a string of meetings with housing developers, according to the Treasury register of ministerial meetings.
Reeves has repeatedly trumpeted the virtues of slashing nature rules to make it easier for homes to be built, and maligned the bats, newts and spiders that might get in the builders’ way.
She recently boasted to a tech conference hosted by US bank JP Morgan that she had unblocked a development of 20,000 homes that were being held up by a rare snail after she was approached by a developer. These homes had initially been blocked by Natural England because the Sussex area was at risk of running out of water.
Housing minister Matthew Pennycook has also recorded many meetings with developers including Vistry, Berkeley, Barratt, and Taylor Wimpey. He has recorded 16 meetings up to May this year with property developers, on housing supply and planning reform.
In contrast, his engagement with wildlife and nature groups is less intense. Pennycook has recorded four meetings over the past year with nature groups, three with Wildlife and Countryside Link and the other with a range of groups including the Campaign to Protect Rural England and the RSPB (the Royal Society for the protection of Birds). Ministers in the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) have held roundtables with environmental NGOs, but the bill’s oversight is being led by Pennycook’s department.
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Vistry, which is building 1,200 homes outside Newton Abbot in Devon, sent bulldozers to within feet of a 2,000 year-old protected ancient wetland last month. They want planning conditions protecting the site lifted, and have said they are in contact with Labour housing ministers, seeking help to sort out the “current blockages” and expedite the project.
Hayns said ecologists from her group worked closely with developers, and were key contributors to helping projects go ahead but were not being properly consulted. “There is a very low level of ecological literacy being displayed by ministers,” she said.
“Nothing I have seen or heard gives me comfort that Rachel Reeves understands the importance of nature to economic and social wellbeing, nothing,”
Hayns said nature was being treated as expendable. “I believe this will come back to bite them in the local elections,” she said. “Nature and protecting it is an issue that people care about.”
Joan Edwards, director of policy and public affairs at the Wildlife Trusts, said it was vital that the amendment to disarm the most damaging aspects of the planning bill was supported by MPs in the Commons next week.
“The evidence is unequivocal and a consensus is growing: nature is not a blocker to development and the government should stop pretending otherwise … this is the last chance saloon for MPs to ensure that the planning and infrastructure bill rolls out development and growth that brings genuine benefits for people and wildlife.”
A spokesperson for the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government said: “We completely reject these claims. Minister Pennycook attended two meetings with environmental groups on the planning and infrastructure bill in recent months, while the secretary of state also held a number of meetings with environmental NGOs during his time at Defra.
“This engagement has helped to shape the development and passage of the planning and infrastructure bill, which will remove barriers to building vital new homes and infrastructure and achieve a win-win for the economy and nature. We will consider our next steps as the bill returns to the Commons and leave no stone unturned to get Britain building faster.”
