It's not nature's fault

by Henri Brocklebank

Director of Conservation 

Periodically there are threats to nature that are hard to comprehend, and we are facing one of these at the moment.

It’s all nature’s fault that we can’t build where we want – rivers needing their floodplains to flood into, ancient woodlands being irreplaceable, Special Sites of Scientific Interest being so special. It’s inconvenient when you want to encourage more development to stimulate economic growth.

So if we brush the fact that sustainable growth needs a healthy environment under the carpet (inconvenient) why not get rid of the red tape that clogs the wheels of progress.

So this is what the Planning and Infrastructure Bill is trying to do. No seriously. I’m not exaggerating. Cash to Trash. You couldn’t make it up!

Part 3 of the Bill, which would overhaul environmental protections in planning, replacing local, site-specific protections with a so-called strategic approach. This would allow developers to pay into a central fund to compensate for damage done at a local level, potentially causing irreversible damage to nature.

And to add insult to injury the loss of a Sussex ecosystem could be ‘compensated’ somewhere else in the country – presumably where land prices are cheaper.

The Bill contains clauses that must be revoked through amendments and we are relying on our MPs to action this. Last week the draft bill went through the House of Lords, who did incredible work drawing it back from its hellish positioning of nature.

Now it goes back to the MPs. They go to vote next Thursday (13 November).

The Wildlife Trusts have set up a national mechanism to make it easy for us all to email our MPs. I really do believe that this is the time to fill their inboxes with constituent passion about defending our precious Sussex Wildlife. Our request to them is as simple as we can make it (in light of the complexity of the Bill) – it just takes a couple of minutes.

So I have two requests.

🌳 Firstly please write to your MP and tell them why defending nature and protected sites is important to you.

Ask your MP to keep Amendment 130

🌳 Secondly, please share this web link with your networks – in Sussex or wider.

This is one of those times where we all need to come together under the unifying concept of defending nature in Sussex. If you want more detail behind the bill, there's context here. The analysis is measured, but its hard to get past the assessment of how this bill ‘remove(s) the foundations of our nature laws’.