Can the Nature Restoration Fund really restore nature? – Inside track

This post is by Richard Benwell, chief executive of Wildlife and Countryside Link.

In his excellent blog, ‘We can make space for nature and people’, Tony Juniper is right that the current planning system hasn’t worked well enough for nature. Government proposals for a more strategic approach to planning and nature recovery really could improve our environment at the same time as speeding up development.

What Tony couldn’t say quite so clearly is what happens if it goes wrong. The government is proposing to amend the Habitats Regulations to allow developers to pay into a Nature Restoration Fund as a way to discharge legal responsibilities for some protected habitats and species. Those laws have stood the test of time as one of nature’s few effective shields against harmful development. If they are weakened, in return for vague promises of future gains, that could be a death knell for wildlife.

It is right to start with the positive. Any prospect of planning reform instantly terrifies people because it has, so often, been bungled. If these fears make us oppose any change, then we will forever fight a rearguard action to defend ever diminishing pockets of nature. We need to be on the front foot, fighting for a system that can allocate more space for bigger, better, nature recovery actions. The government says that’s what it wants to do.

But how can we support the positive without being naïve about the prospect of calamitous failure? It’s good that the government is talking with us early and openly ahead of legislative proposals in the Planning and Infrastructure Bill. We can be clear about what bad looks like, and about the effort needed for the government to make this work for nature.

How to make sure it’s not awful
The main pitfalls to avoid are ruining the Habitats Regulations, ditching site specific safeguards in cases where strategic approaches won’t work and accepting rubbish offsets.

First, Habitats Regulations already allow for strategic approaches rather than always protecting individual sites or specimens. A notable example is district licensing for great crested newts, where schemes like Naturespace are creating high quality new habitats and increasing newt populations. The argument for legal change is that these approaches need more certainty to give confidence they won’t be challenged. That makes sense, but legal changes must be carefully targeted and circumscribed, with iron cast safeguards to ensure principles of avoidance and mitigation are respected.

Changes should make legal compliance simpler and faster, but they must not make unsustainable development easier. Legal amendments should increase certainty, but they should not decrease protection.

Second, strategic approaches can work brilliantly for some landscape-wide challenges like nutrient pollution—the nitrogen and phosphorus pollution from farming, sewage and other sources that starves rivers of oxygen. In other cases, strategic approaches are unproven and are unlikely to work. This is especially true for some protected species like bats, which are loyal to existing habitat which is hard to replicate quickly.

The government is proposing to bring environmental rules within the scheme one by one. There must be clear gateways to determine whether or not to include new elements, with independent and transparent scientific judgement about whether tests are met.

Third, in principle, existing systems like biodiversity net gain (BNG) are good. BNG shouldn’t ever make it easier for unsustainable development to go ahead, but where development is allowed it should ensure that companies pay for the harm they do to habitats. In practice, however, no one believes it. Monitoring is terrible, enforcement is non-existent and many of the promised gains never appear. The government must learn the lessons of weaknesses in existing schemes.

The success of the Nature Restoration Fund will rely on long term, transparent monitoring and enforcement, and excellent governance. Natural England mustn’t end up as both the delivery body and regulator, blurring accountability. The next spending review must secure a sizeable boost in investment to ensure promised gains are effective, additional, visible and lasting. It should include pump-prime funding to deliver conservation benefits ahead of development, with the fund operating on a cost recovery basis. Notional promises of hopeful gains simply won’t do.

How to make it brilliant
Just as vital as avoiding the pitfalls, the government must be highly ambitious for the programme to drive recovery. Too often, governments have settled for minimising harm to nature. To contribute to Tony’s “golden era” of nature-friendly planning, the Nature Restoration Fund must put much more weight on the positive side of the scale.

For a start, the Nature Restoration Fund must go way beyond offsetting. Again, BNG is a cautionary tale. Ten per cent gain is not driving much investment and it barely breaks even in terms of repairing harm.

With a £3 billion to £4 billion annual shortfall in nature funding, the Nature Restoration Fund must require developers to pay toward nature restoration. For example, with nutrient pollution, the fund’s approach should aim for quantified nutrient reduction targets that will rapidly reduce the toxic pollution load in our rivers.

The working paper also includes tantalising promises of stronger environmental standards. For example, it talks about delivery plans accompanied by stringent standards for design and construction, as well as the prospect of compulsory land purchase to deliver gains.

Stringent development standards (such as water use, green space and habitat creation) should be written into all strategic schemes.

In other areas, the government’s ambition should be to introduce requirements beyond existing protected sites and species. There are few regulatory requirements for polluters to pay toward nature recovery and this lack of demand is holding back private investment in nature.

Where strategic schemes are proven to be effective, they should be rolled out across catchments to drive environmental recovery in the wider landscape. For example, every river catchment should be covered by ‘nutrient negativity’ requirements for developers (and other sectors) to contribute to cleaner rivers, not just those covered by current nutrient neutrality rules.

Blaming nature regulations for blocking development must stop
Amending the Habitats Regulations is playing with fire. Doing it well will require trust and engagement. Ministers at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government   have been open and constructive – the most collaborative government for years – but all such efforts go up in smoke when politicians resort to blaming nature regulations for development delays. For the Planning and Infrastructure Bill to enjoy safe passage, that kind of rhetoric must stop.

Ministers will only succeed in planning reform if they can build trust that a new system will be better than the status quo. With that trust in place, and the policy elements set out above, the Nature Restoration Fund could help. But even with these design features, the fund alone won’t be enough for the government to meet its legally binding nature targets. This parliament will decide whether the government meets its manifesto pledge to halt nature’s decline. That will need a planning system that prioritises space for nature recovery on land and at sea, alongside strong regulation and environmental investment.

We are ready to support planning reform that makes the system faster and more efficient, if it works for nature. Preserving existing standards is good, but it’s far from enough. We need a planning system that protects the fragile and the precious, makes development wilder by design and dedicates enough space for our critical natural infrastructure to thrive.