In 2021, Natural England recommended that residents of a new care home in Fareham, Hants, should be banned from keeping cars as a “precautionary approach” to help reduce disturbance to the New Forest.
The Telegraph has seen documents in which consultants commissioned by Natural England set out how they were looking at “mitigating emissions from traffic/vehicles associated with new development (residential/commercial)”.
In emails sent earlier this year, the consultants, a firm called Ricardo Energy with a £40,000 contract with Natural England, list examples of potential mitigation schemes as including “low emission zones (LEZs) or clean air zones (CAZs)”.
In one email seen by The Telegraph the firm states: “While these are typically designed to mitigate the effects of traffic emissions on human health, there might be situations where they could be used to address impacts on ecological sites as well.”
The firm added: “Natural England is also interested in learning more about the potential use of ‘soft measures’ to address air quality impacts from traffic emissions.”
As part of its own brief to the firm, Natural England said: “Soft measures can be proposed to address air quality impacts,” and suggested such measures could include “improvements to local public transport such as bus and train services, improvements to walking and cycling infrastructure, low traffic neighbourhoods, 15-minute neighbourhoods, provision of electric charging points and restriction of car parking in new developments and route management strategies for HGV’s etc.”
The environment quango, which is chaired by Tony Juniper, the former head of Friends of the Earth, has asked for examples of evidence that such schemes reduce overall vehicle emissions.
Mr Juniper told The Telegraph: “We simply cannot halt and reverse the decline in nature or improve the quality of our environment – as the Government has legally committed itself to do and is rightly demanded by the public – if we don’t mitigate the impact of pollution sources.”
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