Political office does odd things to parties which were in opposition. Angela Rayner and Steve Reed have written in the Sunday Times this morning complaining that environmental rules are threatening the government’s house-building targets. We’re in a situation, they say, ‘where bats and newts are getting in the way of people who desperately need housing.’ They are not wrong. One of the reasons why there are 1.2 million would-be homes which have been granted planning permission over the past decade but which have yet to be built is that pettifogging green rules are standing in their way. Three of those ghost homes are in my village. Nutrient neutrality rules and an overloaded local sewage system led to a condition being attached to their planning permissions: the houses would each have to have a mini sewage treatment works, costing around £12,000. Not only is this expensive, it turns out that the draining system granted planning permission might not actually be sufficient for net neutrality.
Yet a few months ago, when still in opposition, the Labour party was bleating about the Tories’ environmental vandalism. When the Sunak government attempted to water down the nutrient neutrality rules – EU-era legislation which insists that new homes must not have any net effect on nitrate levels in local rivers and streams – Labour bitterly opposed it, perhaps reckoning that it was a free hit, garnering the votes of voters who were wavering between Labour and the Greens while costing them nothing.
What Rayner and Reed are now proposing is to charge developers for environmental damage. Instead of demanding that they install newt tunnels and bat boxes, or private sewage systems to deal with the nitrate problem, house builders would simply pay a nature levy which the local authority would spend encouraging nature in other locations. That makes some kind of sense, but it does raise an obvious objection. It is hard to see this levy not evolving into a general nature tax, which surges over time. Developers are already in many cases paying a Community Infrastructure Levy (CIL), the proceeds of which fund local schools, roads, parks and – yes – nature reserves. Many of the projects funded by the CIL have little to do with the new development itself; they are facilities which will be used by the local community as a whole. But developers – for which you can read new home buyers, as the cost is inevitably transferred to them – are forced to pay disproportionately for them.
What is to stop the same happening with a nature levy? A local authority wants to plant a new woodland, create new wetlands, or replace the gas boiler which heats its offices with a heat pump? Great, councillors will think – rather than load the cost on council tax, let’s get a housing developer to pay for it all. Once you have established the principle that housing developers can finance nature improvements, there will be few limits to what housing developers are expected to pay for. And it will be the first-time buyers the government says it wants to help who will be footing the bill.
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