Those of us who try to defend wildlife are horribly familiar with bad laws. But we’ve never seen anything like this. The government’s planning and infrastructure bill is the worst assault on England’s ecosystems in living memory. It erases decades of environmental protections, including legislation we inherited from the EU, which even the Tories promised to uphold.
The rules defending wildlife and habitats from unscrupulous developers are weak enough already, which is partly why, as Labour reminded us in its manifesto, Britain is “one of the most nature-depleted countries in the world”. But this bill will make it much, much worse.
