“When making the relevant decision, the competent authority must assume that nutrients in urban wastewater from the potential development . . . will not adversely affect the relevant site,” The government amendment to the levelling-up and Regeneration Bill says.

An “adverse effect” from these nutrients “is not a ground for the competent authority to determine” that the development (basically, new housing) will add to pollution, “even if a finding . . . to the contrary is made”.

Welcome to Alice Through the Looking Glass!

Matthew Parris www.thetimes.co.uk (Extract)

Early this year The Times dedicated itself to a Clean It Up campaign to restore Britain’s rivers and waterways to ecological health. How are ministers doing in response? I hate to bother you with the actual wording of a piece of proposed legislation but don’t worry, I’m not asking you to make sense of it. I’m inviting you to take note of weird syntax, tortured logic and opaque intentions, then smell a big, fat rat.

The Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill has suddenly, weeks after most of it has gone through parliament, been landed with a late clause governing the impact of housebuilding on natural habitats. “When making the relevant decision, the competent authority must assume that nutrients in urban wastewater from the potential development . . . will not adversely affect the relevant site,” it reads.

Nutrients are what you flush down the lavatory, which can wreck the ecology of our rivers. So put in the language we are pleased to call English, this paragraph means that when considering an application to build, the authorities must assume that what poisons rivers does not poison rivers.

The clause goes on to deem that any concern about an “adverse effect” from these nutrients “is not a ground for the competent authority to determine” that the development (basically, new housing) will add to pollution, “even if a finding . . . to the contrary is made”. Thus, any finding that extra sewage will pollute rivers cannot be grounds for finding it will pollute rivers.

This is pure Alice Through the Looking Glass. In plain language, it means that if a new housing development will add to what’s tipped into our rivers, planning authorities must assume it won’t. And that is what the two responsible secretaries of state, Michael Gove and Thérèse Coffey, now want parliament to lay down. Clearly the big housebuilding companies have got at the prime minister; and the prime minister has got at Gove and Coffey; and Gove and Coffey have now executed a complete U-turn on a piece of environmental law that nibbled at the edge of big housebuilders’ profits……

……..Farewell, then, to this perhaps last of the once-famous Brexit dividends: that we’d be free to frame our own, enhanced, environmental protections. Farewell to the 2021 Environment Act, whose stipulation that the act “will not have the effect of reducing the level of protection provided for by existing environmental law” must urgently be removed by parliament if the government is not to be massacred at judicial review. In keeping with the new drafting style, the stipulation could be left in place but an amendment brought in providing that anything found to be a reduction in environmental protection must be assumed not to be a reduction.

Farewell, too, to the Rishi Sunak who as a young MP sat on the environment, food and rural affairs select committee. Farewell to the Michael Gove whose 2017 post-referendum speech (a fine speech: “The Unfrozen Moment — Delivering a Green Brexit”) quoted Philip Larkin, waxed lyrical and declared that “I have no intention of weakening the environmental protections that we have put in place while in the European Union”.

“We live on the same planet,” he said. “The only one we know which can sustain human life . . . Again and again, societies and civilisations have been gripped by hubris, by the belief that this time is different, that the cycles of the past have been broken.”

I plead guilty to hubris. I have believed that Gove would be different, that the cycle of ministers making promises and then forgetting them would be broken. I still cannot quite believe he is acquiescing in
this retreat.That Larkin poem lamented the approaching despoilation of our country. It bears the title Going, Going and includes the line: “And that will be England gone.” Gove should re-read it.