BBC News www.bbc.co.uk

The House of Lords has blocked the UK government’s plan to relax restrictions on water pollution to encourage housebuilding in England.

Labour led a rebellion in the Lords to defeat the government in a vote on removing the EU-era “nutrient neutrality” rules.

Ministers believe up to 100,000 new homes could be built by 2030 if water pollution regulations are loosened.

But environmental groups said the move would mean more polluted waters.

The government announced plans to scrap these rules through an amendment, or change, to the Levelling Up and Regeneration Bill, currently going through the House of Lords.

Because of the late stage at which the government tried to introduce the change, it cannot try again in the House of Commons now it has been defeated.

Ministers would need to bring the proposal forward in a new bill.

The defeat is a victory for Labour, whose deputy leader Angela Rayner led opposition to the plan in her new role as shadow levelling up secretary.

Ms Rayner, who is also Labour’s deputy leader and shadow deputy prime minister, said the defeat showed “the Tories have utterly failed in their attempt to score cheap political points with a flawed plan”.

She added: “We stand ready to sit down with the government, housebuilders and environmental groups to agree on a workable solution to build the homes we need.”

The attempt to ease the rules, by amending the Levelling-Up and Regeneration Bill, was defeated by 203 votes to 156, a majority of 47.

Liberal Democrat Lords spokesperson for communities and local government, Baroness Pinnock, hailed the result as a “great victory”.

“The Conservatives have continually promised not to roll back our environment rules, it is deeply shocking that they can’t be trusted to keep their word,” Baroness Pinnock said.

Green Party peer Baroness Jenny Jones said the government should consult the public before they consider bringing back the plan to scrap pollution rules in a separate bill.

“They can then consult properly and justify it to a public who are already fed up with polluted local rivers and beaches,” Baroness Jones said.

Natural England rules currently mean 62 local authorities cannot allow new developments unless builders can prove their projects are “nutrient neutral” in protected areas.

The government said by removing the restrictions, housing developers will deliver an extra £18bn in economic activity.

But environmental groups and opposition parties opposed the plans, with Labour arguing the change would increase river pollution.

At Prime Minister’s Questions on Wednesday, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said Labour under Sir Keir Starmer could not be trusted to build more homes.

He said Labour’s opposition to the government’s plans was “typical of the principles-free, conviction-free type of leadership that he offers”.

Sir Keir’s spokesman rejected the charge, saying the government’s plans were “rushed and flawed”.

“We do have serious concerns about the way in which the changes the Tories are proposing will harm our waterways and ecosystems,” he said.

Angela Rayner, Steve Reed www.thetimes.co.uk 

After 13 years of Conservative government, England is facing a housing crisis. And things are set to get even worse thanks to Rishi Sunak and Michael Gove’s reckless decision to scrap mandatory housing targets and send housebuilding into freefall.

It is not in dispute that nutrient neutrality rules are making it challenging to secure consent for new housing development. The status quo is clearly not an option.

Yet the Conservatives are being thoroughly disingenuous in suggesting that the only way we can build the homes we need in river catchment areas is by weakening environmental law. No one should fall for it.

This is just the latest in the long list of Conservative failures on the environment. Their record speaks for itself.

They recklessly slashed enforcement and monitoring of the water companies that now routinely pump toxic raw sewage into our rivers, lakes and seas. The country is suffering from the highest levels of illegal discharges on record and the Office for Environmental Protection (OEP) says the government itself may have broken the law in allowing this.

We must build the homes people need while also protecting the environment we live in. The two are not mutually exclusive.

The government’s proposed solution to this challenge is deeply problematic. It would allow councils to ignore environmental regulations and authorise new housing development without mitigation for environmental harm on the basis that the nutrient pollution problem will be solved by other means.

Their approach would not only significantly weaken environmental law and increase river pollution but would fatally undermine the emerging market in nutrient pollution reduction that developers are already making use of.

We know there are far better ways to build the new homes we desperately need than green lighting water pollution. To give just one example, the government could direct local authorities to approve planning applications held up by nutrient neutrality rules, subject to so-called Grampian conditions.

This would allow developers to start building homes that are stuck in the planning pipeline but would require them to put in place measures to counteract any environmental harm before those homes are occupied. Such an approach would allow time for Natural England’s nutrient mitigation scheme or other off-site mitigation schemes to bed in, while also providing certainty to the housebuilding industry that the wait would not be indefinite.

We fully appreciate the concern among housebuilders about the need for an adequate supply of mitigation credits to make it work. It is indeed a failure on the part of the government that more has not been done to identify and bring forward sufficient suitable sites to enable the credit market to flourish.

To ensure that enough mitigation schemes are available, the government would need to provide Natural England and local authorities with support to identify suitable sites and bring more credits to market. But any solution to the impact of housebuilding on nutrient neutrality in sensitive catchment areas is going to require the government to quickly get serious about strategically planning for mitigation.

The alternative is to place the entire burden of alleviating the impact of housebuilding on nutrient pollution levels on tackling the primary causes of nutrient pollution at source. But we know from the government’s failure over many years to tackle the impact of pollution from agriculture and water companies’ wastewater treatment works that we cannot rely on their promises to do so now.

To guard against the risk of developers being unable to find a mitigation despite their best endeavours to find one, Grampian conditions could be designed to lapse after a specific period of time.

Instead of taking time to explore and consult widely on workable solutions like this, the Conservatives’ approach is to weaken environmental law, ignoring the stark warnings of the OEP in the process. It is reckless and irresponsible.

This government has made the housing crisis worse by torpedoing housing supply. Now it is trying to cover up this failure by conjuring up a false narrative that pitches housebuilding against protecting our natural environment.

Like always this is the Tory solution, a quick sticking plaster here, no sense of what the impact is on the future. We do not accept this, and nor do we believe people want to see further harm caused to precious waterways the Conservatives have already flooded with raw, untreated sewage.

We have set out a credible alternative and will table our own amendment when this is put to a vote in the House of Lords later today. If they refuse this opportunity, we will vote against the government’s plans.

Labour knows we can build the homes we need without further damaging nature and the environment.

Here is another thing our PPS to the Secretary of State for Transport could be earwigging his boss about. – Owl

Pothole repairs on local roads in England sink to lowest level in five years

The mileage of local roads in England being resurfaced or treated to avoid potholes has fallen to its lowest level in five years, research has shown.

Gwyn Topham www.theguardian.com 

There has been a decline of almost one-third in the total amount of life-extending road maintenance by local councils, according to analysis of government data by the RAC motoring organisation.

Only 1,123 miles of roads were surfaced in 2021-22, compared with 1,588 miles in 2017-18, while only 3,551 miles, down from 5,345 miles four years earlier, were maintained with surface dressing – the more cost-effective preventative method, according to the road repair industry.

The RAC said the figures helped explain the decline in England’s roads – widely described as “pothole-plagued” this year with an estimated repair backlog of £12bn – and called on the government to do more to help councils maintain roads, including ringfencing funding.

It found that of 153 roads authorities surveyed, 31% did no resurfacing, while 51% failed to carry out any surface dressing.

Simon Williams, the head of policy at the RAC, said: “These figures paint an incredibly stark picture of road maintenance in England and confirm our worst fears about the overall decline in the state of the country’s roads.

“While the government has made more money available to authorities to fill potholes, it’s the general reduction in road improvement work that’s causing potholes to appear in the first place.

“It’s abundantly clear that councils in so many areas are barely scratching the surface when it comes to getting their roads up to a reasonable standard.”

He said local authorities should take a more preventative approach to make budgets go further, and called on the government to increase roads funding.

The Local Government Association (LGA) said the huge backlog was caused by years of funding cuts, followed by recent inflation in the cost of repairs.

Shaun Davies, chair of the LGA, said: “Decades of reductions in funding from central government to local road repair budgets has left councils facing the biggest ever local roads repair backlog. This has been compounded by recent extreme weather as well as rising inflation, pushing up the cost of materials such as bitumen.”

He said that the government should help motorists by working with councils “to develop a long-term, fully funded programme to bring our roads up to scratch”.

MPs also called on ministers to ringfence road funding and give long-term settlements to councils, in a report issued by the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Better Roads.

The MPs said that road conditions had worsened since a dedicated pothole fund ended in 2021. Only 50% of England’s local roads are now classified as good, the lowest level since 2016, according to asphalt industry data cited in the report.

A Department for Transport spokesperson said: “It’s for local authorities to maintain their highways, and to help them do that we’re investing more than £5bn from 2020 to 2025, with an extra £200m announced at the budget in March, to resurface roads up and down the country.

“We’ve also brought in new rules to clamp down on utility companies leaving potholes behind after carrying out street works.”

Ministers and regulators may have broken the law by allowing water companies to dump sewage into rivers and seas, according the Office for Environmental Protection (OEP), a new statutory watchdog.

John Rentoul www.independent.co.uk 

It found the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), the Environment Agency (EA) and Ofwat may have misinterpreted the law and allowed water companies to pollute waterways when they shouldn’t.

Combined sewer overflows are only meant to be used in exceptional circumstances, such as after unusually heavy rain to prevent sewers backing up and flooding homes and businesses.

Liberal Democrat leader Ed Davey described the OEP’s findings as “environmental vandalism on an industrial scale” while “ministers and regulators are sitting on their hands”.

Therese Coffey, the environment, food and rural affairs secretary, has two months to respond to the findings and to set out what she intends to do about them. Her department’s initial reaction has been to concede that the volume of sewage discharged is “completely unacceptable” but to insist it has not broken the law. It argues that the OEP has got the law wrong. The OEP, meanwhile, says it has “reasonable grounds for suspecting” that the government has misinterpreted the legislation.

What is the Office for Environmental Protection?

The OEP is a kind of super-regulator, set up by the Environment Act two years ago, to supervise various public bodies responsible for protecting the environment. These include not just Defra but industry regulator Ofwat and the public body charged with regulating land and water pollution, the Environment Agency.

Helen Venn, its chief regulatory officer, said: “As a result of our investigations so far, we think there may have been misinterpretations of some key points of law. The core of the issue is that where we interpret the law to mean that untreated sewage discharges should generally be allowed only in exceptional circumstances, such as during unusually heavy rainfall, it appears that the public authorities may have interpreted the law differently, permitting such discharges to occur more often.”

Who might have broken the law?

The OEP has in effect put all three organisations in the dock, saying that they have all failed to force the water companies to prevent sewage discharges, which they are required to do by law.

So what will happen next?

The net effect of all this legal and regulatory action is hard to discern. All the organisations concerned strenuously declare that the failure of the water companies to reduce sewage discharges is unacceptable, and they all admit that it is difficult and expensive to do anything about it.

Ms Venn of the OEP says: “Improving the quality of water in our rivers and seas is a complex challenge. There are no quick fixes.”

Indeed, she goes further: “We recognise that a great deal is already being done to tackle the issue of untreated sewage discharges, and we welcome the intent of government measures such as the Plan for Water and storm overflow targets, as well as commitments to increase investment.”

In other words, all the regulators and the water companies are trying to sound as if they are doing everything they can to tackle the problem, but they know that they are lagging well behind public opinion.

“We don’t believe a spy would have been able to find any intelligence whatsoever in this administration”

Residents raise £20k for legal help

Devon villagers go into a fierce ‘grass not glass’ battle on Tuesday, with a barrister and a high-profile pressure group preparing to fight their corner.

Guy Henderson, local democracy reporter www.radioexe.co.uk

The county’s branch of the Campaign for the Protection of Rural England (CPRE) are backing residents of Marsh Green near Aylesbeare as they take on a company that wants to build a 60,000-panel solar farm across 27 fields.

Planning officers recommended the scheme should go ahead when it came before East Devon District Council (EDDC) last December, but councillors voted narrowly to reject the scheme.

The site was waterlogged when councillors went to visit, which supported the protesters’ argument that the land is not suitable for a solar farm.

Councillors are also concerned about visual impact, land classification and the impact on a designated heritage asset.

An inquiry will be held at the district council’s offices in Honiton, with protesters’ legal costs being paid for after a £20,000 crowdfunding campaign.

Cllr Todd Olive (Lib Dem, Whimple and Rockbeare), who is an expert witness on planning, is supporting residents. He said: “We’ll be fighting hard to make sure the democratic voice of residents is properly heard – and respected.

“It is an uphill battle for us. EDDC has dropped a couple of the reasons for last year’s refusal that the planning committee no longer felt were defensible, which is unfortunate.

“Impact on the landscape and heritage are the two main prongs of attack EDDC is pursuing. We are contributing quite substantial evidence on the landscape front and are continuing to pursue issues relating to flooding and concerns about bringing HGVs down tiny Devon lanes.

“The other point of contention that we are defending is the issue of agricultural land.”

The CPRE has a nationwide ‘grass not glass’ campaign which opposes what it claims are ‘industrial-scale’ solar farms like the one proposed near Aylesbeare.

Devon CPRE director Penny Mills said: “The Marsh Green application was turned down for the right reasons last year, and we hope the inspector will respect the wishes of the local community this time around too.

“Residents have clearly said ‘No, we don’t want this’. Will their voices be heard by the inspector or will the wishes of yet another small rural community be ignored? It’s a matter of democracy.” 

Solar farm developments have recently been permitted elsewhere in the east of the county, at Whimple and Clyst Hydon. Another is pending at Aylesbeare.

The government ignored its nature watchdog’s advice in weakening rules on pollution from housebuilders in England, the Guardian can reveal.

Helena Horton www.theguardian.com 

Michael Gove, the housing secretary, and Thérèse Coffey, the environment secretary, recently announced they would be ending what they termed “defective” EU laws, which require developers to offset any extra nutrient pollution they cause in sensitive areas, under the habitats directive. These areas include the Lake District and Norfolk Broads.

Ministers are aiming to remove the legal requirement via an amendment in the House of Lords, which requires local authorities to ignore potential pollution risks when approving developments. It will be debated on Wednesday.

Gove and Coffey’s amendment proposes that instead of forcing housebuilders to invest in local wetland sites to soak up any extra sewage pollution and mitigate damage, this legal requirement would be scrapped and taxpayer money would instead be used to double the funds for a scheme by Natural England to reduce nutrients such as nitrates and phosphates in waterways. These nutrients choke the life out of rivers and cause damaging algal blooms.

Despite the increase in funding to Natural England, no officials from the quango came forward to endorse the announcement at the time. Now correspondence from the nature watchdog to Lady Barbara Young of Old Scone, a Scottish Labour member of the house, shows the watchdog said the rule changes were not necessary and that the current scheme was working to deliver homes and reduce nutrients.

The advice from Natural England recommends making developers pay for the pollution: “Our experience in similar schemes suggests that upfront, fixed-rate contributions from developers could be faster and offer more certainty in enabling planning permissions to be granted and support emerging green finance markets.”

It also said the European Union habitats regulations, which were carried over into UK law after Brexit, and which this amendment would undermine, had worked in delivering homes and reducing pollution. “There are a number of well-established schemes that implement the [habitats regulations] with regard to housing, where a case by case approach has been replaced by a more strategic scheme – familiar cases include the Thames Basin Heaths scheme, mitigating housing pressure operating across 13 local planning authorities, and the national district level licensing scheme which has replaced the need for individual newt licence solutions for great crested newts.”

Natural England pointed out that its nutrient mitigation scheme had thus far offered credits to developers to enable more than 3,500 homes and two temporary prisons, with a pipeline of schemes for a further 4,500 homes in place for this financial year. It said that in total all providers across England had created sufficient mitigation for approximately 16,000 homes, with a well-advanced pipeline to enable an additional 35,000 new homes.

Although the government said current rules choked small and medium housebuilders, Natural England said the scheme “has deliberately prioritised [small and medium-sized] housebuilders, so for example in the Tees catchment we were able to meet demand for credits for all small developments (50 homes or less)”.

Despite this advice, the government went ahead with plans for the amendment. Wildlife groups have accused ministers of ignoring Natural England. Craig Bennett, the chief executive of the Wildlife Trusts, said: “The government brought forward outrageous plans to weaken environmental law in the final stages of the levelling up bill, without any public consultation. Now it is plain that they have ignored their own advisers as well. The result is poorly conceived plans that will not work, but will leave lasting damage to rivers and to UK environmental protection.”

Dr Richard Benwell, the chief executive of the environmental coalition Wildlife and Countryside Link, added: “Natural England’s advice reveals that this regression – which would expose protected river habitats to more pollution, while letting polluters off the hook – is totally unwarranted. Environmental charities are united in opposition to these plans, and we hope all parliamentarians who care about rivers and nature will resist them.”

Peers are trying to squash the bill. The Duke of Wellington, a crossbench peer, has laid an amendment that would nullify the government’s one, and he has support from other Tories. Lady Jenny Jones of the Green party is hoping to force a vote against Gove and Coffey’s amendment which would delete it from the bill. The Office for Environmental Protection has also written to the secretaries of state, calling the move a “regression” in environmental standards.

Young added: “The government’s proposal would force local authorities to ignore pollution, even when it is plain to see. In the process, it would take a wrecking ball to the habitats regulations, the UK’s most important nature laws. The advice I have received from Natural England shows that both are unnecessary and that effective other measures are available to release much needed houses and protect their environment. I plan to oppose these provisions when they come to parliament tomorrow.”

A government spokesperson acknowledged Natural England had suggested alternatives to ripping up the EU-derived law and said: “We believe the approach we are taking will best deliver our objectives of unlocking much needed homes, continuing to offset the small amount of additional nutrient pollution caused by new housing, and shifting our focus from mitigation to site restoration. Over 100,000 homes are held up due to retained EU laws and will be unblocked between now and 2030, delivering an estimated £18bn boost to the economy while protecting the environment.”

Richard Foord, Tiverton & Honiton MP 

The summer months are a time getting out to enjoy our beautiful countryside with family and loved ones. But as your Member of Parliament, the summer is also a useful time for me to take time far from Westminster, beyond Uffculme where I live – to spend time in the towns and villages in our corner of Devon.

That’s why, in addition to the various meetings and local community events I attended, I also launched my first ever summer tour. This saw me visit 36 different places across five weeks to host a series of open town and village hall meetings. I also took a break in the tour to visit the Honiton Police Station front desk that will open next year, thanks to your submissions to a Devon and Cornwall Police online poll.

Many people took up the opportunity to let me know frankly and directly about local, national and international concerns – what they and you would like to see me arguing for in Westminster. I am hugely grateful to the hundreds of people who turned out and for the many positive discussions we had.

Several issues came up time and again – the pressure on our health services and local schools; the difficulties accessing special educational needs provision; and the outrage that we rightly share about the scandal of the way we taxpayers and billpayers have been ripped off by water companies.

The meetings also offered a forum to discuss very specific local issues, such as the need for more social housing, the scale of potholes, and poor-quality broadband provision.

There are so many issues which need addressing. This has been caused in part by this Conservative Government repeatedly squeezing local authority finances – which has left many Councils struggling to deliver our core services. There also seems to have been a lack of focus on fixing the small things, which can grow and spread if not kept in check.

The job of a good MP is not simply to proffer our own opinions. It is to listen and act on what we hear. This autumn, if you tune into Parliament on your TV, I hope that you will see and hear me raising some of the concerns that you let me know about this summer.