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.