Planning for nature? Environmental protection and planning reform under the spotlight
The fourth in a series of blogs relating to The Bartlett School of Planning's research cluster "Planning systems, planning reforms".
By Professor Ben Clifford
29 October 2025
Environmental protection and planning reform under the spotlight
Over the summer, the latest in our series of roundtable discussions on planning reform at the UCL Bartlett School of Planning debated the issue of place of nature in the planning system. We’d selected the topic as one to discuss at the start of the academic year, little realising quite how timely these issues would become with growing controversy surrounding provisions in the Planning & Infrastructure Bill that would move from a site based mitigation for potential impacts on protected habitats to allowing developers to make contributions into a pooled fund to be spent on priorities identified by Natural England through new Environmental Delivery Plans.
Alongside the bill proposals, over the past year we have seen increasingly anti-environmental rhetoric from senior government figures including the Prime Minister seemingly blaming bats and newts for the lack of delivery of infrastructure and housing to the Chancellor of the Exchequer apparently telling business leaders how she’d intervened to allow housing development to proceed even when it threatened a rare protected species. This is despite the fact that the UK is one of the most nature-depleted countries in the world and biodiversity loss is one of the multiple crises with severe potential implications for our wellbeing in future.
In our discussion, we considered the way that we seem to lack a shared vision and understanding for what we want the planning system to achieve and a model of what good actually looks like in this space. One comment was that the current approach doesn’t actually seem to work that well, but it is of course possible things might be even worse if we didn’t have the current environmental protections we do. The current approach seems poor at dealing with indirect, cumulative impacts like air and water pollution and habitat fragmentation as opposed to just protecting the most important sites from land take. Certainly the Lawton Review in 2010 on making space for nature made the argument about the need for a landscape scale strategy, not just individual protected sites, which may just about hold the line to protect further loss of biodiversity but not actually promote nature recovery.
There has been some further government amendments to the Planning and Infrastructure Bill, but concerns about the proposed reforms still abound. A particular issue could be if viability assessment is applied to the Nature Restoration Levy meaning that in practice these contributions then get reduced, as well as broader concerns about sufficient resources including ecological expertise to implement the new system. Meanwhile, the terms of the trade deal with the European Union mean the United Kingdom cannot have weaker environmental protections than the EU and concerns about this have been raised.
Generally, there appears to be a lack of mutual trust at present, with government consultations seeming to be increasingly instrumental rather than productive. A constant conveyor belt of policy flux or rumoured change potentially undermines previous reforms which can take time to bed in, for example ripple effects of uncertainty around Biodiversity Net Gain apparently putting off investors who want to get into the market for off-site provision. Meanwhile, previous research for Wild Justice has found that about 50% of ecological enhancements secured through planning permissions haven’t actually been delivered in practice.
It will also be interesting to see how things like local nature recovery strategies align with the new strategic spatial development strategies and the local growth plans being prepared under the emerging devolution arrangements. At the same time, there are questions as to where exactly big questions of land-use will be debated and joined-up. Could the Land Use Framework for England help here or will this been seen as a DEFRA project in a still quite siloed government structure?
Recent debate on planning reform seems extremely narrow, and even dispiriting, with some quite hostile rhetoric against any positive role for planning and an apparent belief that we must ‘build baby build’ to deliver the economic growth the Chancellor so desperately needs. Yet we desperately need to think about land-use in the round, about what nature means for society and the consequent role for the planning system in protecting and enhancing the environment, and how we might achieve better outcomes that meaningfully tackle both pressing societal and environmental crises. How long the current surge in Green Party membership in England lasts remains to be seen, but there is an interesting debate to be had about how to bring together socially-focussed economic and environmental concerns as a real win-win.
In 2021, the UK government commissioned Dasgupta Review argued we have often overlooked nature as an ingredient in understanding economic growth and that we need to bring economics and ecology together with biodiversity at is core. This is not divorced from how we approach planning reform. Whilst there are certainly issues with how our planning system works at present, there’s also a danger of making things worse with rushed or inadequately worked through reforms with the potential to both fail to deliver the housing that’s actually needed and to further damage the environment, a lose-lose situation.