With a recent flurry of publications on our planning system, we have a clearer picture of where we are and the direction the Westminster Government wants us to head in.

A potted summary is that we are in a bad place, and the Government is proposing radical reforms that increase strains on our already struggling planning system and risk excluding communities from decisions that affect their local natural environment.

An excellent report published by Wild Justice on 12 December showed that developments only deliver around 50% of the environmental features and mitigations they're supposed to. The report exposes the huge failings in the planning system and the lack of resources made available to local authorities to make sure planning conditions and environmental requirements of developments are actually carried out.

There's no point in words being put on paper to make a planning application acceptable if those words just stay on paper and do not turn into action on the ground. It's clear that reforms to the planning system are needed to give local authorities the resources they need to monitor and enforce conditions.

However, new housing targets announced by the Government on 12 December will put additional strain on under resourced local authorities and expediency risks being prioritised over nature.

I can't help but be put in mind of Dominic Cummings’ planning white paper containing his algorithm for allocating housing across the country during the Boris Johnson years. There was a huge groundswell of opposition to the plans as it would take local people out of the process for deciding where homes should be built.

It seems Labour have not learned the lessons from the previous Government’s mistakes. Local people, if not being completely removed from the equation, are being dwarfed by the weight of central government and the scrutiny of local communities is seen as simply a cause of needless delays.

The Government seems to think that once a site is allocated in a local plan there is little else to consider. The builders should just crack on! They fail to recognise that even though a site might be allocated, there are still a number of important considerations to be taken into account around the actual detail of development. Considerations like habitats, pollution, drainage, recreational impacts, green infrastructure, water supply, air quality and more.

Sir Keir Starmer seems to believe these are simply the tools of the blockers rather than genuine considerations that need our detailed attention. His patronising language around blockers and NIMBYs suggests that to have an emotional connection to the place where you live and the nature around you is selfish and parochial. We should all want to protect where we live. The reforms relating to building on “grey belt” land also fail to understand that previously developed land and scrubland can be great for nature.

In addition to Westminster imposed housing targets, the Government also wants to centralise the delivery of environmental mitigation.

On 15 December the Government published its “Planning Reform Working Paper: Development and Nature Recovery”. In it the Government proposes making amendments to the Habitats Regulations and the Wildlife and Countryside Act which immediately rings alarm bells.

It also proposes looking at environmental impacts at a larger geographic scale, rather than individual developments, with the Westminster Government taking responsibility for dealing with certain environmental impacts of developments.

The idea seems to be, that in most cases, instead of developers providing environmental mitigation locally, a developer would simply pay an amount to Westminster via a Nature Restoration Fund, which the Government would spend on bigger environmental projects. Developments would not go through environmental assessments in relation to certain environmental impacts and instead would simply pay into a Westminster fund.

Whilst this could provide bigger nature restoration projects it risks leaving the negative consequences of local developments on the local community with few of the benefits. It is also vital that the Government’s plans do not undermine the mitigation hierarchy.

The priority for any development must first be to avoid negative impacts on the natural environment. Whilst biodiversity net gain has its critics, it is clear that the mitigation hierarchy must be followed and BNG itself does not weaken any existing environmental protections. The Government’s Nature Restoration Fund must not take the place of any existing environmental protections and must not replace the need for developers to first and foremost avoid negative impacts on the environment.

Whilst we need landscape-scale nature restoration projects, we shouldn’t accept our failure to deliver habitation creation locally. The narrative recent publications tell is that developments are failing to deliver for nature, we'll have more developments, and the Government will take environmental mitigation away from local communities and spend resources centrally.

The imposition of housing targets, the centralisation of environmental mitigation delivery, reform of planning rules and merging of councils, all paint a picture of decisions and delivery being taken away from local communities. The Wild Justice report confirms what we have long believed that local authorities need a greater ability to monitor and enforce planning conditions.

The answer isn’t to centralise these responsibilities. Local authorities need more resources, more planning officers, and more ecologists to enable them to effectively deal with the current level of planning applications. There are problems in the planning system that the Government needs to address, but they should do so without reverting to the age-old cheap shot of blaming newts and NIMBYs and taking power away from local communities.

We hope the Government will listen to constructive comments about how its plans need to change to ensure our planning system doesn’t further undermine nature’s recovery.