Guest election blog – Conservatives by Rosie Pearson

I am a planning and environmental campaigner, co-founder of the Community Planning Alliance, founder of Essex Suffolk Norfolk Pylons action group, co-founder of the North Essex Farm Cluster and columnist with The Telegraph.

I do not have any strong party allegiances.  I’m interested in policies, not politics

This is my review of, and my thoughts about, the environmental implications of the Conservatives’ approach to speeding up infrastructure as set out in their election manifesto.  Here are my highlights and lowlights.

Things I like:

• We are promised reforms that will better protect nature.  Yes, I know, promises, promises, but the intent is stated and can be used to hold the Conservatives to account. What’s not to like about a promise to better protect nature? 
• The Conservatives will ensure any requirements to offset the impact of new infrastructure and homes on an area are proportionate, without compromising environmental outcomes.  This too, is hard to disagree with.   We must all remember, though, that offsetting is a last resort, after the rest of the mitigation hierarchy has been followed, starting with avoiding harm in the first place.
• Ensure National Policy Statements are regularly updated.  This is essential.  There are rapid technological changes which must be reflected in policy to ensure best outcomes for the environment.  
• A welcome pledge, for example, is to review the policy statement which presumes pylons as preferred grid infrastructure. Why would you presume a pylon when an integrated offshore grid reduces harm on the environment by halving infrastructure overall?  Why presume a pylon when there’s so much new technology that allows transmission operators to upgrade the existing grid?  And why not encourage HVDC undergrounding, as used by the Germans, instead of pylons – it’s cheaper and less harmful to the environment, landscapes, communities, and heritage?

Things I don’t like:

• “End frivolous legal challenges that frustrate infrastructure delivery by amending the law so judicial reviews that don’t have merit do not waste court time.”:  How many ‘frivolous’ legal challenges actually are there in reality?  One doesn’t wake up and decide on a whim to lob in a judicial review.  It is a huge commitment, not least financially.  And anyway, the courts won’t allow frivolous legal challenges. If infrastructure providers, the Planning Inspectorate and Secretary of State do their jobs properly, there will be nothing to challenge.  Therefore, this commitment feels petulant and unnecessary. We await the Lord Banner review on this very topic.  It was completed on 27 May. I hope the next Government publishes it. Any attempts to water down the legal system should be strongly resisted. The environment needs the protection afforded by legal challenges.
• Reforms to ‘outdated EU red tape’ and continued reforms to ‘EU’s bureaucratic environmental impact assessment’:  That slated EU red tape has done a great job, in the form of sustainability appraisals and the like.   We will need to watch the Environmental Outcomes Reports with an eagle-eye to ensure that they are similarly robust.
• Nothing about communities: Communities can provide a very robust scrutiny service, all for nothing, of big infrastructure projects.   They have detailed knowledge of their local environment, from species, to habitats, to flooding and much more. Communities must be valued for the treasure trove of information they provide
• Silence on the Treasury Green Book: What is the point of having Treasury Green Book guidance for policies and projects if no-one is ever expected to follow it? This is a personal bug-bear. We’re seeing in East Anglia that huge infrastructure projects, such as the Norwich to Tilbury pylons, are being rammed through the system without any attempt to quantify the impacts, whether those be socio-economic or natural capital impacts. Use of Green Book guidance would enable a far more balanced appraisal of alternatives and better environmental outcomes.

Overall assessment:

There is nothing wrong with an ambition to speed up infrastructure delivery.  The system is bureaucratic and tortuous.   Whether it is realistic to expect major infrastructure projects to be signed off in one year instead of four remains to be seen.  Early indications would suggest that while the sign-off process may shorten, the burden of work to be done before an infrastructure provider enters the consent process may simply increase.  Thus sign-offs may appear faster but the project planning phase will be no quicker than before.

Would I vote for these environmental policies?

A glass half full response…   While there are risks to the environment of simplifying and speeding up the planning process, there are also benefits.   So long as Government is held robustly to account on its post-Brexit promises not to water down environmental protections, and to this manifesto pledge to better protect nature, this new approach could offer benefits.

This is one of a series of opinion pieces on the political parties’ 2024 general election manifestos. They were commissioned by Wild Justice several months ago by approaching a wide variety of conservationists and environmentalists long before the date of the general election was known. Some people who originally agreed to write pieces found the date and short timescale impossible and had to back out. We did not know what they would write and their only brief was to pick one or two political parties’ election manifestos and tell us what they liked and didn’t like about their environmental policies. We didn’t tell people what to write and we haven’t edited what they wrote (except to squeeze things into a common format, to correct minor grammatical and spelling errors and typos). The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Wild Justice.

If you think you could produce a review of one of the 2024 general election manifestos then we would need to receive it as soon as possible, but in any case before 26 June, in a similar format to that above, as a word file and with a .jpg or .png image of yourself, the author. Send any potential texts to admin@wildjustice.org.uk and we will look at them. We’ll let you know if we want to publish your piece and we may be able to pay you a small amount for it.