Monday, November 10, 2025
Ministers lose environmental plot on planning bill
The paper says that the government published its planning and infrastructure bill in March, but before and after the bill’s publication the chancellor, Rachel Reeves, and housing minister Matthew Pennycook met dozens of developers in numerous meetings. However, the body representing professional ecologists, has not met one minister despite requests to do so:
The Guardian can reveal the scale of the lobbying by developers in face-to-face meetings with the chancellor and other ministers that has been going on for months, while professional ecologists have found it hard to gain any audience.
“Access to ministers has been difficult,” said Sally Hayns, the chief executive of the Chartered Institute of Ecology and Environmental Management. “We asked for a meeting early on, and were initially turned down. We asked again in July and finally had a meeting in the autumn with civil servants. We haven’t had a face-to-face meeting with a minister at all.”
In contrast, just a week into her tenure Reeves hosted high-level discussions with housebuilders Berkeley, Barratt and Taylor Wimpey and has continued to have a string of meetings with housing developers, according to the Treasury register of ministerial meetings.
Reeves has repeatedly trumpeted the virtues of slashing nature rules to make it easier for homes to be built, and maligned the bats, newts and spiders that might get in the builders’ way.
She recently boasted to a tech conference hosted by US bank JP Morgan that she had unblocked a development of 20,000 homes that were being held up by a rare snail after she was approached by a developer. These homes had initially been blocked by Natural England because the Sussex area was at risk of running out of water.
Housing minister Matthew Pennycook has also recorded many meetings with developers including Vistry, Berkeley, Barratt, and Taylor Wimpey. He has recorded 16 meetings up to May this year with property developers, on housing supply and planning reform.
In contrast, his engagement with wildlife and nature groups is less intense. Pennycook has recorded four meetings over the past year with nature groups, three with Wildlife and Countryside Link and the other with a range of groups including the Campaign to Protect Rural England and the RSPB (the Royal Society for the protection of Birds). Ministers in the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) have held roundtables with environmental NGOs, but the bill’s oversight is being led by Pennycook’s department.
Vistry, which is building 1,200 homes outside Newton Abbot in Devon, sent bulldozers to within feet of a 2,000 year-old protected ancient wetland last month. They want planning conditions protecting the site lifted, and have said they are in contact with Labour housing ministers, seeking help to sort out the “current blockages” and expedite the project.
Hayns said ecologists from her group worked closely with developers, and were key contributors to helping projects go ahead but were not being properly consulted. “There is a very low level of ecological literacy being displayed by ministers,” she said.
“Nothing I have seen or heard gives me comfort that Rachel Reeves understands the importance of nature to economic and social wellbeing, nothing,”
Hayns said nature was being treated as expendable. “I believe this will come back to bite them in the local elections,” she said. “Nature and protecting it is an issue that people care about.”
It's almost as if the Tories were still in charge.
