---

Impact of Environmental Regulations on Development (Built Environment Committee Report)

My Lords, I thank all noble Lords who contributed to this debate. I add my particular congratulations and thanks to my noble friend Lord Banner on his maiden speech. Given the time constraints, I hope that the noble Lords who spoke will forgive me if I do not respond individually to each of them but instead confine myself to making a few remarks in response to the comments from my noble friend the Minister.

All of us in this Chamber are agreed, I think, that the objectives of building housing and of improving the environment are desirable and, if properly planned, attainable. That is also true of my noble friend the Minister; we are all as one on this. I was pleased to hear from my noble friend that the Government are doing various things they can boast of, but what I did not hear was an acknowledgement, as was well identified in this report, that the system we are operating with is broken—not necessarily fundamentally broken, but there are systemic problems—nor that the Government are going to grasp the problem. What I heard was that the Government are spending money, perhaps for the

highly desirable objective of trying to work around the nutrient neutrality bans on housing, but not what they are doing to address the overwhelmingly predominant cause of the pollution in our rivers: farming practices and the discharge of sewage and other pollutants. It seems to me that the Government have not quite grasped the seriousness and systemic nature of the problems that the report identified.

I am gratified on behalf of the committee that the report itself attracted so many compliments from noble Lords who spoke. If I may say so, I am very proud of it. I am pleased that I can say I have been associated with it. It has lessons that any Government should seriously learn; that is true of not only current Ministers but Ministers who will hold office after the general election that we must expect this year. These problems are not going away; they require a long-term, well-thought-out solution. Whoever’s laps these problems land in, I hope they will find this report a useful guide to what they should do.