UK Nature and Environment

Leading economists, former government advisers and ecologists are calling for a key section of the government’s planning bill to be changed because it creates a “licence to kill nature”.

Sir Partha Dasgupta, professor emeritus of economics at the University of Cambridge, ecology professor Sir John Lawton and Dr Tom Tew, a former chief scientist of Natural England, are among the signatories to a letter to MPs that warns them to ignore government slogans and false rhetoric about nature and wildlife being a block to growth.

The letter warns that part three of the planning and infrastructure bill, applying mainly to England and Wales, allows developers to pay “cash to trash” wildlife and the environment. They say it allows companies to sidestep environmental laws affecting their project by instead paying into a national nature levy.