Green No More: Labour's Planning Bill Threatens England's Natural World

So-called ‘progress’ - but at what cost?

You don’t hear birdsong over the sound of bulldozers. That much became clear long ago, as ancient woodlands were torn through in the name of high-speed rail. But now, a new sound - quieter, bureaucratic, and more insidious - is taking hold. This time, it comes not from Conservative ministers wielding deregulation like a chainsaw, but from a Labour government that claims to be ‘restoring and protecting our natural world.’ The irony is thick, the consequences irreversible.

Under Keir Starmer’s proposed Planning and Infrastructure Bill, more than 5,000 protected nature sites across England, including beloved landscapes like the New Forest and the Peak District moors, could be placed at risk. Developers would no longer be required to conduct environmental assessments for protected species. Instead, they’d simply be allowed to pay into a “nature restoration” fund, a kind of cash-for-destruction scheme dressed up as progress.

A stream flowing through the New Forest.

We are watching something deeply familiar unfold: the slow, surgical unpicking of hard-won environmental protections, reframed as modernisation. And we are meant to nod along. Raise a concern, and you’ll be called a nimby. Protest, and you may be silenced under newly emboldened public order laws. Once again, a politics of contempt is bulldozing its way through the country, only this time, it’s wearing a red rosette.

The truth is difficult to admit, but we must: Labour is not just continuing the work of previous governments. It’s accelerating it. And in the process, it risks making the last government look, incredibly, like the greener of the two.

What the Bill Actually Does, and Undoes

On paper, Labour’s Planning and Infrastructure Bill reads like a dry procedural document: tweaks to the planning regime, simplified processes, a so-called ‘nature restoration’ fund. But what it actually represents is the deliberate unpicking of environmental protections that have, for decades, safeguarded what little remains of England’s ecological integrity.

In reality, this bill enables developers to build on some of the most sensitive sites in the country - Sites of Special Scientific Interest (SSSIs) - without the need for protected species surveys or robust environmental assessments. Instead, they are allowed to pay into a centralised pot, a “nature restoration fund” that supposedly compensates for the damage they cause. The idea that you can bulldoze a breeding site in Hampshire and compensate for it by wildflower seeding in Cornwall is just complete nonsense. This is not environmental policy, but ecological laundering.

As reported in The Guardian, more than 5,300 protected nature sites are now at risk under these proposals (Carrington, 2025a). The Office for Environmental Protection has already warned that the bill could “weaken the legal framework for protecting nature” (Carrington, 2025b). The Wildlife Trusts and RSPB have gone further still, calling it a direct betrayal of Labour’s own manifesto promises to “restore and protect our natural world” while “not weakening environmental protections” (Monbiot, 2025b).

But weaken is the wrong word. As environmental and political activist George Monbiot writes: “Well, I guess you could argue it isn’t weakening them. It’s deleting them” (Monbiot, 2025b).

This isn’t a mistake or an oversight. It’s a deliberate political choice; a calculated act of vandalism, carried out in the name of “unlocking growth.” The Labour Party, which once claimed to represent those without power - including the land, the trees, the species with no vote and no voice - is now doing the bidding of the development lobby with the same enthusiasm as any Conservative administration, just without the accompanying theatre of denial.

In fact, Labour’s approach is more insidious. Where past governments at least paid lip service to the idea of environmental stewardship, Starmer’s team has opted for the bureaucratic equivalent of a shrug: gutting legal protections and offering a pay-to-destroy scheme in return. It’s planning by direct debit. The more you can afford to ruin, the more you are entitled to build.

Deregulation Is Just Austerity in Disguise

Labour insists its planning reforms are about ‘cutting red tape,’ ‘getting Britain building,’ and ‘unlocking growth.’ But this language, so familiar from the austerity playbook, should ring alarm bells. As Monbiot observes, “Like austerity, deregulation tends not to save money, but to shift costs from the rich to the poor and the private sector to the state” (Monbiot, 2025b). Labour’s bill fits this pattern precisely. It removes obligations on developers to account for biodiversity loss, slashes environmental surveying requirements, and hands over the right to destroy protected sites, all while calling it ‘streamlining.’

Who benefits from this? Not the public. Certainly not nature. Not even, in the long term, the economy. What Labour is offering here is a subsidy for ecological vandalism, deregulatory green light dressed up as ‘pragmatism.’ It invites short-term profit at the cost of long-term resilience.

The costs that used to be absorbed by developers - surveying, mitigation, ecological design - will now fall on already-strained local authorities, on community health, and on the climate. By removing requirements to study protected species on development land, the bill hands developers a fast lane and leaves taxpayers to deal with the fallout: increased flood risks, habitat loss, the slow collapse of ecosystem services. What looks like ‘efficiency’ today is environmental debt tomorrow.

There is a dangerous irony in watching a Labour government, a party once built on the collective good, actively dismantle the safeguards that protect our shared inheritance. The party of the NHS and the post-war welfare state now champions a model that treats the natural world as an inconvenience to be priced out of the equation.

The nature restoration fund at the heart of the bill is a hollow instrument. As multiple experts have pointed out, there is little evidence that such schemes deliver equivalent ecological value (Carrington, 2025a). You cannot simply uproot a living habitat in one place and replant its value elsewhere. You cannot spreadsheet an ecosystem into being.

This is displacement: of cost, of damage, and of responsibility.

From HS2 to This: A Long View of Land Betrayal

For all the destruction Labour’s new bill threatens, it would be a mistake to see it as an isolated event. It is, rather, the continuation, an escalation, of a long, cynical tradition: treating the British countryside not as a living system or shared inheritance, but as an obstacle to be overcome.

First came HS2. Now this.

South Cubbington wood, Warwickshire, before HS2 work began.

Felled trees in Little Lyntus, Staffordshire, 2020.

Little Lyntus, decimated, as shown from the air.

HS2 was the warning shot. More than 100 ancient woodlands were felled or damaged to make way for a train line that, even now, exists only in fragments (The Woodland Trust, 2021). Here in the Midlands, we’ve already watched entire copses disappear under HS2. Bluebell woods cleared. Skylark song murdered by machinery. Badger setts sealed off. The damage isn’t hypothetical. It is highly visible, and permanent.

Habitats that had evolved undisturbed over centuries were wiped out in days. Conservation activists watched in despair as woodland floors were scraped bare, root systems severed, wildlife corridors lost.

And now, Labour proposes to apply the same logic nationwide: that environmental destruction is acceptable as long as it is wrapped in the language of ‘ambition.’ But HS2 should have taught us something, not only about what is lost, but about what is promised. Grand infrastructure projects are often sold as symbols of renewal. In truth, they are often monuments to short-term thinking.

The new Planning and Infrastructure Bill lifts the bulldozer from the rail line and lets it roam across England. Where HS2 was a surgical strike, this bill is blanket permission, giving developers wide latitude to destroy sensitive habitats, and simply pay a fee for the privilege. In both cases, the underlying principle is the same: land is a barrier to economic growth, not a partner in our collective wellbeing.

What makes Labour’s proposals so much more dangerous than their predecessors is the scale, speed, and cover of progressive branding. Under Starmer, the language has changed, but the agenda has not. Instead of ‘cutting red tape,’ we are told that ‘planning must be unlocked.’ Instead of ‘getting Britain building,’ we hear that ‘local voices must be heard’ - even as they are ignored. Instead of protecting habitats, Labour proposes ‘restoring nature’ - by first allowing it to be destroyed.

It is, in essence, the HS2 model writ large: promise the future, devastate the present, and hope no one remembers.

The ‘Nimby’ Smear: How Language Silences Dissent

Every era has its scapegoat; ridiculed used to shut down debate and dismiss resistance. In the 2000s, it was ‘loony left.’ In the 2010s, ‘woke.’ In 2025, the insult of choice is ‘nimby.’

Nimby is acronym for ‘Not In My Back Yard.’ Nimbyism has always carried negative connotations, but now it has been weaponised to shut down people’s concerns about their local environment and general environmental degradation. It’s a clever rhetorical trick, and a deeply dishonest one.

Labour has embraced the smear with open arms. Keir Starmer himself has framed opponents of the new planning bill as “time-wasting Nimbys and zealots holding the country to ransom” (Starmer, 2025, cited in Doughty, 2025). The Daily Mail, in its usual fevered cadence, echoes the claim: that it is middle-class nature lovers, not deregulated development or political cowardice, who are to blame for the housing crisis.

But this is a crude and convenient distortion. Not everyone who opposes the concreting over of ancient fields is a nimby. Not everyone who wants better planning is anti-growth. Many campaigners, including those fighting to preserve local habitats, footpaths, hedgerows and bird populations, are not obstructing the future. They are fighting to preserve the possibility of one.

The smear works because it flattens complexity. It casts anyone who questions the government’s bulldozer-first approach as reactionary or regressive. It transforms ecological concern into personal selfishness. And, most insidiously of all, it shuts down democratic conversation.

In a country already struggling with democratic deficit - where consultations are often tokenistic, and public inquiries neutered, the language of nimbyism becomes a weapon of contempt. It justifies the sidelining of local voices, the dismissal of environmental expertise, and the criminalisation of dissent. It tells us that to care for the land you live on is shameful. It turns stewardship into sin.

This is a strategic issue, too. The government - Labour or otherwise - knows that widespread destruction of green space, ancient habitats and community life cannot proceed unchallenged. So, it deploys a cultural insult to do what policy alone cannot: to silence opposition before it speaks.

Rhetorical silencing is only one half of the story, though – the other half is legal. In recent years, the right to protest in Britain has been steadily eroded, and not just by the Conservatives. Under new legislation supported by Labour, even peaceful demonstrations can now be restricted or criminalised under the broad banner of ‘public order.’ As The George Monbiot recently reported, activists holding a silent protest inside a Quaker Meeting House were monitored and documented by police intelligence (Monbiot, 2025a). What used to be civic engagement is now treated as subversion. And what better way to push through a deeply unpopular planning bill than to make it harder for people to resist it?

Labour: Greyer Than the Tories

It would have once seemed unthinkable to say this, but here we are: Labour’s approach to environmental planning is now so regressive, so unapologetically destructive, that it makes the Conservative government of the past decade look almost verdant by comparison (note the word ‘almost.’)

That is in no way a compliment to the Tories. It is an indictment of Labour. The Conservative’s record on environmental protection is poor, often performative, and riddled with contradictions. At the very least, they retained certain guardrails. Even Boris Johnson’s administration stopped short of openly dismantling the legal frameworks that protect Sites of Special Scientific Interest. Under Rishi Sunak, these protections remained intact - if only barely - as a sop to party members in rural seats and a gesture toward international climate obligations.

Let us remember however, that the ongoing sewage scandal was allowed to happen by the Tories. So again, we’re not complimenting their environmental record.

Labour, however, is not pretending. It is not quietly failing to protect nature; it is actively legislating to weaken the laws that preserve it. It is not backsliding, but marching - proudly - in the wrong direction.

Keir Starmer’s government is not ‘pragmatic,’ as it claims. It is deeply ideological, committed to a brand of technocratic growth that treats nature as either a staging ground for development or a PR inconvenience. It speaks the language of ‘green growth’ while deleting the very laws that make growth green in the first place. Under the guise of ‘modernising planning,’ it is delivering an old and familiar project: the rollback of public protections in favour of private interest.

This is not environmental policy. It is neoliberalism in an earth-toned tie.

And unlike the Tories - whose disdain for environmentalists was at least consistent - Labour cloaks its betrayal in the language of duty and ambition. It tells the public it will “restore and protect” the natural world, while laying legislative dynamite at the base of it (Monbiot, 2025b). This duplicity is not just galling; it is dangerous. Because when the public sees that even Labour cannot be trusted to protect the land, what hope is left?

The last government may have done too little. But this one is doing too much of the wrong thing, with unearned confidence, and barely a flicker of shame.

The Land We Love, and Are Losing

There is a deep grief in watching a country forget itself.

In our own region, HS2 has already cleared habitats that stood for generations. Scorched gaps where woods once stood, silent spaces where birds used to call. These places aren’t just green dots on a map or obstacles to housing targets. They are memory. Continuity. Belonging. They are part of what it means to live here.

Labour’s proposals put thousands more of these places at risk. Over 5,000 protected sites, ancient grasslands, hedgerows buzzing with pollinators, rare peat bogs that store carbon and history, all now open to destruction, provided a developer pays into a fund. This is what we are being told to accept as a fair trade.

But people do not love nature in the abstract. We love this tree. That path. The birds that return each year. The pond our children walk past on the way to school. The woods we escaped to during lockdown. What’s being lost is not just biodiversity. It is rootedness, solace, a sense of home.

Polling shows this disconnect clearly. According to research conducted by Savanta for The Wildlife Trusts, fewer than one in three UK adults believes the government is taking the nature crisis seriously enough. Only 25% said they would support new developments in their local area if they harmed the environment (The Wildlife Trusts, 2025). So, these are not marginal views. They are mainstream, heartfelt, and grounded in lived experience.

Yet, instead of listening, Labour appears determined to bulldoze its way through both habitat and opposition. It is willing to destroy what remains of our natural inheritance for a quick political win, to claim it is ‘building’ while it is, in fact, erasing.

In a country where green space is already unequally distributed, this destruction will not be felt evenly. Affluent communities will fight back. But elsewhere - in post-industrial towns, edge-of-city villages, and newer housing estates already starved of nature - the damage will be irreparable. This is an environmental justice issue, not just a planning one.

Some things, once lost, can never be recovered. You can replant a tree, but you cannot replace a 400-year-old oak. You can scatter seed, but you cannot resurrect a vanished ecology.

And you cannot buy back the trust of a public that has already watched too much vanish.

Conclusion: A Future Paved Over

We are not opposed to homes being built. We are not nostalgic romantics clinging to some pastoral fantasy. But we are people who understand that ‘progress’ which bulldozes the past and ignores the future is not progress at all. It is failure masquerading as vision.

Labour’s Planning and Infrastructure Bill does not solve the housing crisis. It does not offer meaningful protection to nature, and it does not reflect the will of the British people. What it does is sacrifice what little remains of our ecological inheritance for the illusion of urgency, dressed in the language of growth.

This is another reckoning about what kind of country we want to be, and what kind of world we are willing to leave behind. Do we really believe that every ancient wood, every singing bird, every hedgerow and field and fen can be priced, monetised, and swapped out like so many development tokens?

Or do we believe that some things are not up for sale?

Labour promised to restore nature. Instead, it has placed it on the table as a bargaining chip. While the party in power may have changed, the logic remains the same: nature is expendable, local voices are a nuisance, and protest is a threat to be managed. The right to dissent - already hollowed out under the Conservatives - is now being quietly sealed off under Labour. New public order laws, supported across the political spectrum, have made it easier to fine, arrest, or surveil those who stand in the way of ‘progress.’ When even silent vigils are treated as threats, we must ask: who is this government listening to? And who is it silencing? This is not leadership. It is surrender: to the market, to the developers, and to a short-termism that our children will never forgive.

We can still resist this. We can write, speak, and protest. We can support organisations like The Wildlife Trusts and RSPB, who are standing against this bill. We can demand a politics that values land not as a liability, but as life.

Because once it’s gone, it’s gone.

You can’t rewild a motorway. You can’t restore an ancient forest with a cheque. And you cannot build a future by paving over the past.

If you value this kind of writing, please consider subscribing to Plague Island.

We don’t hide our work behind a paywall, because we want it to be read. But if you can support it, we’ll use that support to keep writing more, and writing better.

Paid subscribers receive early access, behind-the-scenes newsletters, and the chance to shape future essays.

We write with rigour, we cite everything, and we answer only to our readers.

Subscribe here

Or support us with a one-off tip → Buy Me a Coffee

References:

Carrington, D. (2025a) ‘Revealed: 5,000 English nature sites at risk under Labour’s planning proposals.’ The Guardian. 3 June. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/jun/03/revealed-5000-english-nature-sites-at-risk-under-labours-planning-proposals [Accessed: 3 June 2025].

Carrington, D. (2025b) ‘Planning bill would allow builders to pay cash to trash nature, say UK experts.’ The Guardian. 24 April. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2025/apr/24/planning-bill-would-allow-builders-to-pay-cash-to-trash-nature-say-uk-experts [Accessed: 3 June 2025].

Doughty, S. (2025) ‘Keir Starmer: Only Labour has the courage to stop the time-wasting Nimbys holding the country to ransom.’ Daily Mail. 24 April. Available at: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-14314783/KEIR-STARMER-Labour-Government-stop-time-wasting-Nimbys-zealots-holding-country-ransom.html [Accessed: 3 June 2025].

Monbiot, G. (2025a) ‘Protest in Britain: How activists were surveilled for holding a silent meeting.’ The Guardian. 3 April. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/apr/03/protest-britain-activists-quaker-meeting-house [Accessed: 4 June 2025.]

Monbiot, G. (2025b) ‘Labour says it wants to protect nature - so why is it about to trash it?’ The Guardian. 24 April. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/apr/24/labour-nature-england-ecosystems-planning-bill-keir-starmer [Accessed: 3 June 2025].

The Wildlife Trusts (2025) ‘Planning bill breaks Labour’s nature promises, say Wildlife Trusts and RSPB.’ 24 April. Available at: https://www.wildlifetrusts.org/news/planning-bill-breaks-labours-nature-promises-say-wildlife-trusts-and-rspb [Accessed: 4 June 2025].

The Woodland Trust (2021) ‘HS2 and ancient woodland.’ Available at: https://www.woodlandtrust.org.uk/protecting-trees-and-woods/campaign-with-us/hs2-rail-link/ [Accessed: 4 June 2025].