Environment secretary downgrades environment shock, horror

It was, I suppose, sadly predictable that environment secretary Steve Reed should give his “first significant interview since Labour took power” to the home builders’ house magazine, the Sunday Times. He certainly managed to sound house builder friendly.

Campaigners to protect green spaces should not expect the right to a veto over planning, he warned them.

As if.

Who are these powerful folk who get a “veto” over development on greenfield sites?

Certainly not local planning authorities, whose ability to specify brownfield-first in allocation of development sites was ended in 2012. And if they try to influence things they’re routinely slapped down at examination-in-public or at planning appeals – sometimes with costs dumped on their already grossly inadequate planning budgets.

Certainly not local campaigners, who have never had more than a right to put in evidence to local plan inquiries – up against massively funded developers able to deploy KCs and the rest of it – or to submit objections to planning applications on a very narrow range of “relevant planning considerations”, where the pass has already been sold and which the local planning authority routinely ignores.

“We need to allow people to influence how change happens,” he told the interview. “But collaboration isn’t the same as veto. It’s entirely legitimate for a democratically elected government to seek to implement the programme it was elected on. Politics is about negotiating for the common good. Those homes have to be built.”

Reed: Those homes have to be built

So stuff the environment, says the environment secretary. There could be “negotiations”, he says, “but it won’t be a veto”.

Mr Reed is, of course, either being naïve here, or just downright misleading. There never was a veto and never will be.

Given that he then repeats the rubbish in the planning consultation about the “grey belt”, it’s pretty obviously the latter.

“These are areas people wouldn’t recognise as green,” he claims. “Disused car parks or petrol stations.”

Just how many disused car parks does he imagine there are in the southern English green belts that house builders are salivating over? Precious few, of course. And given that they were car parks, they’re pretty definitely at car-dependent locations remote from public transport.

And you can forget disused petrol stations. Ground contamination, expensive or slow to remediate, is pretty well universal at such sites and developers really aren’t interested.

So, does the environment secretary have any plans to actually improve the environment?

Well, he cites natural recovery plans, but warns that while they can bring people together to identify what to improve, they depend on “what resources are available”. This is his ideology, apparently: “the politics of place”.

Places with rubbish funding presumably – though rubbish does get a nod to the circular economy.

Which apparently brings him to “his other passion” (unclear what the first one was, but still). DEFRA, he told the interview, “has a reputation as a blocker to prosperity. He wants it to become known as a department of growth”.

“Defra gets talked about in all sorts of ways,” he said. “But it rarely gets called a growth department.”

You might imagine this is because protecting the environment involves things which can be at odds with the 1980s style economic growth model – Margaret Thatcher’s “Great Car Economy” – currently being fantasised over by the new government. And, to judge from the examples Mr Reed cites, you might be right.

“Growth”, apparently includes the £88 billion of water industry investment over the next five years. “It will be the second biggest private-sector investment in the entire economy over the next five years,” he says.

Really? Much of this “growth” would be the routine investment in the industry needed to make up for years of giving the dosh to private investors instead of renewing infrastructure? And is he absolutely sure it won’t end up as public investment as water companies fold under the pressure of, er, doing what they’re required by law to do?

In case all this sounds like DEFRA has become a small and insignificant office at HM Treasury, hold on to that thought.

This week sees announcement of a review of DEFRA regulations to be led by Gordon Brown’s former Policy Unit director Dan Corry, “with a view to putting economic growth at the heart of the Department’s activities”.

Anyone who has listened to the whines of central government neoliberals about regulation over the past 45 years will have a cosy feeling of familiarity. Mr Corry will doubtless find, as ever, that regulation has already been stripped to the bone and beyond in this country, to the point where its inadequacy results in much higher costs to the environment.

The shambolic state of our water industry being a prime example.

That the environment now just occupies an inconvenient corner of the Treasury’s brain, given the massive challenges of climate change, food and water security, destruction of nature etc., that we face, is pretty depressing.

So Steve Reed has a choice in front of him. Either wise up, learn what the challenges are and the responses we need, or go down in history as the latest dismal failure at the environment department.

I know it was the Sunday Times, but did he really have to make it so blatantly clear he presently intends to be the latter?

Jon Reeds