The Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (Defra) has published details of the Nature Restoration Fund, designed to accelerate infrastructure projects and enable developers to meet their environmental obligations faster.

Part of Government’s Plan for Change the proposals include measures to unblock infrastructure projects whilst supporting nature recovery at scale and will be listed in the forthcoming Planning and Infrastructure Bill.

The Government is also considering measures that will make legal challenges more difficult and limit the number of times any project can be challenged. (See the story Nimby challenges to be blocked.)

Under current rules, infrastructure projects must secure mitigation or compensation for environmental harm to some protected sites and species before being granted planning permission, adding costs and delays to the planning process. Developers are required to identify and meet environmental obligations, typically on a project-by-project basis, and this misses opportunities to find strategic solutions with the greatest benefits for nature.

The Government will set up a Nature Restoration Fund enabling infrastructure builders to meet their environmental obligations faster and at greater scale by pooling contributions from developers to fund larger strategic interventions for nature. The approach will mean the burden of individual site-level assessments and delivering mitigation and compensation is reduced. In many cases, a single payment will enable development to proceed.

Environment Secretary Steve Reed said: “Nature and development have been unnecessarily pitted against each other for too long. This has blocked economic growth but done nothing for nature’s recovery. Communities and the environment deserve better than this broken status-quo.”

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