House Building & Eagle Predation

National news

Building | Keir Starmer has taken aim at the ‘blockers and bureaucrats’ who have prevented house-building and ‘choked off growth’ in both a column in the Times and a major speech outlining the Labour Party’s priorities. In both communications, the prime minister specifically took aim at the now-infamous £100m HS2 bat tunnel as an example of ‘absurd’ regulations holding up infrastructure projects. Starmer said that the government would ‘streamline the approval process’ in the forthcoming Planning and Infrastructure Bill, and introduce a target for 150 new major infrastructure projects. Covering the announcements, the Times suggested that this would mean an end to ‘case-by-case negotiations’ of measures to deal with ramifications for wildlife, with clearer rules for developers on rules for offsetting environmental damage by paying for improvements elsewhere. Campaigners expressed concern over the anti-environment rhetoric: ‘Boris Johnson did newts, Sir Keir goes for bats,’ wrote Richard Benwell of Wildlife and Countryside Link on X.