Angela Rayner is right to criticise our batsh*t eco-rules

‘We can’t have a situation where newts are more protected than people who need housing’, warned UK deputy prime minister Angela Rayner at the weekend. For once, she actually has a point.

Rayner, who is also the housing secretary, has vowed to build 1.5million new homes and fast-track decisions on 150 major infrastructure projects by the end of the decade. Yet five months into the job, she is already falling behind. The main reason for this? Britain’s arcane planning system really does prioritise the protection of newts, bats, fish and other flora and fauna over the needs of the British public.

While Labour might not be willing to fully admit this yet, environmentalism is at the root of Britain’s struggles to build adequate housing and vital infrastructure. Last week, prime minister Keir Starmer cited the now notorious case of the HS2 ‘bat shed’ – a £100million tunnel built to protect a colony of Bechstein’s bats in Buckinghamshire near the route of the high-speed rail line. The bat species in question is not endangered globally, and nor is there any evidence that trains would interfere with them. But according to the UK Treasury, any legal challenges that could arise from failing to protect the bats would be even costlier than the £100million price tag for the batshit bat shed.

The Lower Thames Crossing, a planned tunnel connecting Essex and Kent, has faced a similar ordeal. The planning application for the tunnel, much of which deals with environmental concerns, runs to an astonishing 360,000 pages. The cost of compiling this document, including the countless environmental-impact studies, has brought the project’s costs to almost £300million – before a single spade has touched the soil. This is more than twice as much as it cost Norway to actually complete the longest road tunnel in the world.

Nuclear power may be vital to UK energy security – as well as being carbon-free and environmentally friendly – but Britain’s next generation of plants is routinely being held up by green tape. As the UK government has itself acknowledged, the environmental-impact assessment for Sizewell C, which runs to 44,260 pages, is ‘more than 30 times longer than the complete works of Shakespeare’.

Hinkley Point C is currently on track to be the most expensive nuclear-power station ever built. Among the many factors leading to delays and cost-overruns has been a legal obligation to protect marine life. Environmentalists fear that around 112 ‘protected’ fish might end up swimming into the reactor. To which the only rational response should be, so what? Yet to allay these concerns, builders EDF have been forced to spend hundreds of millions of pounds devising a scheme that former housing minister Michael Gove has dubbed a ‘fish disco’. Almost 300 speakers are to be installed in the sea, which will play loud noises to divert the fish. In the eyes of Britain’s deranged green bureaucrats, the lifecycle of a kipper seems to matter more than powering six million homes.

The sacrifices we’re expected to make on behalf of the environment are staggering. The cost of all this green tape is reflected in housing shortages, energy insecurity, decaying infrastructure, congested roads and slow, crowded railways. And that’s before we even get into Net Zero, which threatens to subject every aspect of our lives to even more stringent green constraints.

Britain is being crushed by environmentalist zealotry. If only green Labour actually had the guts to take it on.

Fraser Myers is deputy editor at spiked and host of the spiked podcast. Follow him on X: @FraserMyers.