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UK ministers have promised to speed up the construction of nuclear power stations, after decades of delays, by making changes to the planning system including weakening protections for wildlife and national parks.
Following recommendations in a review by John Fingleton, former head of the Office of Fair Trading, ministers plan to weaken habitat protection around new nuclear power stations, to the dismay of ecologists. There are also fears that undercutting Brussels’ habitat rules could cause a dispute with the EU and make it harder for the UK to gain greater access to the single market.
Nuclear developers will be able to pay a large fixed fee into a nature protection fund instead of having to get cumbersome environmental impact assessments, which can run to tens of thousands of pages. The government will also protect developers against any damages they incur in the case of a judicial review, a move that may require fresh legislation and could lead to taxpayers underwriting controversial developments.
Fingleton was commissioned by ministers to examine ways to speed up the planning process for new nuclear projects. His report, published in November, proposed correcting the planning system’s “overly conservative, process-driven culture” by defining a national standard for the “tolerability of risk”.
Developers will no longer be expected to pay compensation when they build nationally significant infrastructure projects in national parks. Local authorities will still be required to consider national parks’ protection, though the changes mean their powers will be weakened, lawyers said.
The government on Friday also revealed a new plan for urgent legislation to create a fast-track system for “defence nuclear” projects, arguing that the world had become a more dangerous place.
Ministers have long hoped that the private sector would deliver a fleet of new nuclear power stations in the UK, but the two projects currently under construction are far behind their original schedules.
Hinkley Point in Somerset, developed by France’s EDF Energy, is running a decade late and is billions of pounds over budget, while construction has only just begun at Sizewell C in Suffolk, owned by the UK government and a consortium of investors including EDF and Centrica.
Some of the delays to new nuclear projects have been caused by companies pulling out, such as Japanese conglomerate Hitachi, which abandoned plans to build reactors in Wylfa in Anglesey in 2019.
But developers have also complained about the need to conform with strict ecological restrictions. EDF has previously drawn up plans for a so-called “fish disco” at Hinkley Point, a deterrent system involving 288 underwater speakers to stop fish swimming into the reactors.
Fingleton recommended major reforms to environmental assessments, which will mean overhauling the application of the Habitats Regulations from 2017.
A similar system has been put in place for housebuilders through the recent Planning and Infrastructure Act. Builders can now destroy local habitat if they pay into a “nature restoration fund” administered by government body Natural England.
Officials and ministers are wary that the changes could flout the EU’s “level playing field” rules that underpin the free trade agreement with the UK. These rules state that Britain cannot regress on its environmental rules to gain a competitive advantage over the EU.
“The Fingleton recommendations include damaging proposals that weaken nature protections in England, legal protections that are otherwise applied successfully across the whole of Europe,” said Alexa Culver, lawyer at RSK Wilding.
“If the Fingleton recommendations are being brought forward in full, they represent another irresponsible rollback for nature laws following the blow dealt by the Planning and Infrastructure Act last year.”
The government said it would create a Nuclear Commission to be a single collective decision-making body for the sector and merge the Office for Nuclear Regulation with the Defence Nuclear Safety Regulator to reduce duplication.
The conflict in the Middle East underscored the need to accelerate the transition to “clean homegrown power” including nuclear and renewables, the government said.
It added: “These reforms could help speed up other types of infrastructure, such as looking at whether reforms to judicial reviews could apply to other major planning regimes.”
