In the days since the Prime Minister and Chancellor’s announced Plan for Growth, I have been contacted by hundreds of constituents about the importance of ensuring that Plan for Growth doesn’t throw away our longstanding protection for our precious habitats, wildlife and countryside.

Let me first say that this is an issue I feel similarly strongly about: which is why I have campaigned as MP here for over 15 years to reform the planning system to deliver a different sort of growth that is more sustainable long term, healthy, resilient and protective of Norfolk’s precious heritage, landscape and quality of life, and the urgency of our achieving Net Zero.

We have to move away from the broken model of “house-dumping” edge of town/village commuter housing estates, without any infrastructure or facilities, which pile impossible pressure on our local services, killing our historic towns, and destroy the very pattern of market towns, villages and beautiful countryside that makes our area so sought after.

The quality of the Norfolk countryside and landscape – from the famous beaches, Broads and Brecks to the salt marshes, chalk streams, water meadows, woodland, villages and churches – is as fundamental and important to the future prosperity of our county as the exciting high growth innovation economy based here at the Norwich Research Park, the Hethel Innovation Centre, the Easton Food Hub and the many other exciting centres of our exciting local innovation economy. In agriculture, especially, we have a fantastic opportunity to use our departure from the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) to establish UK leadership in Agri-Environmental habitat management and clean, green, lean, progressive farming delivering better local food with fewer chemical inputs. From a farming family, having worked for the National Farmers Union and as former Chair of the All Party Group for Agricultural Science and Technology, and having led the UK AgriTech Strategy, this is something I have long championed.

We need a model of growth that supports both our quality of life and environment AND increases our prosperity and opportunity.

That’s why my first and ongoing pledge when selected as candidate here in 2007 was to fight for just that. It’s why I launched The Norfolk Way; have consistently campaigned for planning reforms, with better rail, cycle and bus links; successfully opposed the worst large scale house dumping in areas of outstanding natural beauty like the Tiffey Valley outside Wymondham; supported local village and town Neighbourhood Plans; set up the Mid Norfolk Flood Partnership; insisted we expand the ELMs scheme; initiated the campaign to stop multiple point to point cabling and substations for offshore wind farms and replace with an offshore grid; and why I called for the bulk of new housing to be concentrated in one or two New Towns on railway lines (for example, at Lakenheath on the Cambridge-Norwich railway), built to the latest environmental standards with proper modern infrastructure, cycle and bus links. 

(Details of much of this work can be found on here on my website campaign pages)

If we continue the current, old model of “planning” which sees constant reductions in the power of elected local councillors to plan our area properly, and continue to allow house-dumping of commuter estates wherever the most aggressive “out of town” developers most like, we will simply see continued inappropriate (and often unsustainable) out of town estates, with the accompanying destruction of the green belt, increased congestion and flooding, and the destruction of our county’s quality of life.

That’s why I have consistently called for a different approach in which areas like ours with strong growth potential are given much more local control over what model of development we want to see, so that WE the residents and our elected councillors can shape a genuinely inspiring model of long term growth. Of course we need housing, as well as investment in new and growing companies to create jobs, opportunity, prosperity and the local and national tax revenues on which we all rely.  I strongly support promoting a more entrepreneurial and innovative local economy, alongside reform of the planning system and some of the dafter specific regulations from Whitehall and Brussels, like overly oppressive nutrient neutrality and the ban on managing corvid populations to protect breeding birds, which can cause chaos in rural areas like ours. But we must not systematically undermine conservation of our precious habitats in the name of a growth free-for-all. 

Rest assured I would be hugely concerned if the new powers that the new Chancellor and PM are proposing in the Growth Plan, and the local Growth and Enterprise Zones proposed here in Norfolk, sought to seriously undermine the conservation of our most precious natural habitats.

I have already raised this with Ministers and am assured that claims the Government is rowing back on commitments to our farming reforms or nature are wholly untrue, and that Ministers are determined that the Government will never undermine its commitments to nature and the environment in the pursuit of growth.

I stood for election on a manifesto which pledged to maintain the budget for farming but spend it in a way that does better for farming and nature. I am assured that Ministers want to support the choices that individual farmers make for their farms, boost local food production and UK agricultural productivity. This will bolster the rural economy and support communities across the country, and will involve the rolling out of new schemes which will support farmers to both produce high-quality food and enhance the natural environment.

Further, the Environment Act 2021 includes a commitment to halt the decline of nature by 2030. Ministers have been clear with me that any new reforms will not undermine meeting our commitments in the 25 Year Environment Plan and the legally binding environmental targets set out throughout the Act.

As you may be aware, internationally, the UK has also committed to protect 30 per cent of its land and ocean by 2030 too, through the Leaders Pledge for Nature, which committed to putting nature and biodiversity globally on a road to recovery by 2030.

While the Government has set an intention to remove burdensome EU requirements as part of the streamlined planning process in new Growth and Investment Zones, I have checked and been told explicitly  that key planning policies which protect our precious natural heritage and maintain national policy on the Green Belt and other green areas will continue to apply. The Government focus is only on removing unnecessary bureaucracy which does nothing to protect the environment but holds up permitted development.  

I have also spoken with local Council leaders too. (I’m sure you will have noticed and welcomed the clarification from the leader of Breckland Council that they have no intention of allowing mass house-dumping here) and rest assured I will be picking this all back up with Ministers and officials in Parliament once normal business resumes next week. 

Please do feel free to circulate this note to others in your neighbourhood or network who share these concerns. I hope it comes as some reassurance to see my clear position on these matters.