Those of us who try to defend wildlife are horribly familiar with bad laws. But we’ve never seen anything like this. The government’s planning and infrastructure bill is the worst assault on England’s ecosystems in living memory. It erases decades of environmental protections, including legislation we inherited from the EU, which even the Tories promised to uphold.

The rules defending wildlife and habitats from unscrupulous developers are weak enough already, which is partly why, as Labour reminded us in its manifesto, Britain is “one of the most nature-depleted countries in the world”. But this bill will make it much, much worse.

At present, builders are supposed to follow a “mitigation hierarchy”: avoid, minimise, mitigate, offset. Ideally, they should avoid building in places of high wildlife value, especially irreplaceable habitats. If that isn’t possible, they should minimise the harm inflicted. Then they should mitigate that harm, by restoring the habitats they’ve damaged. Only if all these options are exhausted should they seek to offset the damage by creating habitat elsewhere. This final gambit is generally the most expensive and least successful.

The new bill scratches all that, jumping straight to option 4: offsetting. By paying a “nature restoration levy”, developers will be allowed to trash whatever habitats – woods, meadows, wetlands, streams – stand in their way. Once they’ve paid, the bill states, they can “disregard” the impact of destroying a protected feature. The details are remarkably, horrifyingly vague: the secretary of state merely needs to believe that the levy is “likely”, one day, to create new habitat to deem the........

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