CPRENEY reaction to the Autumn 2025 Budget

Chancellor Rachel Reeves has delivered her much anticipated budget statement

Our initial reaction to the budget statement is that we were pleased to see the commitment to more skills support for local planning departments. England desperately needs an appropriately resourced planning system that will ensure the homes and infrastructure we need are delivered in a way that both benefit people and mitigates harm to the natural environment, reducing potential harm from greenhouse gases through sustainable design and construction methods.

This Government commitment will achieve little, if environmental protections are watered-down for the benefit of big housebuilders and energy giants.

Alarmingly for North and East Yorkshire, the budget endorses the recommendations of the recently published Nuclear Regulatory Taskforce report, including the scrapping of nature protections for new nuclear projects. We strongly believe that new nuclear power stations have no place in National Parks and National Landscapes like the Howardian Hills or the proposed Yorkshire Wolds.

In the spring of 2025, the government set up a Nuclear Regulatory Taskforce to make it easier to build new nuclear projects. Their final report has just been published and its recommendations threaten some of the hard-won measures we have to protect our countryside and nature.

The taskforce was made up of figures working for the nuclear industry. They’re proposing two measures in particular that we’re most worried about.

First, it proposes that new nuclear as a whole would get an opt-out of both the Habitats Directive and the mitigation hierarchy. This is a mechanism whereby developers first need to seek to avoid harm and then try to minimise the harm. Only when they cannot do this, they should compensate for the harm by improving the natural environment elsewhere.

The report calls for nuclear developments to pay into the new Nature Restoration Fund being set up by the Planning and Infrastructure Bill and ‘move directly to off-site nature conservation’ as the default. This sweeps away the first part of the hierarchy, which asks developers to avoid or minimise local harms on landscapes and nature in favour of offsetting the harm somewhere else.

This is completely contrary to CPRE’s view which is that protecting and regenerating landscapes at the source should be prioritised.

Secondly, it calls for the scrapping of the duty on public bodies to further the statutory purposes of National Parks and National Landscapes, which came in to force through the Levelling Up and Regeneration Act 2023. The report says the duty ‘has caused confusion, and will likely delay, and add cost, to nuclear development.’

Two CPRE groups – Kent and Friends of the Lake District – have already challenged decisions using the new protected landscapes duty, but in both cases planning permission was still granted. In the CPRE NEY area, we have two National Parks and 2 full National Landscapes (Howardian Hills and Nidderdale) and part of the Forest of Bowland and the Pennines NLs, alongside a proposed new National Landscape for the Yorkshire Wolds.

Scrapping this duty would undermine the progress made in safeguarding our protected landscapes like Nidderdale and return us to the previous, much weaker duty.

The Chancellor has said she welcomes the report and will set out the government’s response in due course, and we’ll be strongly urging ministers not to dilute nature and landscape protections.

Jan Arger, CPRENEY Chair, says “Instead of building energy infrastructure in our much loved landscapes and replicating identikit executive homes across the countryside, the Government should be investing in rooftop solar and the regeneration of rundown urban centres by building the affordable homes people need and safeguarding green spaces.”

According to a CPRE report, England has enough brownfield land for 1.4 million homes and rooftops could generate more than 60% of the UK’s solar energy target. – Read the report here: https://www.cpre.org.uk/resources/state-of-brownfield-2025/