There has been a new sound in the streets around Westminster this week. The whoosh of traffic and the cooing of pigeons have been joined by howls of shock and outrage, from the offices of the corporate lobbyists that cluster around Parliament.  

It is these offices that have produced the narrative that nature protections somehow ‘stand in the way’ of growth. The start of the year was set fair for these advocates of deregulation. Hot on the heels of 2025’s environmentally regressive Planning and Infrastructure Act was to come a fresh Planning Bill for 2026. This new assault on nature would be needed to fully implement the 47 recommendations of the Nuclear Regulatory Review, three of which are deeply concerning as they propose weakening the Habitats Regulations and removing key legal protection for National Parks.  

The march of deregulation was to continue: boom time for lobbyists arguing that developers should be able to avoid planning rules.  

Now, thousands of nature lovers have thrown a fly into the ointment. Public opposition to last year’s planning reforms was loud.  

It’s been followed by voters across the political spectrum questioning the wisdom of a Government that uncritically accepts corporate lobbying lines as planning solutions. Across political parties, MPs are listening and, suddenly, thankfully, the full implementation of the Nuclear Regulatory Review is not a done deal. 

This has stung those advocates of deregulation, who reacted with a frantic letter and associated blog urging the Government to continue to listen to them instead – their advice being disinterested and impartial of course (notwithstanding the number of those letter signatories who have ties to the nuclear industry).  

It is worth delving into these deregulation arguments, for what they reveal about the corporate lobbying fraternity, their favoured magic tricks and the central illusion being peddled to the Government – that the destruction of cherished wildlife, in a country that has already lost so much,  is a price worth paying for a profit boost for developers.  

Deception by minimisation  

Hinkley C: the vanishing fish act

In our paper, ‘Why the Nuclear Regulatory Review is flawed’, The Wildlife Trusts highlight that the Review’s recommendations stem from one, flawed, case study of the Hinkley C nuclear project. The case study minimises the impact the project would have on wildlife without mitigation and maximises the costs of those mitigations. The result presents nature protections as an ‘unreasonable burden’ on nuclear developers.  

The minimisation includes the assertion that all mitigation measures will save just a few hundred fish per year. The Environment Agency’s figures show the actual figures to be 8,000 times higher.  

In a blog responding to The Wildlife Trusts, ‘growth campaigners’ Britain Remade quietly accepted that ‘in reality, far more than 4.6m fish will be killed each year’ before dismissing these repercussions because ‘many will however be extremely young, small and would not have made it to adulthood’.  
 

Deception by misrepresentation

Hinkley C: Conflation extraordinaire

The Britain Remade blog has more to say on fish, defending the Review’s claim that the cost of mitigation measures at Hinkley C to lessen fish impacts will come to £700 million.  

The claim rests on the argument that three key environmental requirements - low velocity water intake heads (£500M), a Fish Recovery and Return System (£150m) and an Acoustic Fish Deterrent (£50M) - are all purely fish protection measures, which combined mean that, in the words of the case study, ‘Hinkley Point C will have more fish protection measures than any other power station in the world’. The implication is clear - the cost of environmental mitigation is unreasonable.  

In reality, the Acoustic Fish Deterrent, remains the only purely fish protection measure at Hinkley C. The other two – the most expensive - components of this package are not purely fish protection measures. Low velocity intake heads and a fish return system form part of a core structure for the nuclear plant itself; the cooling system which brings in water to stop the nuclear reactor overheating.  

Solid objects, from fish to wooden flotsam, coming in with the water risks blockages and potential overheating, so all nuclear plants spend money on measures to prevent solids getting too far into the cooling system, including low velocity intake heads and fish return systems. Plant protection, not nature protection is the core aim of these measures – as evidenced by the fact that some fish return systems return most fish to the water dead. 

When carefully designed, these two measures can reduce impacts on local fish populations. To claim that these are pure ‘fish protection measures’, as the Review case study implied, is a misrepresentation. It is more correct to refer to them as part of the plant’s cooling water infrastructure, which can and should be designed with nature in mind. 

This is the approach taken by the Planning Inspectorate, in their 2012 report on the project (p299). Unsurprisingly the only purely nature measure, the Acoustic Fish Deterrent, is the element the developer has tried to remove from the project as an unnecessary cost. 

For more on lobbyist attempts to conflate and exaggerate the costs of doing anything about fish impacts, see this blog from environmental campaigner Danica Priest.  

Deception by misattribution

The Habitats Regulation: an exercise in projection

The letter from Britain Remade returns to Hinkley C to argue that the Habitats Regulations need to be weakened, as recommended by the Nuclear Regulatory Review. 

Signatories blame the regulations for ‘compelling’ the developer to: ‘submit over 30,000 pages of environmental documentation; face three unsuccessful environmental legal challenges; delay essential works at a cost of £150m due to a failed court action; install unprecedented (and costly) mitigation systems; and apply for planning permission for operational minutiae’.  

A careful reader will see there is something characteristically fishy here. Regulations do not in themselves compel legal challenges, delays, or unprecedented costs. 

Regulations do require a developer to provide specified information in a timely manner. The main risk to the developer comes from not providing sufficient information, which can then lead to challenge and delay. 

A minority of developers, usually those who have failed to provide sufficient information and are then hit by delays, get predictably grumpy. This is what happened at Hinkley. Successive attempts to wriggle out of planning requirements, plus issues with no connection to nature, have caused delays. The developers have in some ways been the authors of their own misfortune and are now looking to project blame. Some frustrated developers always resort to blaming the Habitat Regulations – par for the course.  

The Habitat Regulations, which have been in place in the UK for over thirty years, have succeeded in preserving some of last strongholds for wildlife whilst nature has declined outside their boundaries. Three decades is enough time for any developer to understand how these rules work. 

Countless residential and energy developers, including on nuclear sites, have successfully worked with the system to bring forward development in a way that prevents harm to precious wild spaces. Defra reviewed the Habitats Regulations from an economic perspective in 2012 and found them to be ‘working well, allowing both development of key infrastructure and ensuring that a high level of environmental protection is maintained.’  

Five – yes, five - further reviews of environmental regulation since then, have reached similar conclusions.  

 
Deception by misrepresentation

Private gain versus public good: the great distortion

And now we come to the most blatant lobbyist trick: claims that cuts to developer’s costs automatically translate to public good. This has been especially apparent in the response to our criticism of the Nuclear Regulatory Review. 

The lobbyist fraternity have accused The Wildlife Trusts, and all the conservation charities that are standing with us, of stopping energy bills from becoming cheaper and even of getting in the way of nuclear’s contribution to net zero. 

This is confected outrage, deployed for cynical ends. Nature groups are defending mitigation measures costing £50 million at Hinkley C, out of an overall project cost that has swelled to £46 billion - huge costs that are due largely to developer decisions and wider issues which have nothing to do with nature.  

While £50 million is a huge sum, it is 0.1% of the overall cost - not a scale that could block or even seriously impede any project. If all nature mitigations are removed across the planning system, nuclear power might get around 0.1% cheaper to deliver, trivial for deployment prospects. 

It is also negligible in terms of impacts on energy bills, even if we can assume developers would pass the 0.1% cost saving on to consumers. Precedent after precedent suggests the opposite; corporates typically turn cost reductions from deregulation into increased profits, not consumer savings. 

And this, at the end, is the crux. The planning system is supposed to balance private gain with public good. 

These latest attempts at environmental deregulation aim to tilt that balance ever closer to private gain, by fudging the lines and asserting that developer gain is the same thing as public good.  

A 0.1% boost to developer profits is not inherently injurious to the public good but it is detrimental to the public when the cost is the desecration of some of our last remaining wild spaces, and resulting acceleration of nature’s decline. The consequences of this acceleration have been starkly set out in the National Security Assessment on global biodiversity loss. Consequences include ‘water insecurity, crop failures, fisheries collapse and intensified natural disasters’. To claim that a boon to developers which heightens the risk of these calamities is, overall, a public good feels grotesque. 

We won't be deceived

And so, whatever some quarters of Westminster say, The Wildlife Trusts, our supporters and partners will continue to call out the illusionists seeking to distort this debate, and planning policy overall. 

Together we can pull back the wizard’s curtain to reveal what lies behind it – corporate lobbyists seeking boosted profits, regardless of public cost. As ecological disaster comes closer, the Government must stand with the public and see through the deregulation conjuring trick.  

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