Dark Skies — House of Commons, 2020-12-14
Topic: Housing
Andrew Griffith (Conservative, Centre-right): As ever, my hon. Friend, with his varied experience that he brings to the House, makes an excellent point. Not only can hard-pressed local councils save money that they can redirect to supporting their residents elsewhere, but there is also, surprisingly, no evidence at all that street lighting contributes to greater safety and it has impacts on the environment, as well as some of the other impacts that we talk about. He makes a very good point Before we leave the planning process, we cannot ignore the elephant—or perhaps I should say the Ursa Major—in the room: over-development in the south-east. I pick up a point that the hon. Member for Westmorland and Lonsdale (Tim Farron) has already made. I have spoken on these matters many times in this House in my short year here, and I make no apology for doing so again tonight. Right now, my constituents face a veritable clone army of developments, with proposals in Adversane, Barnham, Ford, Kirdford, West Grinstead, Mayfield and every compass point in between Consideration of light pollution in the planning system can only be palliative relief while the Minister’s Department consults on taking an algorithm that already lists heavily towards the overcrowded south-east and tilting it still further, rather than levelling up. We are building the wrong types of dwellings in the wrong place. Before the second world war, roughly a fifth of the population lived in the south of England outside London, while twice as many lived in the north and Scotland taken together. Now, equal numbers live in both. We should be building far more in our great urban centres of London, Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds, Liverpool and many others—building environmentally friendly supertalls that reach up to the stars, instead of concreting over our last remaining natural places. We should be pursuing commercial to residential conversion on a galactic scale in places where the infrastructure already exists. Where rural areas such as West Sussex have their own housing needs to fulfil, that should be through a brownfield-first policy, utilising brownfield land registers that are able nationally to accommodate more than 1 million potential homes. How can we teach our children to recycle plastic bags from a supermarket to save the environment, and yet bulldoze by numbers through the ancient fields, hedgerows and woodlands of West Sussex Elsewhere, I am proud that this Government are the greenest in our country’s history. We have one of the most ambitious plans for our environment of any leading nation. At the climate ambition summit this weekend, the Prime Minister confirmed that the UK will cut its emissions by 68% by 2030 versus 1990 levels, while our neighbours and friends in the European Union could only manage 55%. I contend that is because conservation has always been at the very heart of conservatism. Our manifesto last December pledged to protect and restore our natural environment by setting up a new independent office for environmental protection. Perhaps protecting our dark skies could be an early and easy win for that organisation Finally, we need to give local authorities a more effective method of acting on light nuisance. The current Environmental Protection Act 1990 requires light nuisance be prejudicial to health, which sets an incredibly high threshold for action, and the provision is only focused on the impact of light emission on humans, rather than the environment. It is subjective and difficult to prove. Further to that, relevant sections should be added to the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981 to prohibit accidental or deliberate disturbance by inappropriate artificial light I want to conclude and allow my right hon. Friend the Minister to respond, but first I thank all those who have made this document possible. They are too numerous to mention, but one whose involvement was quite singular was my researcher, and secretary of the all-party group, Chris Cook Next week on the winter solstice, the two largest planets in our solar system, Jupiter and Saturn, will align in the night sky to appear to form a single superstar. This rare event is called a conjunction, and it will be the closest to earth since 1623 and the most observable since 1226, a time when English kings still ruled most of western France. If the night is clear, I shall be lucky enough to observe it from the South Downs. I am told that this particular combination will not be seen again until the spring of the year 2080, which is a humbling reminder of our small place and transient tenure in the universe. I would like to think that we might witness a similar conjunction down here, with a Government who are serious about tackling the damage we are doing to our environment, a White Paper leading to a new national planning policy framework and a growing recognition of the importance of protecting the dark sky.