A major regulation change is set to make life easier for housebuilders, after UK Levelling-Up Secretary Michael Gove said on Tuesday that the government would be scrapping rules on waterway pollution.

The ‘nutrient neutrality’ laws were first introduced in 2017, when the UK was still a member of the EU. They are designed to make sure new developments don’t leak nutrients into local wetlands or waterways in protected areas.

To secure planning permission, developers must show they are preventing or offsetting this pollution.

On Tuesday, the Department for Levelling Up, Housing & Communities announced an amendment to the Levelling Up and Regeneration Bill, which would free the property industry from this obligation.

According to the government, the move will allow 100,000 new homes to be built between now and 2030, delivering an estimated £18 billion boost to the economy.

‘The way EU rules have been applied has held us back,’ said Gove.

‘Protecting the environment is paramount which is why the measures we’re announcing today will allow us to go further to protect and restore our precious waterways whilst still building the much-needed homes this country needs,’ he insisted.

The news gave the UK’s biggest housebuilders a boost on Tuesday, around midday. Shares in Persimmon, Taylor Wimpey and Barratt were up 3.9%, 2.8%, and 3.3% respectively.

‘Today’s very welcome announcement has the potential to unlock housing delivery across the country, from Cornwall to the Tees Valley, where housebuilding has been blocked despite wide acknowledgement that occupants of new homes are responsible for only a tiny fraction of the wastewater finding its ways into rivers and streams,’ said Stewart Baseley, executive chair of the Home Builders Federation.

‘Builders will be able to bring forward otherwise stalled investment in communities and get spades in the ground so we need parliament to get this solution onto the statute book.’

Alongside the amendments tabled to the Levelling Up bill, which is currently in the UK House of Lords, the government announced a series of new environmental measures to restore protected sites.

The package included a series of promises, including a commitment to further work on developing Protected Sites Strategies in the catchments most impacted by nutrient neutrality, and to reduce nutrient run off from farms by investing £200 million in grants for improved slurry storage infrastructure and precision spreading equipment.

Yet despite these commitments, the plan is likely to anger environmentalists, who have recently been highlighting the detrimental effect of sewage spills and other pollution leaching into the UK’s waterways.

‘Not content with the levels of pollution in our rivers already, scrapping nutrient neutrality is a disgraceful act from the government’, said Tim Farron, the Liberal Democrat’s environment spokesperson.

‘If ministers actually cared about our rivers they would clean them up rather than scrapping the few rules in place that protect them.’

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