Environment is not just an issue for 'nimbys' but for those pushing economic growth too

Boris Johnson was prime minister and Kemi Badenoch was a Treasury minister when they gave their support to a groundbreaking study of the economy and its most consistently tortured victim: nature.

- Phillip Inman

It was February 2021 and the eminent Cambridge professor Sir Partha Dasgupta had just delivered a 360-page report to the Treasury on the economics of biodiversity, which brought rigour to a subject often governed by emotion.

Johnson and Badenoch seemed to support the report, which argued that without a financial cost/benefit analysis that included biodiversity, a growing economy would destroy natural habitats. Dasgupta's hard-headed number crunching showed that when nature is in decline, there is a financial as well as an environmental deficit.

Now it's 2025, and Labour has promised to build 1.5m new homes by the end of the parliament. It is already behind schedule.

An expanding population and a reliance on private housebuilders, which drip-feed homes into the market to maintain high prices, has left the UK with a significant shortage.

Last year there was an estimated shortfall of 2.5m homes, despite 1.4m plots with planning permission. And while some local authorities have insisted that developers include parks and tree planting in their schemes, along with affordable homes, they complain that appeals by developers to the secretary of state for relief from these responsibilities are often successful.