Ministers are rewriting planning rules to make it easier to build intensive livestock farms despite concerns about water pollution, air quality and local opposition.
Documents obtained by the Guardian under the Freedom of Information Act show that proposed changes to the national planning policy framework (NPPF) were discussed by ministers and officials in response to concerns of the country’s leading chicken producers, who have been lobbying on the issue for at least two years.
The British Poultry Council (BPC), which represents the sector, told the farming minister Angela Eagle last autumn: “Access to more growing space is the number one priority for the poultry meat sector.”
In its submission to the government’s farm profitability review last summer, it said: “The need for a solution – either through planning reform or land-use policy – and the urgency of that need dwarfs all other issues currently facing us.”
Before a poultry industry roundtable with Eagle in January, the BPC said it needed the government to “develop national planning direction and oversight for food production […] to safeguard the UK’s long-term food security”.
At the meeting, Eagle said: “We have also announced proposals to reform the planning system to more quickly unlock food and farming infrastructure. Planning should enable ambition, not stifle it.”
Her briefing notes directly linked the proposed changes to industry lobbying, describing planning reform as one of the industry’s “biggest asks” and saying her department and the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government had been working to “find solutions to planning barriers to poultry sheds and other infrastructure necessary for food production”.
