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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 analysis, which argued that without financial cost/benefit analysis that included biodiversity in its sums, 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.
Fast forward to 2025, and Labour has promised to build 1.5m new homes by the end of the parliament and 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.
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