From Jenny S

Saturday, 18 October 2025

Two quick things you can do to help protect peatland across England and stop Calderdale Energy Park:

1. Sign and share the new Parliamentary Petition to Amend the Planning and Infrastructure Bill to ban windfarms on protected peatland and restore protected peatland to good conservation status. The link is here. The explainer is here
2. Sign an open letter to our MP Josh Fenton-Glynn thanking him for asking the Planning Minister a question about updated planning guidance for building on peat. The open letter also lays out some points we'd like Josh to include in the further info the Minister has asked him for. They're basically about bringing the petition and its reasons to the attention of the Minister, Matthew Pennycook MP.

Please will you sign the open letter by 10pm on Sunday 19th October? The link to the open letter is here

We hope you're not suffering petition fatigue! Here are two good reasons for signing this new version of the Petition:

First, we have to win the argument about not building on shallow peat.

Since we launched the first petition to ban windfarms on protected peatland in January 2025, the government has introduced new protections for peatland. We welcome them, but as the petition says, they're not enough.

The new policy statements still greenlight building big windfarms on shallow peat - now defined as 0.3m or less, instead of the previous 0.4m But science warns against building on shallow peat. Both the 0.4m and the '0.3m or less' magic figures are meaningless in ecological terms. The explainer has a link to an IUCN UK Peat Programme briefing about this.

We're still holding out for a ban not concessions, as the only adequate protection for peatland.

Second, the Planning and Infrastructure Bill didn't exist when we launched the first version of the Petition. It does now, it's environmentally atrocious, and a big part of our campaign over the past six months has been to get the Bill amended, as the Petition now calls for.

We're pretty sure that this work has helped to shift the debate. Blanket bog wasn't mentioned in MPs' debates on the Bill until after our MPs' info event in Parliament at the end of April. We have taken a leaf out of British Cycling Coach Dave Brailsford's book about the aggregation of small gains! (We are open to ideas about making big gains too, please pass any on to us!)

George Monbiot asks: Why isn't the country in uproar over the Planning and Infrastructure Bill? It's a good question.

Ban the Burn and Upper Calderdale Wildlife Network – the campaign groups behind the petition – continue to call out the environmental damage the Bill would cause. Please would you do this too? By urgently signing and sharing the new Parliamentary Petition to Amend the Planning and Infrastructure Bill to ban windfarms on protected peatland and restore protected peatland to good conservation status? The link is here