Senior Lecturer in Environmental Management and Ecology and Co-Programme Director of MSc Nature Recovery, Restoration and Rewilding
Kiera has managed to express more eloquently than me (and with far fewer four letter expletives) the frustration - and (for me at least), the feeling of abject betrayal - by a Labour Government that seems hell-bent on pitching people against nature. This is amplified by the announcement today by DEFRA that they are going to undertake a ‘wholesale review’ of biodiversity net gain… The findings of Kiera’s paper are almost exactly the same as another forthcoming article led by Ian Thornhill MCIEEM that shows developers are not delivering on their legal commitments to deliver for nature. The Government know that there a suite of reasons that mean house prices are high and that there is not enough housing for people that want ‘new’ houses in the UK. Other reasons include (but are not limited to): - developers and volume house builders ‘land banking’; holding on to large areas of land that already have planning permission but are not currently deemed profitable enough to develop - that the appeal of developing on greenfield sites for volume housebuilders is far greater than developing on brownfield - that there are delapidated housing estates in towns and cities across the country that people don’t want to live in but which could be regenerated or redeveloped to provide affordable housing Most depressing is that Kier Starmer, Angela Rayner et al are not stupid, they have just ‘lent their ears’ to only one side of the debate: the developers. These new attacks on planning policies and their protection of nature have nothing whatsoever to do with housing supply or demand (if they did, their reforms would be inextricably linked with delivering affordable housing rather than merely eulogising that this is what they want). Instead, their current attack of planning policy is entirely about a misfounded idea that getting the development sector producing houses at scale will boost the economy - plain and simple. So what for nature? In the midst of a biodiversity crisis, we need strong leadership that recognises the nuance needed for development- there is no silver bullet to rectifying the need for housing. But pitching this as a war against nature is about as short-sighted as building a house for your kids’ inheritance that has an explosive device with a timer in it. As well as growing the economy we have a commitment to protecting 30% or our land for nature by 2030. We could have been the country that tried to take a lead on this - a complex issue bound up with a myriad of challenges but eminently worth fighting for. Instead, with the very little time we have left to make a difference and transform people’s attitudes towards nature, Labour have decided to destroy it for short-term economic gain. #conservativesalloveragain
Labour's plans to build 1.5 million homes a year rely on an gambit: that we can increase construction and protect biodiversity with ecological mitigations, including BNG. But are developers actually installing these ecological features on the ground? This summer we decided to find out. We visited 42 new build housing estates in 5 LPAs and we compared the planning conditions for each site with what was there in real life. We uncovered a scandal. Only 53% of ecological mitigations are present. When you exclude street trees, this falls to 34%. Our findings call the whole of the government's agenda into question. After all, despite their attempts to trivialise biodiversity loss by arguing that it's newts and bats versus housing for people, most people have realised that we live in an interconnected world. Humans cannot thrive without healthy ecosystems. For example, we know that habitat degradation may lead to a loss of GDP in the UK by the 2030s that far outweighs the financial crisis or the economic shock of COVID. The social impacts of that will be huge. To make matters worse, I don't know a single housing or planning scholar who seriously thinks the government's strategy is actually going to work in terms of reducing house prices, or even increasing supply to the degree that they anticipate. They aren't listening to housing experts, but are instead ploughing ahead with a disastrous series of planning policies that will not work because they are based on a simplistic understanding of housing economics. So the reforms are putting nature in peril for no gain - and they're seriously anti-democratic too. This isn't nature v people. It's a Labour government funnelling money to developers and landowners, and against both our wildlife and communities. It won't even help people who need houses, and it politically naive too: it could well cost Labour a lot of the rural seats it just won. This is such a deeply frustrating situation. https://lnkd.in/ebDiXfyc
Parks professional with over 22 years experience. International Green Flag Award Judge. Fellow of the Landscape Institute. Founder of Female Working Group for Manchester City Council
2moCould not agree more Anna. Betrayal is the feeling for sure. Nature is already really struggling and I can't begin to imagine the state of it with this approach. Mind blowing the ignorance to the impacts to us and future generations. When will we learn?