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https://theconversation.com/property-developers-installing-as-few-as-half-of-promised-ecological-features-new-report-246391>
"The UK is currently one of the world’s most biodiversity-depleted countries.
Urbanisation is a known driver of the nature crisis. This means that the
planning system, which regulates development in the UK, plays a crucial role in
protecting nature from harm.
On paper, things look positive. Over the past 20 years, a growing list of
international, national and local laws and policies have been passed to ensure
that the planning system protects ecologically sensitive sites. In spring 2024,
England’s new biodiversity net gain policy came into effect, requiring all new
residential developments to achieve and maintain a 10% increase in
biodiversity, secured for 30 years.
In practice, this means that when developers seek planning permission to build
new housing, they have to conduct ecological surveys of their proposed site.
The local planning authority reads these reports and lists a set of planning
conditions, which are binding: in theory, the developer must adhere to them.
This includes providing habitat for wildlife on the land used for development,
minimising the harms to nature associated with the change of land use, from
farmland to urban areas, for example.
However, in the summer of 2024, we audited 42 new developments across five
local planning authorities in England to see whether developers were complying
with these ecological conditions on the ground. We found just 53% of the
ecological features that should have been there were actually present. When we
excluded street trees, this fell to 34%.
Our report, which has not yet been peer reviewed, was commissioned and
published by Wild Justice. This not-for-profit environmental campaigning
organisation was co-founded by broadcaster Chris Packham, author and
conservationist Mark Avery and Ruth Tingay, a columnist who campaigns against
raptor persecution – their work is funded by public donations. We wrote the
report together with Sarah Postlethwaite, a senior planning ecologist who works
for a local authority.
To research every site, we downloaded relevant documents from each council’s
planning portal, including landscaping maps. We visited every street and public
open space within each development and measured whether the planning conditions
had been met on the ground. We walked over 291 hectares of land, surveyed
nearly 6,000 houses and searched for 4,654 trees and 868 bird boxes.
More than half (59%) of wildflower grasslands were sown incorrectly or damaged,
and 48% of hedges were missing, along with 82% of specialist woodland edge
grassland.
Statistics were even worse for species-specific mitigations: 83% of hedgehog
highways were absent, along with 75% of bird and bat boxes. Some swift and bat
boxes had even been installed upside down, making them useless to their
intended occupants.
This pattern was surprisingly similar across the country, for all sorts of
property developers, sizes of development and location. Given that we looked at
many local, regional and national housebuilders, this strongly suggests a
systemic issue across the planning and development system."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
