England benefits from a network of protected nature sites. These include our most precious, vulnerable and internationally important habitats, hosting iconic but often threatened species. There are two key strands to this protection. Firstly, conservation objectives for each site allow stakeholders to understand what makes these sites special and, where they’re in poor condition, what it would take to get them back to full health. (Sadly, mere designation doesn’t guarantee good condition, but it’s a start).  Secondly, designation introduces duties and controls on landowners and decision-makers to ensure that land-use decisions are consistent with protection (and, ideally, enhancement) of the protected site.

Sites including Special Areas of Conservation (SACs) and Special Protection Areas (SPAs) are recognised as being internationally important, and none of our longer-term environmental ambitions are achievable without these sites being restored.

This will be a challenge - currently, only a minority are in good condition, and some continue to deteriorate as current protections fail to deliver – but it is not a challenge the UK can step away from and retain any kind of environmental credibility on the national or international stage.

The planning system is one route through which these necessary protections can be delivered. 

Developments with a likely ‘adverse impact’ on SPAs and SACs, rightly, have to meet a series of tests, take steps to avoid harm and compensate where that harm is unavoidable.

In line with its duties, the Westminster Government’s statutory advisor on nature conservation, Natural England, has advised Local Planning Authorities that where these sites are already failing to meet their conservation objectives due to nutrient pollution, the authority should not grant permission for development which would add to this load. It’s easy to see how this could be badged as a housing moratorium. But in reality, it is not housing, but pollution, which is prevented.

The ruling on which this advice is based allows development to be consented provided that any new nutrient emissions are fully offset, meaning that there is no additional pollution. This is termed achieving ‘Nutrient Neutrality’.  To secure their planning permission, just as housing developers may be expected to contribute towards new roads or schools where local services are under strain, the same is true of nature, so developers must ensure that the harm that would be caused by additional nutrients is mitigated. Developers themselves may not be best placed to provide this mitigation, so Natural England, as well as Local Authorities working with environmental NGOs and others, have worked at pace to put in place nutrient mitigation schemes. From a standing start, a range of market-based credit schemes, local authority  and bilateral/private schemes, including by NGOs, are starting to emerge. Government has, to its credit, also made various funding pots available for wetlands or other pro-nature land-use initiatives that support biodiversity whilst reducing nutrient loads.

The schemes allow developers to offset the damage that would be caused by wastewater from new housing, by purchasing credits from projects which remove an equivalent loading of nutrients.

Natural England highlighted over the weekend that schemes currently up and running will enable construction of at least 40,000 homes, with more housing credits in the pipeline.

These promising schemes could not only clear the current backlog, but also herald the start of a much needed push towards serious long-term nutrient management at a catchment scale.

But this solution is contentious, so it’s worth unpicking the situation a little further. Some housing developers accept the need to contribute to nature’s recovery, and are happily progressing their developments by taking part in nutrient mitigation schemes. Others however raise a key objection, which is that housing development is responsible for only a tiny fraction of nutrient pollution, suggesting that farming and sewage from water companies are the main contributors.

This could be considered merely clever accounting, when you trace the sewers back and realise that the majority of sewage of course comes from… our homes. But there is a more nuanced and acceptable argument here, which is that whilst the planning system allows regulators to prevent any new pollution from housing development, it does not prevent new pollution from other key sources (particularly things not controlled by the planning regime, such as how farmland is managed), and more importantly, if we consider these new inputs ‘the straw that broke the camel’s back’, then it does nothing about the crippling loads that have caused the degradation of our protected rivers and coasts in the first place.

These sites are now on the edge of the ecological abyss and, if we take seriously our commitments not to turn every river into an open sewer, enough is enough. Yet these protections are at risk of being swept away, and the papers are calling for the disbanding of Natural England (for doing exactly what it was set up, and is legally required, to do).

Only a month ago UK Government was on record as saying it wouldn’t water down environmental protections, but today it appears to be looking at doing just that.

Our message to Government?

Ripping the rug out from under nutrient neutrality just as it is poised to bear fruit would represent incoherent policy making at its worst. If there is not the political will to even prevent water pollution worsening, what message does this send to the farmers and water companies contributing to the underlying pollution load?

There are plans to upgrade wastewater treatment works in areas of excess nutrient pollution, moves to review and expand the environmental permits that control pollution from farming, and a legally binding target under the Environment Act to reduce agricultural water pollution by 40%. These improvements will soon create the necessary headroom that will mean that housing development will no longer have to worry about nutrients. But until that time, development must not cause the irreversible collapse of our most precious places for nature.

Government, on this issue, you must hold your nerve.