Bats, adj - having or showing a very abnormal or sick state of mind
Bats, n - nocturnal flying mammals that often rely on echolocation
On 5 December, UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer set out six ‘milestones’, to be delivered within the next five years,. These are what voters will be encouraged to measure his government’s performance against. The next day, in a Times comment piece, Starmer addressed the second of his milestones, “building 1.5 million homes in England and fast-tracking planning decisions on at least 150 major infrastructure projects”. He promised “a golden era of building”. He claimed that Britain’s housing crisis and outdated infrastructure are the fault of a planning system that delays or blocks the changes that are needed to deliver “good homes” that are “supported by good infrastructure.”. Planning restrictions, he suggested, are “how we ended with the absurd spectacle of HS2 building a tunnel for bats that cost £100 million” (The Times, 6 Dec 2024)
Starmer’s shock at the cost of protecting bats from HS2 (the high speed trains that will eventually race between London and Birmingham) is obviously intended to win public support for the relaxation of planning controls. His shock is misplaced. He neglects to point out that many of the bats threatened by the high speed trains are Bechstein’s bats, a species that is particularly rare. They live in an ancient woodland that is also a Site of Special Scientific Interest. It was HS2 Ltd, not Natural England, who identified the threat to the bats, and it was HS2 Ltd who proposed an elaborate and unnecessarily expensive tunnel structure to protect them. Natural England’s role was merely to confirm that HS2’s design would comply with environmental law. Starmer doesn’t question why HS2 chose to route its line through ancient woodland, why the HS2 project is so expensive and so massively over-budget, or whether we even need it. Instead, his aim is to persuade us that infrastructure projects should always take priority over wildlife protection.
Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner is the politician charged with achieving the government’s housing and infrastructure milestone. Two days after Starmer’s Times article, Rayner was interviewed on Sky TV’s ‘Sunday Morning with Trevor Phillips’. Asked how she would balance an ambitious housebuilding target with protecting newts, she suggested that “we can do both”. It was clear, though, that nothing would be allowed to get in the way of the housebuilding target.
Protecting nature is not one of the government’s milestones. Pitting a single newt against homeless people was Rayner’s way of persuading us that development needs should always trump wildlife protection:
“I’m going to streamline planning. We just can’t carry on like this. We’re not getting the development we need, we’re not getting the housing we need ….We can’t have a situation where a newt is more protected than people who desperately need new housing. What we need is a process which says protect the nature and wildlife but not at the expense of us building the houses. We can do both.”
(Angela Rayner, Sky News 8 Dec 2024)
Speeding up decision making, and overriding opposition, have become obsessions of this government. The day after Angela Rayner ‘s TV interview, Pat McFadden, Starmer’s chief fixer, gave a speech on how the state should be reformed to accelerate delivery. This centred on a presumed need for government processes to be shaken up by tech startup disrupters. McFadden’s speech included the ludicrous suggestion that “the most important question isn’t ‘How do we get this right first time?’ It’s ‘How do we make this better by next Friday’.” He doesn’t seem to realise that this is not how tech startups operate, and that working in this way would lead to short term crisis management interfering with delivery of his government’s cherished long term milestones.
The updated National Planning Policy Framework
Today, the UK government published new planning rules, to boost delivery of its 1.5 million new homes by 2029 milestone, and ensure that democratic accountability does not get in its way..
A key innovation of the updated planning framework is a clearer definition of ‘grey belt.’ Before the General Election, Keir Starmer had talked about the need to allow development on green belt (land surrounding urban areas where development is restricted). Some green belt land, he suggested, has little environmental value - it should be redesignated as grey belt, and freed up for development. The example he quoted was of a derelict petrol station situated within a green belt, which could be redeveloped without any negative environmental impact.
The new planning framework makes it clear that grey belt will extend beyond, way beyond, derelict petrol stations. Basically, any greenbelt land can be redesignated as grey belt if it “does not strongly contribute” to defined green belt purposes. Central government will require local authorities to meet challenging local housing targets. If there are insufficient brownfield (already developed) sites to meet its target, a council will be able to convert land from green belt to grey belt to fill the gap.
There is no response in the new planning policy framework to a proposal by the Wildlife Trusts for a new category of ‘wildbelt’, which would encourage nature recovery on land that is currently of low biodiversity value. Surrounding housing development on grey belt land with new wildbelt could be an innovative way to both encourage wildlife and improve the quality of new housing. The absence of any provision for wildbelt shows that the government’s desire to boost housing numbers is at the expense of nature protection and recovery. The new planning rules present nature as a barrier that blocks development and growth. As Starmer proclaimed on X earlier today “My government backs the builders over the blockers”.
Milestones or millstones?
The UK government’s six milestones are targets. Success in meeting them is what Labour hopes will win them the next election. Whether or not this will work depends on whether targets they have set now will resonate with what voters will want in five years time, and whether the different targets are consistent with each other. By concentrating focus and resources on the six targets, focus and resources will inevitably be diverted from non targeted aims. The danger is that the importance of those non-targeted aims will have become much more apparent by 2029.
Downplaying the importance of nature separates us as humans from the rest of the living planet, and it denies the rights of non-human beings. Not only that, it works against our selfish interests as humans as well. Nature restoration benefits us in many ways. It lessens damage to our homes from increased risks of flooding. It protects our rivers from pollution. It promotes our health and quality of life. It stores carbon and increases resilience to climate change. The new planning rules deprive us of these advantages as well as destroying habitats for wildlife.
Another of the government’s milestones, to generate 95% clean power by 2030, addresses the climate change issue, but in a partial way. The government’s first milestone is for the UK to be the fastest growing G7 economy. Achieving this would make its clean energy objective more difficult to achieve. It would also intensify negative impacts on nature - impacts from the additional generating capacity that would be needed, from its increased demand for critical minerals, and from the additional power lines it would require.
The 1.5 million new homes milestone will also be difficult to achieve. The temptation will be to cut corners, and fail to take account of the constraints imposed by nature. As Matthew Pennycook, the Housing Minister, said in his statement to parliament today: “This is a growth focused National Planning Policy Framework, and we’re very proud of it”.
The main housing need is for more social and affordable rented accommodation, but that is not what private developers find most profitable to build. Unless developers are required to meet tougher insulation standards, and incorporate solar panels and low carbon heating in their builds, achieving the housing milestone will make the clean energy milestone even harder to achieve. Yet the government wants less, not more, regulation - another failure to join the dots.
Bats.