Angela Rayner has announced that the government will aim to build 370,000 new homes, up from the 300,000 a year implied in the party’s manifesto. But if the deputy prime minister really thinks that all she needs to do to achieve that target is to take on Nimbys – as Rayner and chancellor Rachel Reeves have suggested in recent weeks – she needs to take a trip to a slice of the ‘grey belt’ in Essex. There, a 206 acre farm at Harold’s Farm near Epping is to be turned over to rewilding.
Why is the cost of encouraging rewilding being lumped on new housing?
Some locals have announced themselves to be delighted because it means the land will not now be developed, as they feared, for housing. That is a predictable Nimby response, but it is not really the point.
The land has been purchased, and will now be rewilded, using money raised from a levy on house builders through something called Biodiversity Net Gain (BNG) rules. These demand that any developer building new housing must ensure that their development results in greater biodiversity than exists on the land at present. The trouble is that if you are building a housing estate on greenfield land – especially one which meets modern requirements for housing density – it is extremely difficult, if not often impossible, to increase the presence of wildlife and plant life on the site itself. As a result, developers are allowed to buy their way out of their BNG commitments by buying ‘biodiversity credits’ – which are then spent creating habitats for nature elsewhere.
Most people like nature, but why is the cost of encouraging it being lumped on new housing? House builders are effectively paying an extra biodiversity tax, which inevitably gets passed on to house buyers. If it was going to create public parks and commons close to the new developments – and which their residents could therefore enjoy – that would be one thing. But biodiversity credits can end up being spent hundreds of miles away. Moreover, these are not public parks and commons – they are privately-owned nature reserves which might have little or no public access. Harold’s Park has been bought by a company called Nattergal, whose CEO Archie Struthers is pretty clear about its objectives: ‘Nattergal’s purpose is to make nature an investible asset class’. The company says it wants people to visit its rewilding sites, but you can find out what that means by clicking on the ‘visit’ tab on its website. It invites you to book a ‘rewilding tour’ at £20 per adult.
In other words, the previous government has imposed a tax on new housing, pushing up the price of much-needed homes, so as to allow to a class of investors to make money out of creating private nature reserves. But it gets worse.
Rewilding, needless to say, takes land out of agricultural production. Not only is it undermining national food security – which seems to take a somewhat lower priority in government ministers’ minds than energy security does, it is pushing agricultural workers off the land. In a typical case several years ago, a tenant farmer in Carmarthenshire had a bid accepted on land he had been farming for years only to be gazumped by a Guernsey-based company wanting the land to plant trees in order to claim carbon credits – a cousin of biodiversity credits. You can imagine the outrage were tenant farmers being forced off the land to make way for fracking wells – big oil crushing the interests if family farmers etc. But when it is powerful green interests doing the same thing it tends to pass unnoticed.
You can’t blame Angela Rayner for BNG credits. They were the brainchild of the previous government. But will she strike a blow for affordable housing by abolishing them? I am not holding my breath.
Comments