The Government may argue otherwise, but most people think it has broken its manifesto promise not to raise taxes on working people. Now it seems to be breaking its manifesto promises to Britain’s nature.
While promising 1.5 million new homes in its first term, Labour also made a commitment to protect the green belt and ensure that housing development more generally would be done in a way that “promotes nature recovery”. But in December it watered down rules introduced under the last government in February 2024. These had required most new developments to create 10 per cent more space for nature on site than there was before the building took place.
The upshot of this change is that about 60 per cent of the estimated 101,000 planning applications expected in the next year will now be exempt from “biodiversity net gain” rules, as they are known, according to research by environmental economics consultancy eftec for the Wildlife and Countryside Link charity.
This means thousands and thousands of gardens worth of nature will be lost every year. At the same time as making this announcement, the Government said green belt land within a 15-minute walk of a “well-connected” train station will be opened up to housing development.
And it decided not to force developers of new homes to include features that reduce flood risk; instead new standards published in June merely encourage them to do so. Many of these elements – known collectively as “sustainable drainage systems” and including natural lawns, ponds and trees – are also good for nature and experts had expected they would become mandatory.
All of which might not matter so much if Britain’s nature wasn’t in crisis. When I was a kid in the 1980s, bugs splattered on windscreens were par for the course on pretty much every car journey. But the UK’s flying insect population is now so beleaguered from pollution, loss of nature and climate change that the average number plate gets 59 per cent fewer bug splats on it than it did just five years ago, according to the Buglife charity, which analysed more than 25,000 journeys over that period.
And alarming though that statistic is, there are far worse where UK wildlife is concerned. One of the most terrifying is that one in six of all species in the UK are at risk of extinction. Turtle doves are perhaps most at risk of all: UK populations have dived by 99 per cent since 1970, as the industrialisation of farming has removed many of the hedgerows and wildflower meadows favoured by this farmland bird.
So what can be done to help? Well, if the Government isn’t going to make sure new homes are as nature-friendly as possible, then it falls to existing households to do more with their gardens.
According to the Royal Horticultural Society, 20.6 million UK homes have a garden. The average household has a garden area of 244 square metres, or nine tenths of a tennis court. And while 42 per cent of that is paved over, that still leaves a total of around 1,200 square miles around the UK that isn’t.
Even turning over just a little bit more of this to nature than we are at the moment could make a huge difference, giving much-needed food and shelter to insects, birds and other populations.
Easy wins include putting in a bird feeder, letting the grass grow a bit longer to give invertebrates a richer habitat, and planting pollinator-friendly flowers such as purple dragons and wild marjorams.
Wildflower-studded lawns are an increasingly important source of nectar for pollinators such as bees and butterflies, as nearly 7.5 million acres of Britain’s wildflower-rich meadows and pastures have been lost since the 1930s.
You might also create a “lagoon” to attract hoverflies, which can be as simple as a small bucket containing sawdust, fallen leaves or grass cuttings and water that larvae can live in. Or you could make a hedgehog house out of a spare plastic storage box using dry leaves or pet straw for bedding.
Increasingly, however, it seems that people are looking to help the environment and save a bit of money at the same time by growing their own fruit and veg. The Royal Horticultural Society has predicted that 2026 will be the “year of the tomato” after 2025’s hot, dry summer gave home gardeners bumper yields and blight-free conditions. This produce will often be fresher, tastier and more seasonal than you can get at your local supermarket – and, if you’ve patience, will work out far cheaper than tomatoes on the vine from the shop. Households are also expected to grow more aubergines, chillies and cucumbers and vines this year.
Whether we take up small scale farming en masse or now, we need more action from Labour to protect the UK’s nature. It was widely accepted that the rules regarding nature creation and new development needed to be simplified because the original exemption system was so complicated that huge numbers of developers tried everything they could to get out of any obligations. But wildlife groups and academics instead proposed a new simple exemption that would apply to developments of less than 0.1 hectare, along with strict monitoring and enforcement measures.
Instead, the Government is exempting developments of less than 0.2 hectares – a far greater number – with no extra monitoring and enforcement measures.
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This is less brutal than it might have been. Ministers were actually considering exempting all developments of under a hectare, which would take in around 95 per cent of applications. But it still doesn’t go far enough. The government should limit exemptions to developments of less than 0.1 hectare.
Labour has made some positive moves. Last month, the Government mandated that all new homes will have to be fitted with “swift bricks”, hollow nesting boxes that fit directly into exterior walls. That will give birds a much-needed boost.
But if the Government doesn’t want to squander the huge opportunity to help nature provided by the UK’s home building spree, it needs to do a lot more.
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