There are plenty of people reading this blog who will know more about this subject than I do. What do you make of this? Apart, of course, from the fact that there is no history before the coalition government came into being.
10 Replies to “Natural England inactivity on planning cases”
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Mark, You may have more information than showing here but I dont read this the same way you appear to do from your heading.
When a planning application is submitted and it might involve protected area, species etc you would expect a local ecological assessment to be submitted which might deal with various issues before it gets sent as a routine letter by LPA to NE.
I suspect that the notifications to NE include not only big and complicated issues but also a lot of routine minor and straightforward issues that need no NE input other possibly than a letter (these figures seem to indicate a response in 100% of cases). To be involved in consultation on over 50% of cases doesn’t seem unreasonable and we don’t know any detail of the objections in order to make a proper assessment.
Parish Councils, Highways, Fire Brigades etc get these letters all the time from LPAs and I suspect the vast majority of their responses are ‘no comment’ or ‘no objection’. I dont see NE as much different in general planning matters.
When local council planning officers suspect that an application may have adverse
environmental impacts, they refer it to Natural England for comment.
The trouble is that NE does not have the staff to assess any but the most high-priority cases, so it refers the local council planner to a website containing general standing advice about protected species etc etc.
This is catastrophic. The council’s planning officer and planning committee members take it as a sign of apathy – that Natural England can’t be bothered to respond to a specific case.
So they then look at the only ecological/ environmental assessment available – that which has been supplied by a firm or an individual commissioned by the applicant.
But he who pays the piper calls the tune. Consultants are not impartial – they routinely minimise environmental impact and find in favour of recommending approval for an application however harmful its potential impact on nature.
Sadly this is my experience of reporting on hundreds of planning applications for local newspapers.
Applicants, planners and councillors all want an easy life – and, as a result, nature gets betrayed.
County wildlife trusts are sometimes, invited to comment on applications, but, like
Natural England, they do not have the resources to respond to any but the most
pressing cases.
Likewise the RSPB which is quite good at putting in “holding objections” but has a habit of backing off when things come to the crunch.
In my view, the deficiencies in the planning system are one of the biggest (if not the biggest) threats to the UK’s birds.
If the cases that NE is consulted on are those which, a priori, the planners think might have some ecological concerns associated with them then the percentage that actually result in an objection being lodged is remarkably low (0.7 – 1.6% of cases on which NE was consulted). That could mean:
(a) the planners err on the side of caution and consult NE in a great many cases where there the ecological concerns are pretty low; or
(b) developers and their consultants are doing an excellent job of designing projects so as to avoid harming nature or providing mitigation for any harm that does occur; or
(c) NE has a presumption in favour of development and only objects in the most blatant and extreme cases of potential damage to wildlife.
It’s possible that all three factors play a role but one can’t help feeling that NE are not standing up for nature very much these days and that certainly seems to be the direction they have been given by government.
Consultants working for developers can be crafty individuals.
For instance if a barn has been earmarked for conversion to a house, you can be pretty certain it will be cleared of any nesting swallows, owls, bats etc in advance of the ecological assessment which will then conclude: “No evidence of presence of protected species”.
If warblers and other songbirds, plus butterflies and lizards, have made their home in any bramble patches and buddleia that have sprung up on the site of a demolished factory, rest assured that the environmental impact assessment will be carried out in February when there’s nowt but a few magpies and carrion crows to be recorded. Then, with no thought of insisting on mitigation habitat, the planning committee will congratulate the developer on its willingness to build 200 homes on an ‘eyesore’ site.
You can’t really blame planning committee members – officers and councillors – because they are not experts on wildlife. They just want to ensure the boxes have been ticked
NGOs are too strapped for resources to carry out their own impartial surveys, so the only real vigilance has to come from any members of the public who are willing a) to scrutinise planning applications (which councils post on line) , b) to make appropriate representations and c) to mobilise public opinion via local radio newspapers and social media.
I recently commented on a planning application in the village where I live, not because I particularly objected the proposal (for housing) but because the ecological assessment was appalling. A single survey was carried out in March so too early for the bird breeding season, a half-hearted attempt was made to get permission to survey some neighbouring ponds for great crested newts (in the end none were carried out) and no bat surveys were carried out despite the assessment stating that several trees had potential for bats. What really wound me up was that the ecological assessment was carried out by the consultancy wing of the county wildlife trust. If you can’t trust them to do a half-decent job, who can you trust? Fortunately we have a really good County Ecologist who raised similar concerns.
The consultancy wings of Wildlife Trust are, in my experience, quite bad at conducting thorough ecological surveys. I do suspect that it is due to them desperately trying to undercut everyone else in order to gain commissions on work, and therefore reducing the quality of the staff they take on – paying a pittance does not get you good ecologists, and I know of some that use unpaid volunteers and call it ‘training’.
A colleague of mine had previously applied for a job with the county trust’s consultancy, only to be told to sign on and then volunteer with them!
It was really strange how some of our local habitat that had Turtle Doves was ‘cleared’ whilst waiting for planning decisions!
This is somewhat untrue about consultants, Jim – I am an ecological consultant and I have no interest in pretending there are protected species on a site, and I don’t know of anyone that would. That also doesn’t alter the fact that any barn will have potential for European Protected Species, and it is then up to the consultant to work out what further work (in terms of surveys) will be required over summer to satisfy a planning application.
It is very difficult for a developer to clear a site of protected species before getting a consultant in (other than bulldozing the site beforehand), they would have to have a good knowledge of all the potential constraints, and if that were the case they wouldn’t need a consultant in the first place! Surveys can take place in February, but these are initial scoping surveys which tell the developer what surveys will be required in the right time of year to inform the ecology side of a palnning application.
You also ignore the fact that many consultants are active members of local conservation groups. It’s nigh impossible to gain personal licences for protected species without a fair amount of hands on experience which can often only be obtained outside of the work environment.
“This is somewhat untrue about consultants, Jim – I am an ecological consultant and I have no interest in pretending there are protected species on a site, and I don’t know of anyone that would…”
Uh? What Jim was saying was that consultants are only too eager to deny the presence of protected species.
It is to the economic advantage of consultants to “keep in” with developers, in order to gain further employment, either directly or through reputation. I have experience of ecological consultants suggesting thoroughly unworkable ‘solutions’ of protecting species in order to gain planning approval…
Don’t forget that many developers go straight to Natural England’s ‘commercial’ arm, DAS see https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/charged-environmental-advice-service-request-form
Natural England are not expected to raise concerns nowadays and certainly not objections, rather they assist developers in achieving their objectives. As already offered by other commentators not all consultants are reputable, but that’s ‘politics’ for you?
Careful what we wish for but are they (defra and NE) fit for purpose any more? Are they simply a shield for their political masters?