By George I think I've got it

In my last blog (Jelly on a Plate) I decided that I didn’t “feel sufficiently confident to decide for definite or comment publicly on just how bad the relaxation of the Nutrient Neutrality rules is.”

The last couple of days, I’ve read the exchange of letters between the Government and the Office for Environmental Protection (OfEP), extracts from the Levelling up and Regeneration Bill (comically dubbed ‘LURB’) and scanned countless commentaries and soundbites from ‘environmentalists’ that collectively compete with a parrots' enclave. Honestly, I nodded off over my nutrient-loaded, roast (British) beef sandwich. Yes. Beef. Half of the critics of the Government’s environmental policies would cancel Britain’s beef industry and rewild thousands of acres of sweeping pastures with totally inappropriate habitats misinformed by a simplistic ideology that flies in the face of science, history, systems' thinking and pragmatism. 

I now feel sufficiently confident to summarise the situation as follows:

1. The Nutrient Neutrality rules mandated that no new housing was allowed if the result was an increase in nutrients (phosphate and nitrates) in protected waterways that are already in unfavourable conditions.

2. If a net increase in nutrients was anticipated, then a nutrient mitigation strategy was required to be in place that would avoid the negative impacts in the first place rather than offset or compensate for damage.

3. This resulted, so it is claimed, in over 100,000 new homes being blocked, because the required solutions were too costly and cumbersome and disproportionately punitive for the impact of new home development; the real villains were agriculture and waste water.

4. The NN rules are being replaced by new provisions in the LURB, plus a wider package of measures, to allow these ‘100,000’ homes to proceed ‘immediately’, even if they lead to increased nutrients in the protected waterways in the short term.

5. The argument is that while NN outcomes would have been limited to ‘no worsening’ of some protected waterways, the replacement outcomes are designed to improve the health of many more waterways even without homes being built.

6. In other words, the Govt is aiming to swap a static position paid for by developers, with a possible small short-term worsening but a mid-to-long-term significant improvement paid for by the tax-payer, water companies and a smaller contribution by developers.

7. So far so good, but one problem is that those 100,000 homes will cause environmental harm other than adding nutrients to a small number of protected sites, and the Government hasn’t factored this into their equations.

8. On the other hand, I have been told that developers could have brought a legal challenge against Natural England for imposing such strict NN rules, so it’s possible that the Government has made the best of a bad job.

9. The supposed consequent rise in the developers’ share price is a sideshow and a red rag to the financially challenged bull.

10. If paragraphs 5 and 6 work as proposed (e.g. the selected sewage treatment plants are sufficiently upgraded, farming practices are sufficiently improved, and local nature-based solutions are put in place) then great, but it’s not a foregone conclusion.

11. So, more planning, more safeguards, more discussion is needed. And less hysteria please.