Moving swiftly on …

… after I’ve first lit the touchpaper, of course. 

Not too long ago, I dared to coin the phrase ‘bashing bats and nuking newts’, in helpful jest. I’m now going to up the ante and talk about swatting swifts. Ah, swifts. They do what they tweet on the tin – they fly swiftly. Furthermore their numbers are, sadly, swiftly declining in Britain, partly as a consequence of our new homes being more airtight, and our old ones being retro-plugged. Swifts live in drafty places like eaves and crevices, so the decline in drafty homes has led to a decline in the swift population, so much so that they’re now on the RSPCA red list of endangered species.

One solution to help the population to increase involves the installation of ‘swift bricks’ in all newbuilds. These are not bricks, or even brickbats hurled at me for daring to challenge perceived wisdom and break ranks away from, and smash solidarity protocols of, the wannabe intelligentsia in-crowd; swift bricks are bricks with hollows in which swifts – and other birds – can nest. If every newbuild had swift bricks, it is argued, we can boost swifts (and swallows and starlings). These bricks are cheap, easy to install and campaigners say the Government should make them a legal requirement. Petitions have been started to this effect. One has so far attracted an eye-popping 105 signatures, another has reached a heady 284. By comparison, a petition demanding immigration be stopped for five years attracted almost 230,000 signatures, while one calling for an immediate general election is still going at over 484,000 signatures. The swift-bricks campaign is failing to fly, despite it being endorsed by Jeremy Clarkson who has let his eye for a lady campaigner overrule his distaste for over-regulation and planning diktats.

Labour used to support a law for swift bricks. Now they’re opposed, arguing that local planning policies should suffice. Reform UK has ruled in favour of swifts, hoping this will help them attract the green vote, having failed so far to appear fluffy and outraged in equal measure, partly because of its opposition to net-zero. Views around the construction industry are mixed: some support the idea in principle; others, mainly smaller businesses, object to yet another hoop to jump through.

Me? I love swifts and I’d like swift bricks where appropriate, but I’m not signing the petition. Yet another legal straitjacket is not what's needed. I say this because the clamour won’t stop at appeasing the swifties with swift bricks. Hoggers will then demand hedgehog highways, and martinis will campaign for PVC to be replaced with brick, concrete and wood, to which nests of house martins adhere better. Before we know it, we’d have one law for each critter. Talk about unwieldy, both in terms of passing all that legislation and enacting and enforcing the requirements. 

At least some of those laws would be a complete waste of time in many locales. Why should swift bricks or hedgehog corridors or banning PVC be universally mandated if the target species are unlikely to return or increase in number in a particular area, evidenced by historical population data? It would be far more sensible for traditionally abundantly species to be targeted, and for local communities and ecology experts to decide on what a limited number of targets should be for their local plans. There should be flexibility for Neighbourhood Plans to vary this list for their own particular circumstances. This alternative solution would be more manageable - and therefore more supportable - for planners and developers.

Fortunately, we already have the ‘infrastructure’ in place, in the form of Biodiversity Net Gain, which prescribes improvements to habitats for most new developments to encourage the nation’s biodiversity. BNG is flawed, as I’ve said ever since it was a twinkle in Defra’s myopic eyes, but it can be improved. Involving communities in prioritising their ‘favoured’ species would be one way.

There is another way to support swifts - cull peregrine falcons, hobbies, barn owls, tawny owls, large gulls and domestic cats. Ooh my phone is going to light up with bile from the usual fanatics for stating an unpalatable fact in a semi-jocular fashion. Says more about them than it does me.

What prompted the disproportionate call for swift bricks in every newbuild in the first place? Probably the belief that a drastic situation needs lots of drastic measures, because ‘The UK is one of the most nature-depleted countries in the world’. As I argued in my previous blog here, such potentially “exaggerated claims lead to bad policy decisions and misallocated resources, to the detriment of … nature and biodiversity”. With swift bricks we have a prime example of this: blanket coverage, no matter what the financial cost, opportunity cost and local needs, means fewer resources for other species, unless they too are covered by similar laws and then it becomes impossible to proceed on anything.

I rest my two cases in one!