Last week it emerged that the government is scrapping nutrient neutrality rules, which it says will allow 100,000 new homes to be built before 2030.
I never realised this was much of an issue, but given the outpouring of positive feedback from developers, many of them have clearly been frustrated by this rule for a while.
The rule dictates that developers have to undertake measures to prevent new developments from creating higher levels of phosphates and nitrates in waterways in order to gain planning permission, which can cause excessive algae growth and degrade water quality.
I understand that boosting housebuilding is of profound importance, but dropping environmental protections like this seems worrying, given that just 14% of England’s rivers were in good ecological health in 2019.
The government said housing developments only contribute a small fraction of nutrient pollution, while it added that it will work with the housebuilding industry to ensure larger developers make a contribution to a £280million nutrient mitigation scheme, but I wonder if this is more tokenism than anything. Surely developers make enough from housing that they should be able to fund nutrient mitigation almost entirely, rather than taxpayers.
What is more, given the nutrient neutrality rules originate from the EU, I question whether there’s some point scoring from Conservative ministers with this change. “Nutrient neutrality rules originate from Brussels, so therefore they must be bad”.
If the government is right and this nutrient neutrality rule only makes a minor difference to pollution levels, then I’d like to see them improve water pollution levels elsewhere to show they are serious about cleaning up Britain’s rivers and coastal regions.
The timing of the announcement seems questionable, given the recent well documented cases of water firms dumping raw sewage into the rivers and the sea in the past few years.
From what I’ve gathered the dumping issue happens when the capacity of sewage treatment works is exceeded – in which case we clearly need to expand on sewage treatment infrastructure.
The UK is a densely populated country so maintaining the environment is tricky, but should we allow our rivers to degrade further for the sake of creating some new homes? Personally I’m not convinced.
