On the outskirts of Norwich in eastern England, developer John Ingram stood in a field of sugar beet where he wanted to build 10 family homes for a city suffering from a shortage of affordable housing.
Ingram’s plans were shelved in March due to government environmental rules that seek to protect rivers and waterways from pollution by placing restrictions on development in conservation areas in England.
Ingram said he can see few viable ways to build something in the field because of the rules, and said other developers are plagued by the same problem. “Others are in the same boat and they’re all going crazy,” he added.
The lead from Natural England, a government agency, has asked local authorities to limit pollution caused by housing developments and has prompted councils to put the brakes on plans for more than 100,000 homes, according to the House Builders Federation, a trade organisation.
Planning experts said the guidelines exacerbate England’s chronic housing shortage and make it less likely the government will meet the Conservative Party’s 2019 election manifesto pledge to build 300,000 new homes in England every year by 2025.
The problems caused by the guidelines are beginning to be recognized in Whitehall and the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs is working on a short-term solution, people briefed on the government’s deliberations said.
Natural England has issued its ‘nutrient neutrality’ guidance to 74 councils in England, encouraging them to place restrictions on development on conservation sites, following a 2018 European Court of Justice ruling that adding nutrients to soil that already is in poor condition, it would be illegal.
The agency focused on 74 areas spread across England because nutrients such as nitrates, phosphates and sulphates in waterways there were at dangerous levels and risked destroying habitats.
The guidance was issued to Norwich City Council in March and Ingram said it “made everything we were looking at unviable”.
Ingram can only get planning permission for his development if the “nutrient load” created by run-off from the new houses is “mitigated” by a scheme to reduce the impact on local waterways by the same amount.
Richard Kenyon, another small developer whose housing projects in Norwich have been held up by Natural England guidelines, said the agency’s proposal to create new wetlands to offset development impacts was possible in theory but out of reach and impractical in reality.
“The problem is not the targets but the implementation and that comes down to Natural England and the Government,” he added.
Dean Finch, chief executive of Persimmon, one of the country’s biggest housebuilders, told analysts this month that Natural England’s nutrient neutrality guidelines made it difficult to get planning and building permission, “causing a problem not only to us, but also to the entire industry.” .
Unless the government steps in to help builders deal with the impact of Natural England’s guidance, small and medium-sized developers are at risk of going out of business, said Richard Blythe, head of policy at the Royal Town Planning Institute, the professional body for planning industry.
“Natural England can enforce the law with the best of intentions, but the current situation is simply not practical,” he added.
David O’Leary, policy director at the Federation of House Builders, said Natural England’s guidelines had “mushroomed into something they now cannot contain”.
The council is forcing larger developers to halt projects in affected areas and force them to look elsewhere for land they can more easily develop on, he added.
O’Leary said Natural England’s guidelines were particularly unpalatable to developers because it was the farming industry, not new homes, that had added most of the nutrients to England’s waterways as a result of fertilizers and animal manure , leached into water basins.
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Water companies also bear some of the blame for polluted waterways, according to developers. A highly critical report published last week by the Environment Agency, the watchdog, accused water business bosses of allowing “shocking” pollution to happen.
Richard Broadbent, director at law firm Freeths, who was head of legal services at Natural England when the nutrient neutrality guidelines were drawn up, said the developers’ frustration was understandable.
“I absolutely feel the sense of injustice in that, because it’s not development that has historically caused this problem – it’s intensive agriculture that’s not maintained at the top, so you have sites that fail,” he added.
The publication highlights the tension between two key elements of the government’s vision for post-Brexit Britain.
Ministers committed to net zero carbon emissions by 2050 and proposed a radical vision for agricultural policy that values land based on its environmental benefits, not just its output, to help achieve that goal.
But the government’s environmental goals – which include boosting biodiversity and carbon sequestration while penalizing pollution – are blocking the kind of development essential to Conservative promises to “upgrade” underperforming regions and build more housing.
Defra said that while Natural England’s nutrient neutrality guidelines were a temporary solution, the government wanted to tackle the main sources of pollution for protected sites.
“We will continue to work closely with those in areas affected by excessive nutrients,” he added. “We are committed to taking action to reduce the burden of mitigation so communities can get the homes they need, and will soon outline the next steps.”
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