Neil Jefferson, the managing director of Home Builders Federation, makes the case for scrapping the EU-era nutrient neutrality rules.
After more than four years, the Government has finally taken action to address the moratorium on home building in 74 local authority areas as a result of high nutrient levels in rivers. While long overdue, it is a sensible step forward.
Some in the environmental lobby have reacted furiously, but the basic facts of the matter are that the ban was not doing anything to address the problem of river pollution. It has been repeatedly proven that new build housing is not the cause of the high levels of nutrient pollution in our water courses.
The Government’s own research has found that agricultural activity from fertilisers, animal waste and slurry is the main contributor to the issue as a result of animal waste being ultimately washed into the rivers, alongside the failure of water companies to invest in infrastructure to cope with demand, such that they end up discharging sewage into our rivers. This is despite the fact that home builders have given them over £3bn in recent years to connect new developments and it is a statutory requirement for them to ensure their infrastructure can cope with existing and future projected demand.
Regardless of this clear evidence, Natural England’s solution to the nutrients issue has been to use an EU ruling to ban the construction of new homes. The justification for this intervention is that a single new property could increase the amount of wastewater generated.
House building itself makes virtually no contribution to the problem of river pollution, and household occupancy and the creation of wastewater in homes make a tiny contribution. All residential development, including the tens of thousands of existing homes in each local authority area plus commercial development, is estimated to account for about 5% of the nutrient issue. So the contribution from a few thousand new builds each year is negligible.
Natural England have previously justified this move by calculating that each new home built increases the local population in an affected catchment by 2.4 people. However, this calculation has been challenged and it is proven that the number is much lower as a significant proportion of the people that move into new homes are already living in the same area – and so still showering and flushing the same amount of wastewater away. New build homes are also more water efficient and so moving people into them could actually help reduce the amount of wastewater generated.
But while preventing new homes being built does nothing to address the national river pollution scandal, it does deepen the national housing crisis we face. Last year we built round 230,000 homes against a recognised need for 300,000 a year.
We estimated earlier this year that as a result of the nutrients issue and other Natural England initiatives on water neutrality and ‘recreational impact zones’, alongside the Government’s capitulation to the NIMBY wing of the Tory party on planning that will see the removal of planning targets for councils and has already seen 60 local authorities withdraw their housing plans, housing supply could halve. This would be devastating for local areas socially, with young people already unable to get onto the property ladder and the majority of affordable housing being delivered via cross subsidy from private development, and economically in terms of jobs and local supply chains.
Over the past four years we estimate that as a result of the Natural England actions over nutrients alone, 150,000 homes have been put on hold. Small builders in particular have been impacted. While the larger companies can still build out sites they have in non-affected areas, local builders, whose one or two sites are in an area where there is a moratorium, are not able to build or sell homes and generate an income – with inevitable consequences.
Alongside the announcement on the proposed amendments the Government also announced that home builders would have to pay £140m towards a mitigation scheme to counter the small levels of nutrients new homes could generate. While yet another tax on development is far from welcome, the industry is keen to find a solution that will end the log jam.
The other part of the announcement actually aims to tackle the cause of the issue. The £200m to be made available for farmers to upgrade or build new slurry storage facilities will reduce the amount of nutrients entering our rivers. This follows on from the requirements placed on water companies to upgrade their infrastructure by 2030 such that they are abiding by their responsibility to manage our populations’ wastewater.
The proposals still have some way to go. The amendments will need to be accepted by MPs and Peers, and the Levelling up and Regeneration Bill will then need to pass.
If it does, it will allow desperately needed new homes that were never a cause of the problem in the first place to come forward, so resolving social issues and boosting local economies, while helping farmers address the actual cause of the problems.
