“The dream of home ownership for thousands of families held back by arachnids. It’s nonsense. And we’ll stop it.” So wrote Sir Keir Starmer on Wednesday, lamenting the fact that a housing development in the Kent town of Ebbsfleet was kiboshed by the discovery of a colony of sitticus distinguendus, or distinguished jumping spiders to you and I.
Natural England designated part of this brownfield land a site of special scientific interest (SSSI), which means it cannot be built on.
In Starmer’s piece, an article for readers of the Daily Telegraph, he says that his government is determined to “loosen the chokehold on building in this country”, and uses Ebbsfleet as an egregious example of the “nonsense” of our planning regulations. In terms of its rhetorical flourish, rather than its substance, it’s not a million miles away from Donald Trump complaining about the idiocy of government spending on transgender mice.
Sir Keir and his advisers must have thought that this would sit well with Telegraph readers. Here was a Labour Prime Minister who would stand up to the green lobby. Here was someone who would put economic growth before environmental concerns.
If that was the premise, it wasn’t exactly a resounding triumph. The last time I looked, more than 2,000 comments had been submitted about his piece, and all but a handful of them were negative. I am aware that we shouldn’t give too much credence to these anonymised keyboard warriors, but few of us will be fooled by the PM’s blanket pledge to “stop it”.
By “stopping it”, was he referring in general to the law which gives Natural England, a quango set up in 2006, power to “conserve, enhance and manage the natural environment for the benefit of present and future generations”? Or did he mean the particular situation at Ebbsfleet, where the previous government had spent £35m on a brownfield site with the intention of building a garden city, only 17 minutes (or so it’s said) from central London by high-speed rail link?
Either way, it will require a change in the law of the land, and you can imagine how long that might take. As it stands, it is part of Natural England’s legal remit specifically not to consider economic factors when it denotes a SSSI, due to the rare species of fauna or flora it contains.
And quite right too. When Natural England was set up, its only purpose was to give primacy to the protection of our landscape and biodiversity, and hang the fact that “progress” might be held up by the unearthing of a family of rare Bechstein’s bats (as happened with the building of the HS2 rail line). Why should a group of environmentally conscious public servants be put in a position where it has to balance the country’s housing needs with the protection of rare species, even of jumping spiders?
square HILARY MCGRADY
The National Trust won’t sit by while our political parties fail the environment
Read MoreSo what does the PM (or indeed his deputy, Angela Rayner, who’s in charge of these matters) intend to do? Does the Government intend to weaken Natural England’s remit? In which case, where does it start? And where does it draw the line?
Jumping spiders might not have a lot of popular support, and are not natural subjects for a Disney film. But they are one of the rarest and most endangered of indigenous spiders, found only in brownfield sites in Kent and Essex close to the Thames Estuary, and further endangering their existence, even for a British Disneyland (one of the features of the Ebbsfleet plan) would seem to be the thin end of a large wedge.
Of course, it sounds illogical that housing for 15,000 people is prohibited by the existence of a few spiders. And Starmer is right to want to tackle planning bureaucracy. But this is the wrong fight. Natural England’s raison d’etre is to safeguard the environment – our most precious asset – from rapacious developers, and to ensure that future generations will benefit from a biodiverse landscape. It is a noble purpose that shouldn’t be derided or diminished.
If this Government is intent on reframing of our environmental protections in the pursuit of its holy grail of growth, it should tread extremely carefully. We fail to defend the airborne arachnids of Ebbsfleet at our peril.
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