Building on the green belt should be part of the UK’s answer to the housing crisis, provided more effort is also put into improving the quality of urban green space, England’s nature chief says.
New housing and better protection for green spaces, wildlife and nature should not be seen as opposites, according to Tony Juniper, the chair of Natural England. The “oppositional mindset” that sees the two as “binary choices” does not reflect reality, and is hindering local communities from finding ways to provide enough homes for people, while restoring the UK’s dwindling species.
“What we need to be doing is thinking more about how we can accommodate high quality nature within and around residential developments, not only in order to meet nature targets, but also in order to promote social wellbeing,” he says in an interview with the Guardian. “Because we now know, from a vast body of evidence, that access to green spaces and areas with water is very, very good for people’s wellbeing.”
The green belt should not be sacrosanct, he says. England could end up with less green belt than it has currently, but “better quality greenbelt – that might have more houses in it. If you look at many green belts around England, quite a lot of them are pretty bereft of wildlife. They’re not very accessible. Some of them are not producing much food either.”
Instead of a blanket defence of green belt land, government and local communities should take “a more joined-up view” that could see some new building but better conservation, and more green space where people need it.
“If you look at the economic benefits we get from access to good quality, wildlife-rich green space, the economic value of that goes up in proportion to the amount of people who can reach it,” he says. “Putting woodlands in remote areas is going to have much less social benefit than putting woodlands in areas next to where people live.”
Juniper’s stance is in contrast to that of many campaigners for whom the green belt is a totemic issue, and who resist encroachment on it. But his pragmatic attitude has been honed from years spent arguing the scientific case for nature to often sceptical ministers and civil servants, finding ways to push for bold action within straitening officialdom.
A zoologist and conservationist by training, whose first area of study was parrots, he has long experience of straddling what others may regard as starkly different roles. Before taking the Natural England chair in 2019, Juniper had combined heading the campaigning charity Friends of the Earth – usually regarded as one of the deepest green of activist groups, more radical in outlook than Greenpeace – with advising King Charles when he was Prince of Wales.
Natural England is charged with ensuring green targets, such as protecting 30% of the UK’s land by 2030, are met. But though these targets are still in place, government policy has changed in ways that many think will make the targets more difficult to meet – or even impossible. Rishi Sunak has taken a publicly anti-green stance, with U-turns on several aspects of climate policy.
Nature policy has also been a battlefield – the government announced in August it would roll back policies on nutrients that required housebuilders to make provision for sewage. The nutrient regulations were designed to prevent further pollution of rivers, which are already under severe threat from water companies’ cavalier attitude to sewage overflows from new housing.
After a bitter row blew up over the proposals, the government backed down, but it is not clear what attitude the new environment secretary, Steve Barclay, who replaced Thérèse Coffey in this week’s reshuffle, will take.
Juniper, speaking before Barclay’s appointment but while Coffey was widely rumoured to be replaced, said the nutrient neutrality scheme that Natural England had been piloting for about 18 months was working well.
“Frustrations are expressed in different places and we get criticised for holding up development. But I fully reject that on the grounds that we’re putting a great deal of effort to enable development, at the same time as enabling government and the country to meet their very stretching targets for nature recovery,” he says.
Juniper is not afraid to take on environmental shibboleths. As well as the nutrient scheme, he supports the biodiversity net gain regulations, and local nature recovery strategies, that will allow for new developments of housing, industrialisation and urbanisation, as long as there are compensatory projects elsewhere. Take newts, he offers. Great crested newts are protected species, and have had “iconic status” among builders because for many years, if populations were found then development had to cease.
Today, builders can use the modified rules to carry on building if they also agree to protect populations of the species in other areas. Rather than being a cop-out, this is an improvement, according to Juniper.
“Trying to protect a remnant population of these amphibians in an isolated pond is one thing, it may not have very much long-term ecological benefit. However, if you can say we are going to sacrifice that pond, but we’re going to build 10 others, and we’re going to put those 10 others in places where we know we’ll get maximum benefit for the connectivity of the new population, then this is leading to better outcomes for nature,” he says.
Though Juniper is carefully neutral, seeing it as his current job to provide scientific advice on the UK’s nature to the government of the day, it is not hard to imagine how difficult that must be with a government whose rhetoric, and many recent actions, have been about attacking green experts and taking on the “Guardian reading, tofu-eating wokerati”, as the recently departed home secretary Suella Braverman put it.
More policy action is certainly needed, Juniper says. “There is a lot of really big chunky targets that government is seeking to reach. And you won’t reach them by doing nothing.” Is the government serious about those targets? “I hope so.” Is the policy situation, for instance with the restoration of the nutrient rules, stable? “I don’t know.”
His outlook at times may seem overoptimistic. The River Wye is dying under the load of chicken manure dumped in it from surrounding poultry farms. Juniper says: “Places like the River Wye remind us that we still have work to do in terms of being able to find ways of accommodating these parallel objectives for nature and food production.” Most environmentalists would regard that as quite an understatement.
He owns it was disappointing that species reintroduction was downgraded to “not a priority” under Coffey. The UK could benefit from more beavers, he says. But of the government’s actions overall, he will not be drawn. “Am I disappointed? I don’t think I’m in a position to be disappointed, I’m a public servant and I have to get on with it.” And if he were not a public servant? “I might be disappointed in my spare time.”
