Great Crested Newts

Froglife were disheartened to hear Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government Angela Rayner MP’s comments in December 2024 that, “Newts can’t be more protected than people who need housing” and this continued rhetoric in Rachel Reeves’ recent speech on planning reform where she singled out newts as the cause for planning delays. 

Be clear, this is not a party-political issue though.  In 2020, Boris Johnson, then Conservative Prime Minister, said “newt-counting delays” were a “massive drag on the prosperity of this country”.  And there are numerous other examples that we could list where nature – and great crested newts in particular – have been erroneously portrayed as the reason that millions of homes haven’t yet been built.

The housing and nature agendas do not have to be pitched against each other.  The current government has made promises to build more houses, AND protect nature, it’s therefore in their best interest to work with environmental NGOs to do just that in order to achieve their targets. 

Great advances are already being made to create habitats for wildlife, including for great crested newts, even in densely populated urban areas. 

Hearing the minister’s comments, you might be surprised to know there is already a scheme in place for great crested newts that is doing away with those “newt-counting delays”.  The scheme, known as ‘district-level licensing’ is a strategic, landscape-scale approach first piloted by Natural England in Kent, back in 2016.  It  is now being rolled out across many parts of the country and removes the need for in depth surveys or counting, and, where implemented properly, has the potential double benefit of preventing delays to development and providing new, and arguably better, habitat for newts.  Instead of focusing on individual development sites, it aims to assess impacts on newts across entire districts. Developers pay into a central fund, which is used to create and manage high-quality habitats for newts in optimal locations through approved local Habitat Delivery Bodies (HDB’s). To date Froglife Ecological Services, which is one of the approved HDBs, has created and restored fast approaching 100 ponds through the scheme in the counties of Essex and Leicester and initial results are showing that great crested newts are already present in these ponds.  While many local schemes such as ours are showing positive initial results, effective monitoring is still required to demonstrate the schemes impact at a national scale. 

Both wildlife and people need good homes: between January 2018 and June 2024, Froglife worked on 1,922 habitat interventions, including creating 506 ponds and restoring 398 others.  It is part of our strategic approach to focus our work primarily in urban areas where, as well as creating space for wildlife, we can engage local people who often have poor access to nature, with reptile and amphibian conservation.  As well as helping us to protect and manage these sites in the future, this also benefits the communities by providing access to high quality natural green spaces on their doorstep: a win for people and for nature.  The former Conservative government committed in the Environmental Improvement Plan (EIP), to provide all people with access to a green or blue space within a 15 minute walk of home. Studies have shown that having daily access to nature can improve health and wellbeing, potentially saving the NHS millions of pounds and these impacts are biggest in nature-deprived communities, who benefit disproportionately from access to nature ^{1, 2, 3, 4, 5}.  We hope that this positive ambition will be kept by the current government in their revised EIP due to be introduced this year.

Environmental NGOs, including Froglife, have been providing evidence to successive governments to show how government ambitions for people and nature can be achieved through planning and other policy reforms.  Froglife is currently a partner on a new campaign led by Wildlife and Countryside Link which calls on government to ensure that new planning policies are Wilder By Design.  Wildlife and Countryside Link, of which Froglife is a member, is the largest environment and wildlife coalition in England, bringing together 86 organisations to use their strong joint voice for the protection of nature.  In addition, The Wildlife Trust’s “Swift and wild” report makes an inspiring case for “how to build houses and restore nature together”.  While we agree the planning system can be improved, deregulation and pitting communities, developers and wildlife against each other is not the answer.

There are numerous reasons why, as a country, we have a housing crisis.  For example the charity Crisis, which aims to “support people to end their homelessness” has a plan to end homelessness by recommending policies that would end that crisis. They say that “by providing more social housing, repurposing long-term empty buildings, improving conditions and security in the private rented sector and ensuring Housing Benefit covers the cheapest rents, everyone will have access to a safe, settled, genuinely affordable home”.  None of this mentions newts or nature.   

Froglife is a champion of wildlife and communities living alongside each other and while we might be biased when it comes to championing newts, this is not the point that matters in this debate.  The evidence shows that not only should nature not be scapegoated as the reason for planning delays but in fact it should be embraced as part of the solution to many of the problems that we as society are facing.  These solutions aren’t new and are now well documented so now is the time to act and use them rather than grabbing the headlines by blaming newts and nature.  

We would love to invite Angela Rayner, Rachel Reeves and anyone else who is in any doubt about this to join us and the communities we work with on site to see for themselves how this can be achieved.

References