- The Lost Nature report, written by researchers at the University of Sheffield and published by Wild Justice, has revealed that housing developers are not keeping legally-binding promises to help wildlife on housing developments
- A survey of nearly 6,000 houses across 42 developments found that only half of the promises to mitigate harm to nature had been kept. Many ecological enhancements had not been provided, with 83 per cent of hedgehog highways, 100 per cent of bug boxes, and 75 per cent of both bat and bird boxes were found to be missing from new developments
- The delivery of plant life across sites was also lacking with 39 per cent of the trees detailed on planting plans missing or dead, and nearly half of the native hedges that were supposed to be laid did not exist
New housing developments are failing wildlife on a widespread scale, new research from the University of Sheffield and published by campaign group Wild Justice, reveals.
Urbanisation can cause harm to nature. Therefore, when housing developers obtain planning permission, it comes with a series of ecological conditions that they must meet to prevent biodiversity losses resulting from the change in land use. These mitigations and enhancements are intended to allow wildlife to thrive alongside human dwellings, creating new habitats like wildflower meadows, planting new trees, and installing homes for wildlife such as bird boxes.
Between June and August 2024, researchers from the University of Sheffield's School of Geography and Planning visited 42 new housing estates across five Local Planning Authorities in England, covering over 291 hectares of land. The aim of the research was to look at what was on the ground and compare it to what developers had promised to do as a condition of getting permission to build.
The findings in their Lost Nature report, published by Wild Justice, reveal that only 53 per cent of the ecological features mentioned in planning conditions were present in reality.
Looking at enhancements for specific species, large proportions of ecological features were missing. In total, 83 per cent of hedgehog highways, 75 per cent of bird and bat boxes and 85 per cent of reptile refuges were not present on the ground. When they looked for promised bug boxes, not a single one had been installed.
The survey also revealed that 39 per cent of trees were either dead or missing, and 82 per cent of woodland edge seed mixes had failed to materialise. Even the features that had been planted weren't always properly installed, making them effectively useless; 59 per cent of wildflower grasslands were found to be sown incorrectly or otherwise damaged.
The distribution of compliance varied wildly. The least compliant site scored zero per cent, while the best scored 95 per cent. These high scores are not, however, a sign that all is well on those developments. The method used measured compliance with planning conditions, rather than ecological value. This meant that quite unambitious schemes could score highly, provided that developers had done a small number of things for nature.
Professor Malcolm Tait, from the University of Sheffield's School of Geography and Planning, said: "The government has just announced ambitious housing targets, on the assumption that the planning system can ensure harms to nature are mitigated. But our research shows that housebuilders aren't implementing the ecological enhancements to help nature that they have promised. What we have revealed is a huge, systemic issue and an urgent need for the planning enforcement system to be given the resources it needs to protect wildlife from harm."
There was very little variation in the compliance of sites by type of developer, size of development (number of houses), area of the development site (in hectares), or geography (area of the country).
A spokesperson from Wild Justice said: "This reveals a systemic issue across the planning and development system as a whole.
"We believe that the new Biodiversity Net Gain system introduced in 2024 is being used to justify increased levels of development on the grounds that ecological harms can be mitigated. This report highlights a worrying gap in the implementation and enforcement of these biodiversity enhancements, meaning very often the 'net gain' will exist only on spreadsheets. This is regulatory failure - developers cheat the system and nothing happens - except wildlife loses out, yet again."
