When a ring road through our local Lammas Meadows was proposed twenty or thirty years ago, we pushed aside our Terence Conran muesli porringers and went out to start protesting, and for once protesting worked. That’s how I remember it anyway, and the meadows are still there. Traditional Lammas meadows, where commoners have the right to graze livestock from Lammas to Candlemas, and the owners of rights on the ancient strips grow hay between Candlemas and Lammas, are very rare, and those east of the city are extensive. They are an important historical survival claimed by some to have origins in the Bronze Age, and a rare habitat, most of these precious meadows having been destroyed as a matter of official policy after the Second World War. The results were called ‘improved grassland’.
The trouble with this particular historic habitat is that it was then, and still is, really fairly unremarkable grassland. It is precious in principle but less so in practice. It is not really very botanically or ecologically interesting, even allowing for the enlightened understanding that docks and nettles are precious food plants. Lots of buttercups, twenty or so grass species, sparse scatterings of cuckoo flowers, yarrow and some narrow-leaved water dropwort. If there are orchids, typical indicators of proper hay-meadows, I have never seen them. I don’t know why this is. The meadows may well have been sprayed with herbicides and treated with artificial fertilisers before their value was appreciated, which would have destroyed the riots of wildflowers and insect life that must once undoubtedly have been their glory. Now when I walk there I see very little that is of interest to the naturalist; the skylarks and curlews mentioned in the Wildlife Trust literature are rarely seen or heard, and the cuckoo flowers no longer herald the arrival of the cuckoo. It is also probable that the regular floods of the River Lugg are now polluting the meadows with high doses of phosphates washed off the land of the intensive chicken farmers in the carchment.
The meadows were saved from the roadbuilders because they contain patches of Snake’s Head Fritillary. Protesters were able to build their case around these remarkable plants, which have something of the sinister about their delicate flowers. They contain toxic alkaloids including Imperialine, which disrupts kidney and heart function, and they were often associated with death and disease, and called names such as Leper Lilies or Dead Man's Bells. Fritillaries are either white or chequered purple, apparently in the manner of a Roman dice-box, and like others of our favourite spring flowers they can be said to dance as they hang delicately from their fragile stalks. We love them and many of us visit them each spring just as we visit the wild daffodils still found in some of our ancient woodlands. Fritillaries are very rare, but that may just possibly be because they are not native. Most botanical textbooks doubt their status as natives, though those campaigning against the ring-road kept this fairly quiet.
The questionable value of these meadows as habitat is relevant and interesting exactly now because the Biodiversity Net Gain regime, which will come into force in November 2023, will have at its heart a metric for measuring and valuing biodiversity, and this scheme is supposed to drive some of the improvements to the environment we have all been promised, alongside the Environmental Land Management scheme. I have been hoping that these schemes will be better than the previous iniquitous Single Farm Payment regime which has supported farmers and landowners with large sums of money with few strings attached; the more land they owned, the more money we gave them. But Biodiversity Net Gain may turn out to be as bad or worse.
The ‘net gain’ in biodiversity to which many of us look forward will be a process peculiar in that it will be triggered by damage to the environment. No pain, no net gain. Developers whose plans will cause environmental damage will, from this November, have to compensate by creating biodiversity net gain of 10% on-site or somewhere else. Net gain is a concept as slippery as net zero.
The second peculiarity is that the Environment Act 2021 stipulated that responsibility for biodiversity net gain would lie with the local planning authorities. Planners, who are not ecologists, will be expected to administer a scheme that assesses the biodiversity value of potential building sites, and of areas elsewhere that may be used to compensate for the damage that will be done by proposed developments.
A third peculiarity is the assumption that a precious biodiverse habitat can be replaced. This is absolutely not true. A newly planted wood will not have the biodiversity of ancient woodland for many hundreds of years, if ever. Sure, the National Planning Policy Framework seeks to protect certain specified irreplaceable habitats – such as all the ancient woodlands in the way of that High Speed rail line, now replaced with plantations. So that worked well!
If you are a developer damaging biodiversity you may, under this Act, have to pay for land elsewhere to supposedly provide 10% more biodiversity than that destroyed by your activities on the land you are developing. You can prepare for this in advance by investing in an ecological land bank, or you can pay a farmer or a landowner to dedicate a piece of land to improvement to compensate for the damage you propose, and then some – 10%, however you propose to measure that.
If you are a farmer or a landowner you can offer to provide Biodiversity Net Gain (BNG) land to developers who will pay you for creating BNG on their behalf. This land will then be entered on a register run by English Nature, which seems very compliant towards the government and the ‘landed interest’, and is fairly supine over issues such as raptor persecution and peat burning on grouse moors. Defra too has shown, for example in the controversies over General Licences permitting landowners to shoot protected birds, or the release of alien pheasants next to SSSIs, that it leans to landowners and away from conservationists, as it also does with badgers. At present Defra is under pressure from our six biggest housebuilders, revealed by documents obtained by Environmental Data Services (ENDS) under the Freedom of Information Act, to significantly weaken the incoming biodiversity net gain requirements, arguing that they are set to be “held to ransom”, and that “the national housing crisis will be worsened as a result. The solution they propose to the impending crisis they describe is for a more relaxed approach on where biodiversity gains can be found, cheaper access to government green ‘credits’, and broader exemptions to the policy”. The recent delay in the start date for BNG taking effect from November 23 to January 24 (mentioned below) may well be because Defra is contemplating weakening the Environment Act and watering down BNG, which would be consistent with other recent decisions by a government which appears to be very nonchalant about the environment and climate change. The property industry contributes 10% of Tory party donations and already the government has relaxed rules designed to stop new housing developments polluting waterways. It is even possible that the postponement of the implementation of BNG is a precursor to Therese Coffey scrapping it.
There seems to be a general vagueness about how land dedicated to BNG will be supervised to see if it is in fact being managed properly. The planners will have a duty to see that planning conditions are observed but may lack the ecological expertise, staff or resources to enforce adequately. A developer can in theory pay for BNG in another part of the country, for example, making it so expensive in both time and money to inspect it that this may well not be possible for an underfunded local government department. The owner can sign a covenant.(Good luck with that!), It has been suggested that some of our Wildlife Trusts could take on the role of ‘responsible body’ to monitor BNG sites for the mere 30 years of their existence, but they may be very reluctant to risk damaging their relationships with powerful landowners and farmers. This 30 years is a fourth absurdity of the scheme – we need compensation for biodiversity loss to be permanent. The global target to protect 30% of the planet for nature by 2030 (known as '30x30') is included in the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, and was agreed at the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) at COP15. Creation of biodiversity for a mere 30 years, after which the landowner appears to be free to bulldoze the habitats created under the scheme, is just not acceptable. Many developers are putting on the pressure to allow BNG land to be released for development sooner, which makes a nonsense of the scheme and raises the possibility of a crazy roundabout where the developers of established BNG land will have to go through the process again with another temporary biodiversity improvement to replace the one they created and now propose to develop.
English Nature has neatly sidestepped the problem of assessing the complexity of biodiversity or ecological value of various sites, with all the expertise that that should involve, by creating an algorithm called the Biodiversity Metric. This requires the assessor of a plot of land, no doubt quickly trained by completing online training modules and attending the odd webinar, to enter the habitat type and area and the algorithm will calculate the BNG units that it contains. All that seems to be required is a quick judgement on the quality of an area of permanent grassland, say, or woodland, without a proper ecological survey. This attempt to quantify the ineffable has had to be constantly revised – a previous version (Biodiversity Metric 3.0) would have described the flagship Knepp rewilding project as worthless scrub, for example. And as I write the Farmers’ Weekly reports that the start of BNG is now going to be postponed until January 2024, partly because the latest Biodiversity Metric (4.0) needs to be revised again.
The advantage of the Biodiversity Metric algorithm is that it lends itself to the neat and facile marketization of biodiversity. It does not attempt adequately to assess actual biodiversity, maybe just as well since in a survey conducted in 2022 26% of the participating local planning authorities said they had no access at all to ecological expertise, and it remains highly unlikely that many planning authorities will be ecologically fully capable any time soon, which leaves a situation where habitat classifications can be dangerously inaccurate. The rare Pearl Bordered Fritillary butterfly, which depends on violets growing under the light bracken cover typically found in woodlands, cannot exist on green roofs, for example, although the Biodiversity Metric values them equally and would theoretically allow the replacement of one with the other. And of course habitats cannot be re-created easily; trees planted in a field are simply trees in a field for centuries, and a line of small trees and shrubs across a typical farm field monoculture will never have the ecological value of an ancient hedgerow with its population of insects, plants, animals and fungi.
But what the Metric does do is facilitate the creation of a market in BNG units. Land managers, landowners and estate agents are getting very interested in the possibilities of a market that is, by deliberate government policy, unregulated. Defra, in line with the same ideologies that have produced the current sewage crisis in the ‘water industry’, wishes to allow the ‘market’ in biodiversity gain to ‘self-regulate.’ What seems to be driving the current enthusiasm for BNG among landowners and surveyors and all those other Viyella shirt guys are the huge amounts of money that may be earned within this market. A recent email sent from Townsends Chartered Surveyors – who maybe think I am a landowner - gives the following mouth-watering example:
“Gross sale proceeds from 95 acres producing 2.0 [BNG] units per acre at £25,000 per unit giving gross sale proceeds of £4.7m with all sold within a 12-month period. …In the example above there would e be gross sale proceeds of £50,000 per acre. However, if one uses a higher sale price (with current sales we are seeing between £35-45,000 per unit and although land cannot always produce 2 units per acre, in ideal circumstances areas of Lowland Meadow could produce 3.5 units per acre and if there is high demand, you could be looking at up to £157,500 gross sale proceeds per acre on some land.”
Townsends may be exaggerating, (though they are not alone in quoting very high prices for BNG units and credits) but even taking that into account there is something thoroughly shocking about such sums going from developers to landowners in the name of biodiversity gain, because very little of that money will likely be going to habitat enhancement or biodiversity gain. If BNG enhancement, for example, is in a particular case the planting of trees in a field and calling that woodland creation, the landowner will pay at the very most £800 per acre for the trees. The labour and any plastic guards he might use- maybe the same again – would leave him quite a lot of change out of the £157,000 .000 per acre. I had to double-check that gross sale price quoted by Townsends, because it is vastly more than the current value of agricultural land. And the landowner will still own the land, and any covenant will only last 30 years, after which he can do as he wishes with the land, assuming that the covenant is worth the paper it is written on and the planners are resourced to enforce it for the required period of 30 years. Meanwhile there is nothing to stop the landowner claiming money under Environmental Land Management schemes and selling carbon and water credits on the same land.
The combination of the inadequacy and inappropriateness of a planning system almost certainly ill-equipped to administer and enforce this regime; a planning system which has always enriched the landowner and often instinctively sympathised with the farmer; the use of an algorithm that is designed to eliminate or reduce the need for ecological expertise when valuing biodiversity; the crude assumption that habitat type is a proxy for actual biodiversity, i.e. the assumption that by replacing a crudely-classified habitat type with another piece of land growing a few features of that type you will automatically re-create and even enhance lost biodiversity; and the huge sums likely to incentivise all manner of sharp practice among developers and landowners do not, taken together, inspire me with hope. There is something quite indecent about the disparity between the huge amounts of money apparently going to go to landowners and the likely small amounts that will be spent in creating habitats, though we do not yet know how many farmers will be able to benefit from BNG, which is only one of the promised mechanisms to pay farmers to provide environmental ‘goods’. These areas dedicated to BNG are likely to lack many of the attributes of functioning ecosystems; a wood planted amidst typical degraded farmland, for example, would be unable to recruit enough organisms to develop into a functioning woodland ecosystem for many centuries. It would, like much of the country, be a habitat in name only for centuries to come, just as an ancient pasture I know that was last ploughed during the war lacks the delicious Meadow Waxcap fungi that still grow in the places the plough could not reach in the 1940s.
Maybe the last absurdity is the idea that farmers are appropriate persons to foster biodiversity on our behalf. Their record of biodiversity destruction in the UK over the last 70 years is world-beating*. Farmers making money out of BNG do not seem to have to demonstrate any expertise in enhancing biodiversity and may, for all that I can see to the contrary in the documents, be able to continue farming the land where they have sold BNG units. This is land only temporarily set aside for nature, although we have been promised that 30% of our land would be given back to nature. Is it another scheme that is designed to channel money to farmers and landowners, just like the Single Farm Payments it is supposed to replace? It remains to be seen if there will actually be any net gain in biodiversity.
For many years conservationists have argued that the countryside has many values that are not included in the profit and loss accounts of farmers. We have argued for the value of nature as part of the joyousness of being alive, as well as being the biosphere on which our food supply depends. We have claimed that there was a value in nature not included in the landowner’s accounts, that it could ease mental, physical and spiritual ills, enhancing both our mental and physical health as well as providing us with the biological matrix that makes our lives possible and our climate benign. We have argued for ways of valuing nature outside and beyond our way of putting a monetary value on everything.
But we have, I think, with BNG, devised a scheme to reduce the value of the very fabric of life itself to tradeable units that can be used, not to enrich the lives of all but to enrich those of us who are already rich. Whether it is eventually scrapped may depend on which supporters and party funders – either the developers or the landowners – are able to lobby the government most successfully.
I started writing on Substack thinking to try to interpret the countryside for people who might not always understand what was going on around them. As a result of researching these pieces in order for them to be as truthful and accurate as possible, I myself began to suffer even more from what Aldo Leopold described as the ‘open wound’ that afflicts anyone with a knowledge of ecology. As time goes on and I discover more I have become convinced that we do not just need to make our own changes to the way we live in order for life on earth to continue, we need to reject and replace the suicidal ideology of economic growth, and the poisonously asocial doctrines of neo-liberal economics embraced by all our prime ministers from Thatcher through Truss to Sunak and probably Starmer, and indeed that our survival is not possible unless we ditch the capitalism typified by Cargill, a major and unrepentant contributor to the poisoning of the River Wye and the River Lugg and the Illinois River in the USA, among their many eco-crimes worldwide, for the private benefit of a handful of billionaire members of the Cargill clan, and replace it with democratic and egalitarian and cooperative ways of organising the necessary production.
So, while we wait for that, let us get our fiddles out, and play music while the summers last, like feckless grasshoppers.
*The UK is classified as one of the world’s most nature-depleted countries, nearly one in six of the more than 10,000 species assessed (16%) are at risk of being completely lost
bloody terrifying.
Where are the ecologists in all this and what are they saying? The idea that you can break the chain of life and put a starter pack somewhere entirely different with a totally different potential ecology due to soil, terrain, climate differences let alone on different bird migration paths is beyond stupid.
I want to know who made the algorithm….it cannot have been ecologists and where are all the ecologists critiques of the ‘Thing’? Thanks once again for penning the pain.