Guest blog by Rod Leslie: There is no more space….

To continue to the debate about the future of the EU Nature Directives, I am delighted to welcome back Roderick Leslie.  Rod has direct experience of large scale land use as a senior manager of England’s 600,000 acres of Forestry Commission forests. He was a member of RSPB Council in the late 1980s when RSPB first moved into agricultural policy.

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Of course we need to water down the EU Directives because there is no more space in crowded England. If it is the lives of people versus the environment then of course the environment and nature has to give way however reluctant some of us may be. 

It’s a universal sentiment, even sometimes (reluctantly !) amongst conservationists, and it is absolutely and totally wrong. Back up the statistics with a look at Google Earth: just over 10% of England is urban, roughly the same is woodland. 70% of England is farmland. Landscape theory says that by 70% a land cover effectively becomes complete, with only islands of other uses. Look at a band across southern England and that is exactly what the country looks like: neat fields from end to end with nothing more than islands of urban and forest. Even in our towns and cities gardens are the biggest land use, followed by roads then by buildings and the urban sprawl of the inter war years is by far the biggest contributor to that urban area. At the housing densities of the last two decades England could build 3 million new homes on no more than 1% of newly developed land !  Only the most blinkered exponent of ‘food security’ could argue that we cannot afford to use that tiny proportion of our farmland, much of which, sadly, retains very limited biodiversity. 

Rod's image of RSPB reserve Rainham Marshes: where you can watch Little Egret fishing as Eurostar goes past in the background

So why do we think we are running out of space ? Almost certainly because almost all of us live in cities and even when we travel the railways and motorways  are the obvious focus for development. 

There may be a need to develop environmentally sensitive land but it is miniscule: confined solely to development that has to go in a particular place: transport corridors and docks, for example, and even then environmental damage may still be being exacerbated by biodiverse land being seen as a cheap option. 

There is also a perception – justified by the cases conservation has lost – that it is a positively good thing for developers to target environmentally sensitive sites. Practical experience suggest the opposite: it dramatically increases both costs and risks. Land Securities claims to have spent £35 million on Lodge Hill in Kent. It is a very bad investment: the odds are against this site ever being developed. Even when the legal avenues are exhausted and law abiding organisations like RSPB have to admit defeat will the developer actually be able to occupy land which will almost certainly attract direct action ? Which developer is going to take the reputational risk of bulldozing those Nightingales out of their breeding habitat, especially at a time when hunting on their migration routes is causing outrage in the UK ? 

So the EU Directives are doing us all a favour, conservationists, politicians, developers, by clearly flagging up the relatively limited space where it is just not right to go with development. The issues won’t go away if the Directives are watered down – they will  come back more disruptively through direct action and pressure for domestic legislation which is likely to end up imposing even more restrictions. 

In an era where fear and insecurity are the weapons of a beleaguered political class we need a bold, positive vision of the future and we can have it. Yes, we are short of space in England, but we can make more and the simple way we can do it is by making our space work harder: the same piece of land delivering several different benefits. The public recognise the idea: it was crucial to the popular revolt against the Government’s plans to sell our national forests.  And RSPB nature reserves are delivering too: combining wildlife, coastal protection and places for people to enjoy looks like a real win-win. We can develop and expand the idea, to flood plain management and to the space around our cities, where land for people, for absorbing the impact of flooding, where reedbeds for cleaning ‘grey’ water runoff could also breed Bitterns and Bearded Tits. Actually, we all live in the ‘Environment’ and the real priority is to create a country for the future where people want to live and do business, not let lose careless capital to degrade our landscapes solely for profit and profit only. 

Do you agree with Rod?

It would be great to hear your views.