The Housing White Paper and Great Crested Newts - addition to a Linkedin colleague’s observations
In response to the post made by my contact Nicola Gooch of Irwin Mitchell, see https://www.dhirubhai.net/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6238285536398700544/ I provide a little further comment and hopefully clarity on the matter.
Firstly Nicola you have not done a bad job of summing this up. I shall try to add a little more context and some views on how I see this panning out as it really is early days.
Though I am sure that most of us have diligently read the 115 page white paper cover to cover I shall just point out now, for quick reference, that the comments on this protected species matter are found in paragraph 2.27.
The Woking trial has received a lot of support from developers as well as statutory and non statutory conservation bodies alike. If we get this right my view is that it shall be a good thing for great crested newts and for developers. Under the current system the delays and costs incurred if you have great crested newts can be significant and very often the outcome for both the newts and developer is a compromise.
The delivery of this strategy that has been piloted in Woking is underpinned by the principles as set out in the Habitat Regulations that the development is justified, there is no alternative and most importantly Favorable Conservation Status of the local population of great crested newts is achieved (this is a crude simplification of what if usually referred to as ‘the three tests’). This is allowing us to have a strategy that will provide derogation from the law for some development activities that may cause harm to individual newts on site as the overall outlook for the local population of great crested newts is much more positive than it would have been for a site focused mitigation scheme. If for any reason we were to return back to UK law, as it currently stands, we would find that each and every toe on each and every great crested newt would be individually protected without this wider conservation based overview. As such, a strategy like this may be difficult to implement if a time came when the Habitat Regulations did not ‘trump’ (with a small ‘t’) the Wildlife and Countryside Act.
There is a presumption that the mitigation hiecrcahy will be applied before sites are allowed to join such a strategy and that they will only do so when they can demonstrate that the off-site mitigation option is the best one for the newt population. I suspect that if a development site had a locally significant population of great crested newts there is a chance that such an off-site strategy may not be the default position.
So, when will this happen? It may be sooner than we expect. I already have an invitation to an event to discuss this with a West Midlands based planning authority which has been asked by the government to develop a scheme for its area of control. I believe the roll out currently is very selective and for a small number of areas so far and it may well be focused on those authorities that have experience of delivering similar strategic schemes such as biodiversity offsetting. Given that this will all be underpinned by surveys, population modelling and then the identification, enhancement and management of compensation sites I can only guess that it will take at least 2-3 years to get this rolled out at a national level. To get it to this point before developers are in a position to contribute financially to fund compensation area management and monitoring I suspect there is a considerable need for investment and it is not clear where this will come from as yet.
With reference to your final point I confirm that the local authority will have a license to deliver such a compensation scheme and developers can adopt/use the strategy under this licence, however they will not need/be granted a licence for their site development works.
I hope this provides a little more insight into this initiative and how it may well work.