When you build a big new housing development in the UK, that means lots of toilets being connected to the creaky Victorian sewage system. Many parts of the country cannot handle this extra waste, which ends up being spewed into local rivers. The waste contains nutrients such as phosphates and nitrates which feed algae, causing it to bloom, eventually choking out all life within the river.
The EU habitats directive, which was carried over into UK law after Brexit pushed the UK out of the European Union in January 2020, means sensitive areas – beautiful rare habitats in places like the Norfolk Broads and the Lake District – cannot be subject to pollution that would ruin their special status for wildlife. This means housebuilders in these particular areas, already on the brink of destruction, have not been allowed to build unless they show the extra toilets won’t cause more nutrients to go into the water.
This principle is called “nutrient neutrality”, and is a law the government has been trying to scrap after intensive lobbying by the housebuilding industry. Ministers claim removing the law could unlock 100,000 homes.
The whole story, if you are not that well acquainted with British politics, feels very arcane, niche and quirky – one of the great hopes for saving English rivers was an amendment laid by the Duke of Wellington. And crucial information that revealed the government had ignored its own watchdog’s recommendations was obtained by the quaintly named Baroness Young of Old Scone.
Whether or not you think dukes and baronesses should have anything to do with legislation, or knew what nutrient neutrality was before reading this newsletter, it does have global and wide-ranging implications.
Firstly, it shows that the UK government is willing and able to unpick hard-won EU-derived environmental law, which those who pushed for Brexit promised multiple times would never happen. Brexit will improve the environment, they said, honest! And many of these laws were those that the UK’s own European parliament representatives negotiated and pushed for. So it shows that even countries that are relative frontrunners in environmental regulation (it’s not a crowded field) can turn their backs on it when it becomes politically or financially expedient.
There’s another story here about offsetting, too. These nutrients from sewage were supposed to be offset by developers buying “credits” from nature agencies. These would then be used to improve local wetlands, which would (in theory) soak up all the extra phosphates and nitrates, naturally filtering them out and keeping the water relatively clean. Now these schemes can be dropped, and they will be – which housing developer is going to pay for this out of the kindness of their heart? Instead, the government has given a rather flimsy promise of some extra money from the taxpayer for use in wetland restoration.
Regulation and improved, greener infrastructure are much stronger controls against pollution and emissions than promises of offsetting. But they are more costly for wealthy companies, which lobby and fund the government. Which is to say: they aren’t going to happen anytime soon.
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