Bob Weston has been in the construction business for more than 30 years and in that time has encountered — and overcome — every sort of building delay. Or so he thought, until last autumn.
That’s when he came across the slowworm. Five of them to be precise — each no more than 50cm long — somehow managing to bring work to a standstill on a four-acre site in the centre of Canterbury. The six-month delay to 141 homes cost Weston’s company a cool £250,000, or £50,000 for each of the gentle creatures.
But it’s not just the money. What really gets Weston, who is chairman of Weston Group, a construction company due to complete 700 homes in the southeast this year, is that he might have been banged up.
“I was reported to the Kent constabulary,” he says, still agitated a year on. Weston is a law-abiding man. He had no idea that a previous owner of the brownfield site had commissioned an environmental report. Nor that this report suggested there might be slowworms lurking underneath. So when somebody from English Nature arrived just after his workers had started clearing the site, ordering them to down tools, he was amazed. “Even the planning authority was shocked,” he says.
There was nothing to be done. The site had to be covered with matting and abandoned until spring, when slowworms, which look like snakes but are in fact legless lizards, awake from their hibernation. “We had to lay down mats so that when they came out they would be happy,” says Weston. “And after all that they only found five.”
Licensed ecologists — the only people allowed to touch them — carried the reptiles by hand to a fenced conservation area on site. The operation, including the survey by ecology consultants, cost £20,000.
“And we’ve had to strim the scrub so they’ve got areas to lay in the sun, and make refuges, which are basically a pile of logs, so they can live happily ever after,” says Ray Blake, design manager at Weston Homes. “And don’t get me started on great crested newts — we’ve got a site we’d like to have started on two months ago, and we can’t start until next August. And we’ve got bats there, too ” Weston believes this is legislation gone mad. “I hadn’t come across anything like this until two years ago,” he says. “Now it’s getting crazy. If you have a pond in your garden with one great crested newt in it, then nobody can do any development of any sort within 500m. You can’t even put up a garden shed without first commissioning an ecology survey and moving the newt to safety. One developer ended up in the magistrates’ court after cutting grass in an orchard in Kent. He was ‘endangering the habitat of the slowworm’.”
Legislation to safeguard our wildlife is not new. Slowworms, smooth snakes and other reptiles, for example, have been protected for 25 years from being killed, injured or sold under the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981, but it is only recently that the laws have been enforced so stringently. Five years ago, few ecology planning conditions were served, now 50% of all planning applications include an ecology condition, which can delay development for as long as 24 months.
John Newton, of Ecology Consultancy, is 56 and has worked in conservation all his working life. He says that while reptiles, water voles, dormice, bats, badgers and birds are all protected by UK and/or European legislation, and in many cases have been since 1981, it is only since Planning Policy Statement 9 (PPS9) was introduced last year that local planning authorities have become more aware of the legislation and their responsibilities towards “biodiversity action plan species”, ie wildlife.
“Since last year the laws have been applied more rigorously and the police are more aware of protection given to species such as bats,” says Newton, who suggests developers undertake ecology surveys as soon as they buy a plot. “They overlook the seasonality of wildlife and wait for planning permission, but it can take a lot of survey effort to clear a site,” he says. “To move reptiles you have to set out heat traps and collect them on a regular basis. It can take as many as 90 visits and can take months.”
Weston is not convinced. “Ten years ago you’d get planning permission with 10 conditions, of which one or two would have to be done before you start work. Now it’s not uncommon to get 60 conditions, of which 40 have to be done immediately,” he says. “In a worst-case scenario, your site can become undevelopable. If you have bats you can only operate in their habitat in winter months. The great crested newt can only be surveyed in the last weeks of March and April, then you can’t go near them again until the following spring, as the rest of the time they are either hibernating, breeding or giving birth.”
Meanwhile, he does his best to comply. “We all care, we all have environmental responsibilities, and we will obey the law, but what is this doing for the economy and how much money is being wasted? All we are doing is providing homes for people to live in.”
Only the homes are no longer just for people. Another developer, St George West London, has had to provide housing for all manner of wildlife at Charter Quay in Kingston upon Thames, including nesting chambers and artificial perches for kingfishers, nesting boxes for blue tits, robins, pied wagtails and grey wagtails, and bat boxes under bridges. But it is at its smart Kew Riverside Park development in Surrey that wildlife has ended up on real estate worth about the same as one of its top-of-the-range penthouse flats.
It started with an ecology condition. An independent ecologist was employed to have a “walk over of the site”, looking for signs of specialised habitats or animal life. One can only imagine his joy to discover the rare two-lipped door snail. The reaction of the developer is not recorded.
Ian Dobie, the managing director of St George West London, is keen to look on the bright side, emphasising that its snail enclave — nearly an acre of prime riverside land, neatly railed, so snails can come and go at will, safe from human intrusion — is a valuable asset, appreciated by homebuyers. He’s probably right. And the snails, at least, have never been happier.
