The non-departmental agency that funds new affordable housing in England has published its plans to force nature-friendly regulations on new housebuilding. Bat tunnel, anyone?
Homes England is the government’s housing and regeneration agency which owns land and sells it to developers as well as acting as master developer on large schemes. It also lends to small builders and hands out social housing grants. Yesterday it named 33 ‘strategic partners’ under the government’s £39 billion Social and Affordable Homes Programme…
It has today published its 2026 “Nature Positive Plan” to force biodiversity quotas on housebuilding. It sets out how:
- Refusing to buy land: “We will not acquire sites for built development that are identified for their ecological importance, avoiding those that are statutorily or locally designated for nature conservation, or those where built development will need to directly impact on irreplaceable habitat.” Includes “Sites of Importance for Nature Conservation” which councils designate themselves.
- Adding nature costs to grants: “Promoting Nature Positive practices in the housebuilding sector through requirements embedded in site disposal evaluations and grant or loan funding criteria.” And: “Where we have direct influence, we will use commercial policy and contract clauses to ensure that suppliers contribute to the delivery of our Nature Positive goals. When we are providing land opportunities we will ask partners to fulfil nature-related criteria to achieve higher standards.” More paperwork…
- Additional nature material on all houses: “Provision of wildlife ‘furniture’ should also be included, such as swift bricks, bat boxes, hedgehog highways, insect hotels and bird boxes.”
- Requirements on all developers:“Every developer that builds on our sites will identify and deliver a suite of features to support all native species with a focus on strategies for habitats in the built environment to foster their resurgence e.g. thorny scrub at peripheries, as well as supporting key species such as bats and invertebrates.” Also “suitable planting being a requirement of detailed design.”
- Narrower supply pool:“Increasing the quality and resilience of planting designs through the procurement process, by screening landscape consultant portfolios prior to work being awarded, to ensure that all consultants commissioned are sufficiently knowledgeable to provide the highest quality designs for nature.
- Materials audits: “Supporting partners to examine and map where materials such as concrete, steel, timber, asphalt and earth are sourced from and their embodied biodiversity.”
DEFRA exempted sites of 0.2 hectares or below from costly ‘biodiversity net gain’ rules – which force all new developments to improve biodiversity by at least 10% – from the end of July. Not that Homes England noticed…
Biodiversity requirements are already causing massive costs and aren’t working as expected. And people wonder why there is a shortage of housing in Britain…
