The Government’s planning reforms risk creating a postcode lottery for access to green spaces in the UK

26 February 2025, 19:33 | Updated: 26 February 2025, 19:57

There is no doubt that the UK needs to build more homes. Population growth, coupled with people living longer, means demand for housing has far outstripped supply.

Add to these factors a backlog of approximately 4 million households that find themselves in unsuitable, uninhabitable, or inaccessible accommodation. We need to get building––and fast. Labour’s manifesto pledge and the Government’s action taken to date to move quickly and remove barriers to building is a welcome one.

But when building our own homes, we cannot forget about protecting our natural one. Proposals, set out in a working paper last year, to support the Government’s target of building 1.5m new homes by the next parliament, risk widening regional and socio-economic inequalities by limiting community access to nature.

The Government plans to streamline planning applications, so quick development and nature protection can go hand in hand. In practice, this allows developers to “offset” the nature they damage or destroy by building through contributions to a Nature Recovery Fund, to deliver environmental restoration elsewhere.

The plan sounds good in theory, but in reality, and without safeguards, the Nature Recovery Fund risks creating a postcode lottery for access to green spaces. And this translates into material impacts for the communities who lose out.

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Access to nature isn’t a luxury – it’s a necessity for mental and physical health outcomes. The Health Foundation found that people with better access to nature live up to three years longer, while the National Institute for Health and Care Research found that every 10% increase in access to green spaces links to a 7% reduction in anxiety and depression.

And that’s where the Nature Recovery Fund could go wrong. Under proposals to ‘offset’ damage to nature, many communities where the building occurs won’t have access to the green spaces that the Fund promises to restore. The Government rightly plans to take a ‘Brownfield first’ strategy, building on underused, ex-industrial land. Brownfield sites can be an eyesore for communities and are untapped growth opportunities. But these sites are also often concentrated in areas of dense development—cities and post-industrial areas already suffering from environmental and often economic deprivation.

The NRF, if implemented, could enable dense development in Manchester or Birmingham with no consideration given to local community green space, meanwhile, the nature tax on developers funds nature restoration in wealthier, already nature-rich areas like Hampshire or Cornwall.

This isn’t just about fairness—it’s about finance. A 2023 report from the Wildlife Trusts found that ‘green prescribing’ (where patients are encouraged to spend time in nature) could save the NHS over £635 million annually. At a time when our NHS is under such immense strain, this is a staggering amount of money to risk wasting.

The proposals for a Nature Recovery Fund should be seen as a work in progress — we have to develop them into a more effective policy to pursue. The solution to balancing development priorities with environmental ones looks like the public and private sector working in lockstep to understand ecological issues. It should involve factoring in the advice of ecological experts to ensure that, where possible, capital is directed close to the site of development—ideally within three miles or less. This has already been done before with world-leading policies like Biodiversity Net Gain, which uses a hierarchy to try and ensure benefits are delivered close to home, and will avoid ecological deserts.

I’ve worked in ecology for more than 20 years, and built the UK’s leading ecological consultancy. I run a team of scores of qualified ecologists all over the country, which means I’ve seen first-hand the wealth of ecological expertise we have here in the UK. Hundreds of businesses pour time and, most importantly, capital into nature restoration. Government should stand ready to work with the businesses to deliver planning reform in a fairer way.

To best leverage this expertise, the Government should consider a for-profit accreditation scheme that helps private companies with ecological expertise deliver vital ecological assessments and advise on where cash can be directed to benefit nature and communities, without any cost to the taxpayer.

The Government has its sights set on the right end-goal, but the road ahead is a bumpy one. When it comes to nature preservation and protection, we don’t have time to reinvent the wheel. Instead, public-private collaboration offers a ready-made solution, to ensure homes are built at the pace we need, whilst avoiding untold damage to the health of communities around the country, and to our planet.

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Robert Oates is CEO at Arbtech, the UK’s leading ecological consultancy.

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