When the simple and obvious solution is illegal

Britain has a complex, expensive and difficult system to provide biodiversity:

More than 7.4 million people in England live in areas completely devoid of immediate biodiversity, including 1.4 million children under 15, the report commissioned by a number of wildlife and environmental NGOs says.

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Biodiversity net gain rules, introduced in 2024, made it mandatory in England for most new developments to deliver at least a 10% increase in biodiversity value. The UK is one of the most nature-depleted countries in the world, and the landmark policy was intended to help nature recovery.

Nice that someone’s thinking of it, obviously. So, what provides biodiversity then?

The domestic garden is an unsung biodiversity powerhouse, hosting thousands of species, some still unknown to science.

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In the UK, garden spaces support over 50% of the nation’s butterflies, amphibians and reptiles, and more than 40% of our bird and mammal species.

So, these redevelopments of brownland into housing should include decent sized gardens in order to provide that biodiversity and space for diversity, obviously.

Ah, yes, how silly, we forgot. It’s illegal to build houses with decent gardens these days, isn’t it? Which does mean that we’ve a simple solution to this particular problem. Allow people to have a garden with their new house and we’ll gain biodiversity with our new houses. All we’ve got to do is change the law to allow it.

Seems trivially simple when we think about it, doesn’t it? As so often, the solution to a problem is to stop government causing the problem in the first place.

Tim Worstall