More housing developments will be exempt from rules requiring builders in England to improve wildlife habitats, the government said on Tuesday.
Ministers have been reviewing rules known as Biodiversity Net Gain (BNG), under which builders must compensate for the loss of nature on housing developments.
Increasing the size of exempted developments has sparked anger from nature charities, who warned it risked stalling nature recovery.
The changes are part of an overhaul of planning rules which the government said would help achieve its target of building 1.5 million new homes in this Parliament.
The changes were one of a raft of reforms to the National Planning Policy Framework unveiled by Matthew Pennycook, Minister of State for Housing, to “get Britain building again”.
“They will not be without their critics. But in the face of a housing crisis that has become a genuine emergency in parts of Britain, we will act where previous governments have failed,” he said.
Other reforms include giving a “default yes” to planning applications near railway stations, including on green belt land, and a requirement that new builds include nature-friendly features, such as installing swift bricks, to support wildlife.
Biodiversity Net Gain, which requires developments in England to increase biodiversity by 10%, has been in place for less than two years.
Several nature-focused groups and charities jointly criticised the government’s decision to lessen its impact.
Richard Benwell, CEO of Wildlife and Countryside Link, a coalition of conservation groups, said the revisions risk “hollowing-out one of the most important nature protection policies in a generation.”
“It’s good that exemptions are narrower than originally proposed, but this is still damage limitation, not positive leadership for nature,” he said.
But critics of the BNG principle have complained that the policy can increase costs and cause delays in the planning process, particularly for smaller developers, making some projects unviable.
The policy has made building “harder, more expensive and more complicated”, said Rico Wojtulewicz of the building trade body, the National Federation of Builders.
The changes to England’s Biodiversity Net gain rules exclude developments under 2,000 sq m of land under a drive to make it easier to build homes on smaller sites. The government says this will apply to an estimated 12,500 homes a year.
Other options in the consultation had included exempting bigger sites of up to 10,000 sq m (roughly one or two football fields).
Speaking alongside Mr Benwell in an interview with the BBC, Craig Bennett, chief executive of the Wildlife Trusts, accused the government of trying to “scapegoat nature for a failing economy”.
“The British people want to see development for the economy and for nature at the same time and yet this government seems intent on pitching them as one against the other,” he told BBC News.
The government has also said it will consult on expanding exemptions on brownfield sites of up to 25,000 sq m in size and will introduce measures to make it easier, quicker, and cheaper for medium-sized developments to deliver off-site nature improvements.
