Stop scapegoating newts and bats. A nature tax will undermine decades of environmental progress

28 March 2025, 09:44

For over 70 years, the UK has sought to protect its rarest wildlife, ensuring that development and conservation can coexist.

From groundbreaking laws like the 1981 Wildlife and Countryside Act to the Environment Act 40 years later, the UK has led the world in safeguarding its natural heritage. Good environmental legislation was a source of pride earlier in my career as Chief Scientist at Natural England, and it’s an ethos we’ve carried on at NatureSpace, delivering a Strategic Licensing scheme that works well for developers, planners and great crested newts.

But this ethos is under threat. This month, the Government introduced a new draft law that threatens to undermine all of this — one that will harm wildlife, fundamentally weaken environmental laws and, paradoxically, create uncertainty for developers that will slow them down. The so-called Nature Restoration Levy is essentially a standard tax on development, albeit marketed as a solution that will benefit both the environment and accelerate housebuilding.

Under this proposal, developers would pay into a fund managed by Natural England so as to offset the environmental impact of their projects. Natural England would then create plans outlining conservation measures for specific areas affected by development.

Sadly, this proposal is far from the win-win it claims to be. By removing the need to complete proper site-by-site assessments, the Government will do more harm than good — undermining years of conservation progress and offering a weak and limited alternative to solutions that already exist. This new system will mean we could risk losing rare species, without even knowing what we’ve lost.

At its unaccountable heart, the levy removes three fundamental principles that have long been embedded in our legislation. The ‘precautionary principle’ means don’t destroy something until you know what’s there.  The ‘mitigation hierarchy’, which means avoid having an impact if you can, rather than just paying to compensate for it, is completely abandoned — so that developers won’t even bother avoiding the best sites for rare species because they’re going to pay into a levy anyway.

And lastly, there will no longer be a ‘polluter pays’ principle, because all developments will pay into the fund.  Despite the wild government rhetoric about newts and bats, it’s very rare that these creatures actually block development – in two of our Local Authority schemes for newts only 0.5% (1 in 200) developments had any significant impact – but now they’ll all pay. This is not a ‘win-win’, this is a ‘lose-lose’.

The proposal will create other problems.  Because the approach fundamentally weakens long-standing environmental protections - replacing clear, enforceable rules with vague promises of "improvement." - the UK could find itself in breach of international trade agreements. It doesn’t help that the levy funding is set by housebuilders, nor that the Environmental Delivery Plans are signed off by the Secretary of State for Housing. Be in no doubt who these ‘Environment Plans’ are really designed to help.

Finally, the system behind the levy creates significant governance problems. Natural England, the agency responsible for wildlife protection, would both create the conservation plans and assess whether they are successful (albeit only once every 5 years, so that roost sites and ponds will be destroyed before anyone bothers measuring it). The conflict of interest, with one body responsible for both making the rules and enforcing them, is self-evident.

The whole environment sector knows that the Government’s pro-growth rhetoric that newts and bats are holding back development is nonsense. The real issues that slow down housing are planning delays caused by woefully under-resourced Local Planning Authorities, infrastructure governance, broken labour and supply chains and housebuilder profit margins.

Existing systems like District Licensing are already working to both protect wildlife and speed up development. This system is self-funded, operates within current laws, balances the needs of both construction and conservation, and is popular with developers who actually want to pay to offset their impacts under a fair and transparent system that delivers long-term conservation gains.

The Nature Restoration Levy is a blunt instrument that willfully ignores the complexity of conservation. It does not prioritise prevention or account for the varying levels of impact on different species. If the government truly wants to restore nature, it should fund its regulator to build on existing systems that are already working. A blanket tax on development that will deliberately underfund vague delivery plans is not the answer.

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Dr Tom Tew is the Chief Executive at NatureSpace Partnership.

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