Hen harrier recovery - as easy as building houses

Yesterday I had the pleasure of travelling up to London on the train. As we passed though beautiful towns and villages, commuters were reading column inches devoted to the recent idea of capping house prices to 5%. This has been floated as the way we could avoid another housing bubble. For those living along the Southampton to London railway line this is a real issue. On the letters page I saw another solution suggested; increase the supply by building more houses. Sounds like a simple idea.

This got me thinking. If we already have Building Regulations to ensure we build good quality, safe housing and it's old fashioned Planning Permission standing between us and another housing bubble; lets scrap the latter. Let people build where they want to live; start filling trenches with concrete and start bricking up urban Victorian terraces at say 60-80 dwellings per hectare; rather than the 25-30 dwellings per hectare as we do now. The market can take the place of these old fashioned planning laws. People will stop building houses when they can't sell them.

If people want to live in, say, Surrey we could study the maps and identify all the land that could be build on. We could calculate the maximum number of houses that could ever be built in Surrey. This exact number could be the new target. Anything less than that is utterly unacceptable. The builders are busy, farmers sell up and moved further out; why were we ever thinking of farming in Surrey anyway? Housing bubble avoided. Accommodation is maximised. The perfect plan. What could possibly go wrong?

Well, quite obviously, lots. However it would not be a complete disaster because the houses are all full. That just leaves one small problem. Now the once beautiful countryside has been trashed, the people the houses were built for have, in turn, left. Let's hope no-one ever checks up on this minor detail.

I feel there are some parallels with conservation. As conservation organisations grapple with a Hen Harrier recovery programme in England, there a temptation to do follow the same simple house building logic.

Step 1 - As with house building - study the maps and calculate the maximum number of Hen Harriers that could live in the English Pennines. Set this as the target. Anything below this is see as utter failure.

Step 2 - Commit every available resource to ensure the maximum density target is achieved. Any other impacts on economic, employment, social or other wildlife species are ignored because there is only one target.

Step 3 - Look confused after the event when the hen harrier population crashes because it no longer wishes to live there. The Pennine moors, now utterly changed, are no longer attractive to hen harriers and many other species. An issue heighted before on this blog here.

Step 4 - Blame the politicians for their failure to avoid the disaster.


I feel this illustrates why any hen harrier recovery programme must be sustainable; just as we must build new houses at a sustainable way:

• new housing must be spread evenly across available space, so does the hen harrier population. The hen harriers tend to aggregate so to achieve even dispersal there will need a proper plan to intervene. They will not be able to do this on their own.
• new housing must be built to a sustainable density which may be less than the maximum possible. So with hen harriers we need to reflect on what the sustainable population number is. A population that can thrive but may not necessarily be the maximum possible. That number has to be agreed at the beginning and so will the ability to intervene when targets are reached. A wildlife population can't always do this on its own.
• new housing must be built with local employment and wildlife impacts in mind - so must the hen harrier. A species that has been proven to, quite literally, put game keepers out of a jobs. The plan will need to explain how these other essentials are protected too.
• new housing must not extinguish the original motivation for living there - Hen harriers want to live on grouse moors because the keepers set the conditions they need to thrive. If the keepers leave we then lose, as we have in Wales, some of the species we cherish the most.

If we over simplify the issues involved, will the new hen harrier conflict resolution process end just as the last one did, with some conservationists simply standing up and walking out of the room? We are fortunate that all these issues are know. The hard facts are there; such as this published scientific paper by the Game & Wildlife Conservation Trust in 1998, and demonstrated in a real study here. A solution is entirely possible if we recognise the resolution will require a plan that recognises all, not a select few, of the issues involved.