Jumping Spiders & The Town that Disappeared

Growth v. The Environment

Michael Dnes has kindly allowed me to republish this brilliant and thought-provoking Bluesky thread:

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I'm tired of hearing about bats. Do you want to hear a story about jumping spiders and the town that disappeared?

Back in the 90s, they were building a high speed rail line to the Channel Tunnel. The railway crossed the Thames and came out at a patch of wasteland in Kent.

Not a nice place - old quarries, landfill and ageing industry. But someone had an idea.

Trains here would be 17 minutes from the middle of London. So why not build a station, and fill all this waste land with thousands of houses?

And for once, something this sensible actually happened. Ebbsfleet Garden City was born!

Unfortunately, Ebbsfleet was cursed. For 20 years, plans barely made it off the drawing board. By 2015, only 3,000 houses were built. The station itself was surrounded by car parks and scrub.

Ebbsfleet was a joke in planning circles.

So the housing ministry decided to take action.

They shook up the government-run development corporation that ran the project. New leaders, new governance, and a £60m war chest.

And in 2019 this new leadership spent £35m of that money buying 125 hectares of land around the station. The place where building obviously had to begin.

They were going to build! Build big! Towers! 15,000 homes! 30,000 jobs!

Through 2020 they were hiring planners and preparing applications. Ebbsfleet was finally going to happen.

Then, in February 2021, they got a letter. Natural England is the body that manages biodiversity sites in the UK. They casually told the development corporation that they would be designating the land next to the station as a site of special scientific interest (SSSI).

Which means you can't build on it.

But wait, didn't I say that this site was an industrial wasteland? Quarries and landfill? Polluted, scrubby and blasted?

Oh yes.

That's why the spiders loved it.

Not all nature loves green fields or ancient woodland. Some species, including the distinguished jumping spider, like scrubby land without a lot of plant growth.

And distinguished jumping spiders are rare, and protected.

And Natural England will assure you, if you ask, that they are obliged in law to protect such species wherever they are found.

So they really had no choice.

This means that in England, now, we can't build in towns because of people.

We can't build in the countryside because of trees.

And we can't build on industrial wasteland because of the spiders.

(Maybe we should all get houseboats.)

What did that decision mean? Well, of the 125 hectares of land purchased, only 35 could now be built on. Not the bit linking the existing housing to the train station, but the bit sandwich between 2 railway lines and a sewage works.

The development corporation puts a brave face on this.

They have a glossy document all about their green infrastructure strategy, and how they will be greening their site and embracing the natural environment. As if they have a choice.

But their account books tell the real story.

They paid £35m for the land. That was meant to shoot up as infrastructure and housing went in, supercharging the effect of that public funding. After the SSSI was introduced, the value dropped to £9m. You can read Natural England's deliberations when deciding whether to go through with the designation including the objections from the development corporation.

The development corporation did its best to play the game. They'd hired experts on invertebrates, and on birds and on plants, to challenge Natural England's case for designating their land.

Natural England's officers dismissed every objection, and explained why their original plan was right.

Nowhere in the development corporations objections are the words you might expect:

We're trying to build 15,000 houses, next to a high speed rail station, during a housing crisis. Are you insane!?!

HS1 limited, who run the railway, were a bit more direct. Their objection was that this destroyed the whole purpose to having a station there in the 1st place.

And Natural England's response was as follows. Don't read it for the words - read it for the words that are missing.

Nothing about the railway. Nothing about the housing. Nothing about the decades of effort taken to get here. Nothing about the government's policies. Nothing about people.

Regeneration and social impact are mentioned as something that they are legally prohibited from considering.

That last point is weird, because in 2015 all public regulators were made subject to a growth duty - they are obliged to consider the impact of their activities on growth.

(Can't imagine why anyone thought that was needed.)

But Natural England has decided that it isn't a regulator. So it doesn't do that.

All it does is fulfil a statutory duty to protect all threatened species wherever they are found.

It's only following orders.

Specifically, orders from here - Defra.

Which, in one of life's little ironies, has its headquarters in the same building as the Ministry of Housing and Local Government.

Natural England's board designated the site in November 2021.

There's no way to de-designate the site without changing the law.

A private company could judicially review the decision; but they'd probably lose.

A public body just has to suck it up and move on.

So - now the spiders have their nice home, 17 minutes from central London, and Ebbsfleet and 15,000 households don't.

£25m of public money has been destroyed.

And Ebbsfleet is back to being a joke.

This reminds me of something. Do you know the paper clip apocalypse?

The idea that humans could create an AI to make paper clips; the AI runs out of control; and because its instructions are very simple, it starts turning the whole world into paperclips.

Environmental controls can be like that.

We give Natural England a very clear, simple instruction. Protect rare and threatened nature. And it does.

But then it spams out more and more protected sites, whether or not it makes sense.

I don't want to offend team bat-newt. You'll notice I haven't suggested that the distinguished jumping spider needs to be crushed under the wheels of history. But don't you think it's weird that this site - so suitable for sustained development - can be broken so casually?

Michael Dnes, Head of Transport Policy at Stonehaven Consulting