Are the newts to blame for nimby Britain?

All the billionaire financier Stephen Schwarzman wants to do is bung a lake on his £80 million country estate, along with a new wing and some — presumably more modest — staff accommodation in the old stables. What could possibly get in the way of a man worth an estimated £31 billion?
The American co-founder and boss of the Blackstone private equity firm might not have reckoned with the particular demands of a warty amphibian that may, or may not, be resident at Conholt Park, the 2,500-acre estate he bought in 2022.
Last month Wiltshire council approved Schwarzman’s application, but only if he sticks to a rigorous “habitat mitigation and enhancement” plan for the great crested newt, which breeds in preferably clean ponds and has suffered drastic habitat loss since the 1950s.
What on earth, this master of the universe is surely wondering, is a great crested newt? The UK is home to an estimated 400,000 of these amphibians, the largest of three native newt species.
Conservationists say they form a vital part of rural ecosystems and have been here for millions of years. But because they travel hundreds of metres between breeding ponds and hibernation sites, they are particularly sensitive to disruption.
As a protected species under the Wildlife and Countryside Act, the animal, which can grow as long as a banana and live for 15 years, has huge influence over rural building and development, earning a reputation as (delete according to where your sympathies lie) a vital check on rapacious developers or a symbol of bureaucratic excess.
While no newts have been found on his 17th-century estate, Schwarzman will have to keep monitoring and rehome any specimens with “a gloved hand”. Mitigation measures should go on “for at least 30 years from the completion of the development”.
Apparently unamused by events further down the food chain, the Wall Street wolf is said to have spoken to Rachel Reeves, the new chancellor, about planning challenges in Britain.
He might console himself with the knowledge that he is far from the first developer or homeowner to have learnt to their cost that you don’t mess with the GCN, as the newts are known within a fast-evolving ecosystem of surveyors, consultants and planning officials.
“It’s cost us well over £100,000,” says Damien Wynne, who runs Q New Homes with his brother, Michael, and is building nine sustainable homes on a 40-acre plot on a farm in Kent.
When Wynne employed an ecologist from an environmental survey firm, for total fees of “tens of thousands” of pounds, they found no physical evidence of newts. But a small pond indicated newt potential, so Wynne had to wait until breeding season in early summer for an environmental DNA test, which samples water for traces of newt skin, faeces or mucus.
When that came back positive, Natural England, a government body, presented Q New Homes with a £105,000 bill for a mitigation licence. Such licences, which typically take months to secure, vary according to the scale and location of a development, and can include the cost of monitoring or new ponds.
“That’s quite a significant dent in our contingency pot and we had to pay it before we could put a spade in the ground,” Wynne says. “And you get no follow-up or correspondence or evidence of where the funds go.”
Wynne says he is committed to sustainable building but worries about the barriers newt protection add to development at a time when the new government has pledged to build 1.5 million new homes. He has also had to pay an ecologist individually to inspect thousands of roof tiles on an existing building for traces of bat droppings.
Natural England says in a statement that a district-level licensing scheme for newts introduced in 2019 is simpler than the previous, centralised system, while generating £38 million to create and protect habitats, including more than 3,400 new ponds.
Newts often stir passions in high places. In 2017, Sajid Javid mentioned them eight times in a white paper on housing policy, criticising “excessive” newt bureaucracy. In 2020 Boris Johnson said in a speech as prime minister that newt regulations were “a massive drag on the prosperity of this country”.
Johnson’s father, Stanley, helped to create the 1992 EU Habitats Directive during his time in European politics. It sits above UK legislation, which has remained intact since Brexit.
Boris Johnson had changed his tune last year, when he described waiting for DNA tests on a pond in his Oxfordshire garden, close to a site for a proposed swimming pool. “There may be people who think the whole world has gone newt crazy,” he wrote. “My friends, I am not among them … If we have to build little newt motels to house them in their trips past the swimming pool, then we will … We will make a Newtopia!”
Jim Foster, conservation director at Amphibian and Reptile Conservation, says newts have become “pantomime villains” in the planning world. He puts their outsized profile down to their relative scarcity, allied with their ability to inhabit almost anywhere with a pond.
He argues the flipside of this paradox is that protecting the GCN has far-reaching benefits. “Newts act as an umbrella species,” he explains. “Without these laws, I think we would have lost a whole range of other habitats too.”
Jonathan Stuttard, principal ecologist at Arbtech, an environmental firm that carries out surveys for developers, recognises that tensions can arise. But he says it’s very rare for newts to block development altogether, even if the solutions can be costly.
“At the end of the day, no one wants to see wildlife or the countryside wrecked, and this is the framework to make sure that doesn’t happen,” he says. Without referring to anyone directly — a certain billionaire in Wiltshire, for example — he says mitigation costs tend to go up in line with landowners’ ultimate profits. “In reality, it can all be afforded,” he says.