Readers' Letters: New housing needs 'simple and cheap' adjustments

Readers’ Letters is a free weekly column giving you the chance to have your say on issues affecting the Harrogate district. It is an opinion column and does not reflect the views of the Stray Ferret. Send your views to letters@thestrayferret.co.uk.

This letter is in response to a letter which featured on May 4 regarding the loss of nature for housebuilding.

Tamsin Daniel is right (Reader’s Letters 04-05-25): "We are about to pass a bill that will allow developers to flatten land for building houses and infrastructure with scant regard for the impact on our natural world."

I very recently wrote to my MP about this exact matter. It is astonishing that the UK, despite all the millions of new houses which are to be built (plus associated roads), still has not managed to make any of the following, incredibly simple and cheap adjustments to be made mandatory in all new builds and their surrounds:

• suitably sized holes to be placed in fences or walls between gardens to allow hedgehogs to forage; find resting and nesting places and mates (“Hedgehog Streets”);
  
• appropriately  positioned bird nest boxes and/or bat boxes to be erected on at least 1 outer-wall of all new build walls. 
  
• not even swift boxes or swift bricks have been approved despite literally costing pence if rolled out throughout the country's new houses or buildings.  Unbelievably, Parliament voted against mandating this, preferring to leave this to local councils - despite the 66% reduction in the UK breeding population of swifts between 1995 and 2022 (British Trust for Ornithology data). Part of this decline is loss of nest sites: swifts need tiny gaps in eaves and roofs to nest in but renovations and new builds remove all these types of spaces. 
  

New roads (built to access these new homes) could be made wildlife friendlier.  For example:

• all drains/gully pots could be fitted with wildlife escape ladders costing very little. Drains are not only lethal to amphibians but also to many small mammals.
  
• road curbs could be built avoiding vertical faces that small animals find impossible or difficult to negotiate leading to a needless, lethal hazard to toads and small mammals (e.g. young hedgehogs) and so get crushed by traffic.
  

Wildlife cannot speak up for itself so why not write to your MP to urge them to push for such high impact, low cost changes to be made mandatory for any new planning proposals?

Friedy Luther, Spofforth

Do you have an opinion on the Harrogate district? Email us at letters@thestrayferret.co.uk. Please include your name and approximate location details. Limit your letters to 350 words. We reserve the right to edit letters.

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