On a winter’s day like today, the Middlewick Ranges in Colchester looks an ordinary field, but in reality it is anything but.
The Ministry of Defence (MoD) owned land is home to some of the UK’s rarest habitats, including rare acid grassland, and is one of the country’s best sites for nightingales and barbastelle bats.
The site is also home to an eight-year long planning battle between local conservationists and the MoD, which has been attempting to sell it for housing.
Earlier this month the Save Middlewick Ranges campaign achieved a significant win when the local council provisionally agreed to remove the site from its local housing plan, despite ambitious targets to build new housing set by the Labour government.
The city has a government-mandated target of building 1,300 homes per year.
While the new plan is yet to be finalised, proposals for a big 1,000-home housing development on the site are looking increasingly less likely.
As the Government looks to draw a battle line with green groups and has pledged to take on “the Nimbys” in its pursuit of housebuilding to boost economic growth, the campaigners are hoping their success can be used as inspiration for environmentalists across the country.
“We’d like to draw a red line in the sand here for Middlewick to help protect and defend other threatened sites, other local wildlife sites,” ecologist Martin Pugh, part of the Friends of Middlewick group, tells The i Paper.
“It does feel like we’re going backwards and the rhetoric is very dangerous and divisive and it feels like wildlife are being scapegoated.”
It’s clear Britain needs more housing – more than one million households are on social housing waiting lists in England alone and a generation of young people are increasingly locked out of the housing market.
Labour, seeking to fulfil its election pledge to build 1.5 million homes, has vowed to take on what Sir Kier Starmer has called an “alliance of naysayers” who look to block major housing developments.
Last month, Starmer announced he was “taking on the Nimbys” as he unveiled plans to make it tougher for such groups to challenge developments in court.
Housing Secretary Angela Rayner, recently suggested “newts” were being afforded more protections than people in need of housing.
“It’s absolute nonsense,” says Annie Gordon, Conservation Planning Coordinator at Essex Wildlife Trust, when asked whether newts are to blame for the country’s housing crisis.
Alongside supporting the Save Middlewick campaign, Essex Wildlife Trust are also campaigning against the Lower Thames Crossing, a proposed new motorway connecting Essex to Kent, which recently received the backing of the Chancellor.
They are also intervening in a number of housing schemes being proposed as part of new ‘garden villages’ across the county.
“This scramble for growth, it can’t come at just any cost. So we support growth where it sits within proper environmental protections and where it goes hand in hand with improvements for nature…Unfortunately Rachel Reeves doesn’t appear to be aware of the vital role that nature plays,” says Gordon.
A government spokesperson insisted Labour’s upcoming reforms to the planning system “will deliver a win-win for the economy and nature”.
They pointed to the creation of a new Nature Restoration Fund that will see developers of major projects forced to donate to a pot of money that will be used on environmental projects elsewhere.
But conservationists like Pugh say a “dangerous” precedent is being set if it becomes OK to destroy rare habitats if you contribute to nature restoration elsewhere.
“They’ve bought into nonsense that you can plough up irreplaceable habitats, tarmac over it and replace it with a chemically treated meadow,” he said.
The Green Party, which now has four MPs following its best ever performance in the 2024 general election, sees an opportunity in Labour’s hostile treatment of environmentalists. As the Government pushes forward with its net zero agenda (albeit with a few bumps along the way), its approach to nature and conservation is providing a dividing line between the two parties.
This week the party’s co-leader, Adrian Ramsay, travelled to Middlewick to congratulate campaigners and assure them he was taking inspiration from their fight back to Parliament.
“This is a campaign that can provide inspiration to others around the country that are wanting to protect their green spaces at a time when the Government is turning its back on nature,” he said.
Among those who have been galvanised by the Middlewick story are the Friends of Old Park and Chequers Wood group who are fighting to save the site on the eastern fringe of Canterbury, Kent, from development.
Like Middlewick, Old Park and Chequers Wood is an MoD site and is home to several rare habitats and wildlife, including acid grass.
Earlier this month the MoD put the site on the market, advertising its potential to be used for a variety of purposes, including a solar farm or a small-scale housing development.
The Friends group has launched a campaign to protect the site for the local community and nature by raising enough money to buy it from the MoD.
What do they think of the work they’re doing being labelled “Nimby”?
“I think it’s insulting and I think it’s misguided,” says group member William Rowlandson on a walk around the site.
“To be labelled as obstructionist and Nimbys and tree-huggers and whatever else is playground bullying…it’s misguided because it’s not addressing the issue.”
The group’s chair, Pat Edwards, also happens to be a Labour councillor and is therefore acutely aware of the different pressures a city like Canterbury is facing.
She is clear the city needs more housing but is mindful of the need for green space and the biodiversity crisis, which has seen nearly one in six species in the UK threatened with extinction.
“We’re Labour and therefore we would be wanting housing to be built, but the balance has got to be struck,” she said.
“We are going to be building on green land, we’re going to be building on agricultural land, because there isn’t anything else around the city, and therefore we’ve got to choose which areas are important.”
Some environmentalists have hope for the Government’s upcoming land use plan for England, which will attempt to map out what areas are most suitable for housing, farming and nature.
Gordon is hopeful that if it’s done well it “could provide a significant reset opportunity to meet all the challenges and deliver wins for nature recovery”.
“We want newts and houses!” she says.
A government spokesperson said: “We need to build more homes and infrastructure, but for too long nature and development have been unnecessarily pitted against each other. Communities and the environment deserve better than this broken status quo.
“That is why we are streamlining the planning process and introducing the Nature Restoration Fund to unblock the building of homes and infrastructure we need, while improving our natural world. This will deliver a win-win for the economy and nature.”
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