[This article develops a recent Facebook post with more maps and discussion of cycle route potentials]
I received communication this week that ‘the King Charles III England Coast Path (KC3ECP), and its associated accessible coastal margin is now open around the full Dengie peninsula.’
There were some caveats in the communication, which I copy below
‘the King Charles III England Coast Path between Wallasea Island and Burnham-on-Crouch opened this morning.
Unfortunately with 2 weeks to go before the commencement date one of the contractors working for Essex County Council, on the north side of the Crouch, fell seriously ill. This has meant that although we continued with the commencement of the access rights, there may be a few pieces of infrastructure to finish off. Essex County Council are managing this as best as they can. It shouldn’t stop the onward journey, but under foot conditions may not be ideal at this point in time.
Now that the stretch is open, and in common with all other open stretched of the National Trail, responsibility for maintenance and related issues lies wholly with Essex County Council. If you ever have any concerns, I’d encourage you to reach out to Essex Council Highways/Rights of Way teams.’
a path alongside the A132 Burnham Road connecting South Woodham Ferrers and Battlesbridge.
new permissions over a farm track between North Fambridge and Little Hayes Farm – allowing the route between North Fambridge and South Woodham Ferrers to avoid the long detour up around Stow Maries which involved crossing the B1012.
New KC3ECP route connecting with footpath FP 28 229 to the North, which leads toward South Woodham FerrersContinuation of the new KC3ECP path to where it meets footpath FP 27 229 providing access to BattlesbridgeNew section of KC3ECPpath/PROW on farm tracks connecting Rookery Land North Fambridge at Upper Grooms Farm with Little Hayes Chase and footpath FP 22 261 around Stow Creek.
I hadn’t seen much action on the A132 section last time I passed, so it might not be more than cutting foliage back on the verge. I’ll take a look at both the South Woodham Ferrers and North Fambridge this weekend, but I welcome comment from anyone else too!
UPDATE: I had confirmation from Natural England regarding the A132 section:
‘The major works undertaken along the sections WIB-3-S012 and S016 is the clearance of the vegetation and the creation of a route within the scrub, which I know has happened. There were some bridges and I believe some steps (at the S012 end) and these were being installed by the contractor that has fallen ill.
That said I believe the route is passable. I certainly managed to walk it this time last year in low walking boots and managed to pass without any bridges being in place.
I have previously discussed with colleagues at ECC that just clearing the scrub may not be sufficient and that there may need to be some form of surfacing (not metalled) if as I believe the enclosed nature means the ground lies wet for longer. The newly cleared areas will also encourage more vigorous side growth and spread of the likes of bramble and nettle. I encouraged them to consider seeding the length and then cutting it frequently (at least 4 times a year) to encourage a good grass cover but I don’t think this was undertaken. I hope they keep an eye on the condition of this section. It will not be Natural England’s responsibility to do so.’
Improving the surface of A132 section to make it suitable for cycle traffic could provide part of a useful connector between the SWF/Dengie and the proposed National Cycle Route 135 at Battlesbridge.
If higher rights allowing bicycle use were allocated to footpaths FP 40 298 (772m), FP 23 298 (119 m), FP 28 229 (650m) and a short section of FP 35 298 (connecting FP 40 298 and FP 23 298) then South Woodham Ferrers, and its railway station, would have a safe, segregated, westward route out for cyclists (the footbridge in Woodhasm Fen might also need some adjustment).
Similarly, where the new A132 path meets FP 27 229, some higher rights for bicycles on FP 27 229 (670) and FP 41 229 (654m) would provide access to Maltings Road, Battlesbridge allowing connection to the proposed National Cycle Network route 135 and Battlesbridge railway station at Hawk Hill.
Higher rights on specific footpaths to allow use bicycles, whether by upgrading to bridleways or otherwise, is one thing – but this doesn’t in itself ensure that the route is suitable for cycling. Soem surfacing work may also be necessary to achieve that.
At the Battlesbridge end, I’m not convinced the footpath route described above is ideal. It would be better I think to create a new track, on Dons Farm land, from the bridge – parallel to the railway, before going South on the existing farm track to Maltings Road. Dons Farm belongs, I believe to DJ Fisher Farms.
Proposed new routefrom Bridge (803?) to Maltings RoadFull proposed route South Woodham Ferrers to Battlebridge
The Gods have spoken. Communities Secretary Steve Reed came down from Mount Westminster this weekend and proclaimed that 15 councils in Essex will be abolished and replaced with five local authorities. I was surprised that UK Gov had not gone with the three unitary authority model proposed by Essex County Council, which seemed to be the only one that fit the government brief.
The five authority model was the one favoured by most existing authorities and does not centralise powers as much as the three model. It is still a centralisation however and decision making will move further away from the people it affects, while the case that the reorganisation will save money is surely weakened by choosing to have five rather than three.
The Dengie will be in the ‘Mid Essex’ unitary – an authority that will stretch from the Greater London boundary to the North Sea coast. It seems likely that the seat of power will be in the City of Chelmsford. It’s the only city in the region, it’s fairly central geographically and it has the buildings and staff of the doomed Essex County Council to draw on, making a transition easier. For similar reasons, I imagine that Chelmsford will also be the seat of the Greater Essex Mayoral Authority when an Essex Mayor is elected in May 2028.
(this all presupposes that a General Election doesn’t happen before local government reorganisation and the Mayoral election and that the next government doesn’t cancel the whole thing as a Starmer folly. Reform UK leader Nigel Farage has said he is “deeply sceptical” about changes to local councils in Essex, “I think that to maintain overall the presence of an identifiable county council is the right way to go” and that Reform UK would try to put a stop to local government reform).
Design and Climate Change section of the Maldon District Local Development Plan
For the Dengie, a move of powers from Maldon to Chelmsford means authority moving from a town it abuts to one that is further away. It’s unclear what value strategies developed at Maldon District level will have when Maldon District is no more – not least the Maldon District Local Development Plan 2014-2029 (reviewed Feb 2025), more recent Neighbourhood Plans across the district that are constrained by the LDP, and the Maldon District Council’s Climate Strategy and Action Plan [pdf].
We are entering a crucial period for achieving the UK’s legally binding target of net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 and the interim target of a 58% reduction by the period 2028-2032.
This uncertainty at District level is multiplied at County level. Essex County Council, under a Conservative Party administration, has developed a raft of climate and environment strategies and policies which say a lot of the right things, even though delivery has often been frustratingly slow.
That lack of speed may prove fatal if the political character of the local authorities changes to one less enamoured of net-zero and climate goals. The current polling is therefore sobering.
With a few weeks to go, the Conservatives look set to be wiped out at the May County Council elections. Even the low end of projections for Reform UK would give them majority control in Essex. Conservative Party ‘Climate Czar’ Councillor Peter Schwier is one of those who looks set to lose his seat to Reform UK.
What happened across the Thames at Kent County Council (KCC) when Reform UK took control is a guide as to what to expect: the party initiated sweeping reversals of previous climate commitments.
• Reform UK councillors rescinded KCC’s 2019 Climate Emergency Declaration • The Reform-led council removed Net Zero/carbon neutrality targets and abandoned efforts to meet those targets previously set by the council. • Background information provided by the Reform UK group said the council’s 2019 climate emergency declaration had “endorsed the unproven view of anthropogenic (human-induced) climate change” [pdf]. • They cancelled £32 million of renewable energy property modifications. • They cancelled £7.5 million of electric vehicle transition plans • They voted down motions aimed at supporting the recovery and growth of wildlife and biodiversity by reducing harmful pesticides – despite environmental and public‑health concerns. • Reform UK councillor Chris Hespe called anthropogenic global warming a “hoax”. • Reform UK councillor David Wimble shared a Facebook post highlighting a “Climate Catastrophe Hoax”, where “the climate apocalypse narrative is exaggerated, wrong, and built on fear rather than fact” • Seven out of ten Reform UK controlled councils have scrapped their climate targets since being elected • Academic analysis from the Grantham Research Institute (LSE) found that Reform‑run councils “removed content about climate change from strategy documents” after taking control. KCC is explicitly listed among the councils where Reform UK councillors expressed climate‑science denial and participated in these removals [pdf].
Strategies and policies are much easier to reverse than already existing actions on the ground. I can’t help but think that much of the last decade was wasted and all the pretty pdfs and consultations produced are now dead in the water. Essex should have taken direct control of buses and integrated public transport ticketing and timetables, planning authorities should have demanded net-zero, low bills, homes with domestic energy generation, rain/grey water recycling and minimum 30% on-site biodiversity net gain, the county should be laced with segregated walk/wheel/cycle paths breaking car dependency and improving health outcomes, money spent on waste incinerators should have been burned creating a circular economy instead, our anchor institutions should have collaborated and built community wealth via local procurement led by the public authorities.
Peter Harris, the Reform UK mayoral candidate for Essex, hasn’t yet made any statements specifically about environmental issues such as climate change, net‑zero, renewable energy, pollution, or biodiversity. He has mentioned ‘protecting our green spaces’ as part of a very general policy agenda, but there’s no detail on what this means in practice.
His promo video has him stood in some fields and his comments there seem to position the ‘green spaces’ protection as being about housing developments rather than nature recovery or habitat protection.
There’s a brief shot of the tide coming in on the Essex coast with the Gunfleet Sands Offshore Wind Farm visible in the distance – but there’s no mention of sea-level rise or renewable energy. Over this image, Harris is talking about the council and the government ‘letting you down’ – is the tide and the wind farm relevant to this, or just B-roll? Hard to tell.
Dr David BullNigel Farage stand-up set at the Circus Tavern
With the Earth’s climate further out of balance than at any time in recorded history, the crash in wildlife populations constituting an extinction event, and human activities increasingly disrupting the natural equilibrium, creating consequences for hundreds and thousands of years, the return of climate change denialism is a bitter pill to swallow.
This week The Timesreported that it had seen a document called ‘Status of Defra’s critical systems to 2030 and beyond’, commissioned before the 2024 election by civil servants at the Department for Environment, Farming and Rural Affairs (Defra).
Tasked with identifying looming threats to the underpinnings of modern life, its authors in the Defra Futures team, an expert group of civil servants, concluded that not only Britain’s food supply but also its water supply and international trade networks were “almost certain” to be “on a decline and collapse trajectory”, meaning there was “a realistic possibility that by 2030 (increasing to 2050) our food, water and natural ecosystems (etc) are at strategic risk of catastrophic failure”.’
The Government denies a document with this name exists, but a couple of months previously, The Timesreported on a different study ‘Global Biodiversity Loss, Ecosystem Collapse and National Security‘ put together by the joint intelligence committee (which oversees MI5 and MI6). Due to be published last Autumn, it was suppressed until an FOI request produced an abridged version.
From the abridged ‘Global Biodiversity Loss, Ecosystem Collapse and National Security’
The Times reports that it has seen the unabridged version which paints an even gloomier picture of how climate change might affect the UK: driving mass migration from parts of the world made uninhabitable, provoking wars and acts of terror, and creating a global competition for food.
It looks like those of us working to address the climate and ecological emergencies are about to encounter a hostile political environment. When I directed my energies into working with a local climate action group (which was encouraged into existence by the local district council), I did so because I saw opportunities for genuine positive change afforded by the commitments and strategies agreed at political levels from the national to the parish. If, and when, those commitments are abandoned, those strategies are shredded, targets are scrapped, and actions to address the climate and ecological emergencies are ditched – the way forward is unclear. These are the conditions that often produce climate despair and depression, a fatalistic surrender to personal consumption and hedonism, or moves towards more confrontational approaches and direct action.
The recent and successive cycle strategy documents from Essex and Maldon have failed to suggest what cycle routes on the Dengie could look like – so, I’ve had a go…
[I should start by stating that the ideal situation would be a Dutch style network, including completely new cycleways taking the most direct line between settlements. This is the only option that would achieve the aim to ‘deliver a world-class cycling and walking network in England by 2040’ expressed in ‘The second cycling and walking investment strategy (CWIS2)’ published under the 2019 to 2022 Johnson Conservative government.
The Dutch CROW Design Manual for Bicycle Traffic considers five basic design principles for network design: Cohesion, Directness, Safety, Comfort and Attractiveness
Despite this being the only option that would meet the national objective, if we place it at one end of an excellent-to-useless-spectrum, then the other end is no-change and cyclists left to fend for themselves on the existing road network. (A bit of signage and some lines painted on the road would be barely better.)
I’ve started with the rECOnnect Dengie aim that every settlement on the peninsula should be connected with a safe active travel route. Railway station and ferry routes should be connected to the network.
I’ve also looked for how Dengie routes could be connected both to the urban cycle networks in Maldon town and South Woodham Ferrers, and to the National Cycle Network (with connections to NCN 1 at Maldon, NCN 13 at Stock, and the proposed NCN 135 [pdf] at Battlesbridge.
Existing National Cycle Network routesProposed National Cycle Network route |(NCN 135]
I began with using the few bridleways and byways we have, but we don’t have many of them.
We have a better footpath network, and footpaths can be awarded ‘higher rights’ (e.g. use by bicycles) so I’ve tried to fill gaps with them but this still leaves a lot missing.
Maldon District currently has no roads designated with Quiet Lane status but I then proceeded to use roads which I think would be appropriate for such a status (avoiding the ‘priority’ PR1 and PR2 roads). Quiet Lane status should being slower speed limits and traffic calming infrastructure.
This still doesn’t provide a network that meets the objective of connecting every settlement, so I’ve then proposed sections over land that currently has no public rights of way (PROW). This will always be controversial and argued over – but cannot be avoided. Here I have prioritised old railway alignments, solar/wind farm access roads and existing farm tracks.
This still leaves some things unaddressed – Latchingdon, for example, is hard to link into a network using existing PROW and avoiding ‘priority roads’; Similarly, connecting North Fambridge and Althorne, other than by the indirect seawall route – bolder plans are necessary here.
The map in the first image is purposely large-scale to avoid instant arguments over routes but I’m happy to share more detailed mapping with anyone who wants to get involved with planning and proposing a network. More local knowledge would certainly improve the routing.
By national government edict the 15 councils in ‘Greater Essex’ must reorganise to form new unitary authorities through a process of Local Government Reorganisation. This will change the current two-level council system into one in which there are new, bigger councils called unitary councils.
I’ve been reviewing the four competing proposals submitted by existing councils as to how that reorganisation should take shape. (They’re all published here). They divide Essex into 3,4 or 5 new unitary authorities:
*Three unitary council proposal [3] *Four unitary council proposal (led by Thurrock) [4T] *Four unitary council proposal (led by Rochford) [4R] *Five unitary council proposal [5]
(in square brackets I’ve added a number used in the figures below)
There are several hundred pages to go through here (874 pages to be precise), so I’ve done a bit of barefoot textual analysis as a first attempt to see what they have to say about the climate and nature emergencies.
My quick and dirty approach was to quantify how many times some key words and phrases related to these issues appear in the respective documents. I chose words to search for that are either words ordinary people might use or they are part of the common lexicon used by governments, NGOs and the climate movement. I began with general terms.
It’s pretty clear that the old favourite ‘sustainability’ is out of favour. That word and sustainable or unsustainable feature often across the documents – 502 times in fact – but very rarely in an ecological context. Only 22 instances of the words relate to ecological sustainability or bear any relationship to the famous definition of “sustainable development” in Our Common Future: ‘Development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.’ The words are used primarily as part of the phrase ‘financial sustainability’.
Words derived from the root ecology – ecology itself, ecological, ecologist etc, are almost entirely absent, appearing once each in two of the documents. The contraction ‘eco’ does not appear at all,
The favoured words are clearly ‘environment/al’ and ‘green’ which feature much more often – and to be fair are terms that ordinary people will commonly use. It’s probably worth noting that 45.6% of the times that the word ‘green’ appears in an ecological context it is within the phrase ‘green belt’ (68.6% in the Three unitary council proposal and 65.2% in the Four unitary council proposal (led by Rochford))
Turning to the climate emergency declared by the UK parliament in May 2019, I looked for where these documents referred to the climate and the national legal commitment to decarbonising all sectors of the UK economy to meet our net zero target by 2050. The phrase ‘climate change’ appears only 7 times across all four documents, ‘net zero’ appears 8 times (and is completely absent from the Four unitary council proposal (led by Rochford)). Decarbonisation also appears 8 times but is completely absent from both the Four unitary council proposal (led by Thurrock) and the Four unitary council proposal (led by Rochford). The word ’emission/s’ appears twice in the Three unitary council proposal but nowhere else. ‘Low carbon’ appears once a piece in the Three unitary council proposal and the Four unitary council proposal (led by Rochford) but not at all in the other two. ‘Zero carbon’ appears in none of them.
What then of the ecological emergency? England is ‘widely considered to be one of the most nature-depleted countries in the world following historic and ongoing declines. Government has made legally-binding commitments to end these declines and for nature to recover‘. Essex County Council is one of the responsible authorities delegated to prepare a Local Nature Recovery Strategy [LNRS] designed to: deliver the necessary action to reverse the current path of decline in our biodiversity; and, bring about a recovery for nature. Essex published its LNRS in July this year.
The phrase ‘nature recovery’ only appears in the Three unitary council proposal. This proposal was made by Essex County Council and the absence of ‘nature recovery’ in all the others perhaps indicates a failure to fully engage the other authorities in the county with this task.
Despite the new planning mandates for ‘biodiversity net gain’, the words biodiversity or biodiverse barely appear. The commonly recognisable terms ‘conservation’ and ‘wildlife’ are fewer and far between.
Domestic transport is the largest source of emissions in the UK, accounting for 29.1% of greenhouse gas emissions in 2023. The largest source of emissions from UK transport is road vehicles, which includes passenger cars and freight vehicles using petrol and diesel. Addressing this is key to a lower carbon future and one of the reasons I’m trying to rECOnnect Dengie. What do these proposals have to say about sustainable transport? Two of them don’t use the phrase.
‘Public transport’, ‘bus/buses’, and ‘electric’ [vehicles], are all missing from the Three unitary council proposal and the Four unitary council proposal (led by Rochford). The Three unitary council proposal is particularly lacking in this area with no mentions of ‘sustainable transport’, ‘public transport’, ‘bus/buses’, ‘electric vehicles’, ‘walk/walking/walker(s)’ or of ‘cycle(s)/cycling’. The amount of attention apparently given to this area by the the Four unitary council proposal (led by Rochford) is also deceptive as many of these words appear primarily in summaries of public responses to surveys saying what they would like rather than any clear strategy to deliver them (see slides below).
A couple of slides from the Four unitary council proposal (led by Rochford) with the public’s transport issues
On the topic of clean/renewable energy there’s a bit more attention, but still surprisingly little on some of the keys areas in which we need to act to reduce carbon emissions.
Concerning waste there’s very little, especially in the key areas of reduction and reuse. It’s good to see some nods to the ‘circular economy’ but the county still seems to be celebrating ending landfill by burning rubbish rather than anything more transformative. Despite the massive public outcry against shit in the river and the pollution of our watercourses, none of the proposals dare say ‘sewage’.
The less we mitigate climate change, the more risks we will face and the greater adaptation we will need to make. There’s not much about this in these forward looking documents and some risks get more attention than others.
As I said at the start this is a quick and dirty analysis – adding up the numbers here won’t tell you which proposal is best – you still need to read the documents and work that out for yourself. More of these words appear in the Three unitary council proposal (279) than any other, the fewest appear in the Four unitary council proposal (led by Thurrock) (189) – but more isn’t necessarily better. A lot of good words have been written in various documents over the years – but what matters is what actually happens not the words.
Yesterday, Maldon District Council (MDC) shared on social media that they would be working in partnership with a property consultancy company that has launched a Biodiversity Net Gain (BNG) scheme with the Braxted Park estate.
The post and linked article are light on detail, and there’s nothing about it on the MDC website, but this looks like MDC shaping up to allow developers to meet their ‘increase biodiversity’ requirements by paying someone else to do the nature recovery off-site.
Local District Councillor Wendy Stamp informs me that this scheme has not been discussed by Councillors and is seeking further detail.
Map on the Braxted Park website illustrating that it is ‘well connected’ shows no connection to locations in Maldon District
I can see some advantages in consolidating nature recovery activities in the best sited locations and that working at a landscape scale can have environmental outcomes not available to smaller sites
but…
Braxted Park is barely in Maldon district (it’s on the North-west border with Braintree District, near to Witham) and it’s a long way from the Dengie peninsula. (It’s over 20km as the turtle dove flies from Braxted Park to the proposed Romans Farm development in Burnham on Crouch for example) It’s hard to see how the environmental outcomes of the scheme will improve nature recovery out here.
We must demand that nature recovery schemes happen locally to us, no biodiversity offsetting in distant locations!
The Maldon Nature Conservation Study (February 2023) produced by Essex Ecology Services (EECOS) for MDC spoke of the importance of wildlife corridors in the district and stated that ‘[t]he taking of measures to enhance connectivity would be worthwhile anywhere in the district… Certain areas suggest themselves as potential priority targets… Any part of the Dengie peninsula‘
Map from the ‘Maldon Nature Conservation Study 2022′ (February 2023) [pdf]
The whole peninsula was mentioned because the Study notes that ‘[t]he Dengie peninsula has few [local wildlife] sites and many of these are isolated in a landscape dominated by intensively managed farmland, with few areas of natural or semi-natural habitats aside from the coast’
It notes that ‘[t]he woodlands of Maldon are heavily concentrated in the north west of the district [where Braxted Park is located] and are virtually absent to the east of Northey Island, both north and south of the Blackwater estuary. The Dengie peninsula, in particular, is virtually devoid of woodland.’
Elsewhere in the document the Dengie is described as an ‘impoverished landscape dominated by large arable fields with few hedgerows’ and that ‘[t]he planting of new hedges and appropriate management of these features would be of great benefit to wildlife, including breeding birds, and any measures that can be taken to encourage this should be considered. The establishment of a well-connected network of hedgerows would represent a major landscape-scale enhancement.’
MDC knows where, and what, nature recovery interventions on the Dengie would be effective because the Study they commissioned informs them.
This new scheme looks like a way for developers to avoid caring for and improving the natural world where they build by just paying a fee for someone else, to do something, somewhere else.
It should not be ignored that replacing an intensively managed, chemically dosed, arable monoculture field in our ‘impoverished landscape’ with houses and gardens will in itself create new niches for wildlife. Housing developments don’t in themselves, however, create a well-connected network of hedgerows, they don’t establish new woodlands, areas of natural or semi-natural habitats, or wildlife corridors between existing sites of biodiversity. Construction of these developments too often begins with violently making their site a tabula rasa, removing mature trees, bushes and hedgerows, blocking access to fauna, filling in scrapes, stripping topsoil, compressing the earth. It concludes with establishing neat show homes, where the ‘messiness’ of the wild is manicured away – no care to share the territory with what came before – no hedgehog holes or bee bricks, no bird and bat boxes, no quarter given to burrowing badgers and foxes, insects starved of fodder. In the amenity spaces, sapling trees are planted and then neglected to dry out and die. A councillor once told me that developers are generally contracted to support these trees for 5 years, but that it’s cheaper for them to replace those that die at the end of their period of responsibility than to maintain them for the intervening period. Any survey of the new estates in Burnham swiftly finds the desiccated evidence
BNG seemed to me from the get-go to be ‘biodiversity off-setting’ in the disgraced mode of carbon off-setting before it. So, it comes as no surprise that we are immediately seeing nature commodified and traded by third-party intermediaries.
When a developer grubs out a 300 year old oak tree near me, and the squirrels who ate the flowers disappear, the moths that relied on it don’t return, the oak-mining bee loses its pollen, the badger and wood mouse find no acorns, the jay has nothing to bury, and the caterpillar doesn’t come that the blue tit might consume, when the bat doesn’t roost, the fungus doesn’t feed, the lichen don’t spot the bark, the mushroom doesn’t fruit from its subterranean romance with roots – then I guess I can take solace in the knowledge that a seven hour walk from where I live, on the country estate of a retired banker, that an ‘off-the-shelf’ purchase by the developer will have financially contributed to the ‘creation of high-quality biodiverse habitats targeting ‘good’ condition as defined by the DEFRA Statutory Metric’. Call me a romantic if you will, but I prefer stewardship to the spreadsheet.
An ‘abundance’ YIMBYism is on the rise, an attitude on both the left and right of politics, and on both side of the Atlantic, that the future has been cancelled out of a gratuitous consideration for ‘bats and newts’, that we must just BUILD. Increasingly often this comes with a sanctimonious sneer that pits mitigating climate change against nature conservation “we could accelerate the construction of renewable energy infrastructure and energy efficient homes if you would just leave it out with bat tunnels and newt-counting delays”.
But why can’t we have both things? Because there’s a missing third part of this iron triangle
The great shapers of places in the UK, of our land and homes, are six volume housebuilders (Barratt/Redrow, Vistry, Taylor Wimpey, Bellway, Berkeley Group, Persimmon) and they are driven by profit, excessive profit. A 2023 report from the UK Collaborative Centre for Housing Evidence, Why have the volume housebuilders’ been so profitable? notes that
‘Since 2014, the largest housebuilders, and in particular the three largest housebuilders by volume (Taylor Wimpey, Barratt and Persimmon – herein, the ‘big three’) have consistently reported supernormal levels of profitability, with gross profit margins reaching 32% and never falling below 17%’
So, obviously, these companies are not interested in the business of stewardship, of long-term commitments to places, or indeed any commitments past the point when contracts are exchanged. A survey by University of Sheffield academics for the wildlife campaigning group Wild Justice discovered that nearly half of the nature-friendly enhancements promised by developers building new homes have failed to materialise.
Instead of enforcing these commitments and penalising developers who fail to adhere, the BNG system surrenders and turns this all into a one-off transaction. Developers pay some ecologists to do a baseline survey before development, a wonk does some sums to account for 10% BNG, they pay a one-off fee to a mediator like Bidway and they’re done – on to the next one. The mediator creams some agency fees and passes on the remainder to a land owner adding BNG to their diversifed income streams. It could be a conference and wedding venue like Braxted Park, it could be elsewhere in Essex like the farm turned rewilderness Harold’s Park – 45km as the turtle dove flies from Braxted Park. (Recently purchased by ‘natural capital and rewilding company’ Nattergal.) These Essex projects stand in the shadow of the Knepp estate in Sussex -the poster child for UK rewilding – although Knepp’s owner Isabella Tree says it wouldn’t meet the DEFRA metrics.
All this is an approach to nature recovery that seems to depend on special places that are protected, another form of nature reserve, rather than forging a new symbiosis with nature and accepting that humans are completely embedded within a more-than-human world. Essex county council has a target of transforming 30% of Essex into wild and nature areas. Every place should be special, distinct among others of a kind. Nature recovery here, and there, and everywhere. Let a Thousand Knepps Bloom.
The proposed Dengie Marshes Wind Farm is moving forward into a phase of public survey and persuasion. (A company called Dengie Marshes Wind Farm Limited was incorporated on 18 October 2024 and shares directors with Blenheim Renewables, the company which initiated the project.)
The project has a website and is holding a series of consultation events with two scheduled for this week:
Thursday 6th February 15:00 – 19:00 Southminster Memorial Hall, Southminster, CM0 7DE
Saturday 8th February 12:00 – 16:00 Burnham Village Hall, 2 Arcadia Road, Burnham-on-Crouch CM0 8EF
They aim to submit a planning application this ‘summer’.
Mercator projection of the Earth centred on Burnham-on-Crouch(or is it London?)
‘Think Globally: Act Locally ‘has been a familiar refrain of the Green movement for decades now. It poses the problematique at the planetary level but advocates for action at a smaller ‘here’. The scale of this here is never entirely clear but the bioregionalist Raymond Dassman confronting the ecological crisis in the 1970s made a distinction between “biosphere people,” who exploit resources from the entire planet and “ecosystem people,” who can achieve a high-quality of life within their local bioregions. The bioregionalists encouraged us to provision ourselves primarily from our local watershed and to reinhabit this more discrete bio-geo-ecological unit as other species do. “The world”, poet Gary Snyder wrote is “places.”
Maldon District Council (MDC) is considering charging for the car parks in Burnham-on-Crouch. Some people are annoyed and have started a petition against charging, including friends and people I know. The Town Council has posted a notice promoting the petition on its official noticeboards and some councillors have announced their support for the petition. I take a different position.
Last week, we celebrated the first year of the Dengie Climate Action Partnership (DCAP) with a social at the Victoria Inn.
More folk turned up for the social in the pub than regularly do for the monthly meet-ups in Burnham Council Chamber. An unsurprising but salutary reminder that an open formal meeting is not for everyone.
I am grateful to Tony Fittock (District Councillor for Althorne ) for letting me know that the process of creating a new Local Development Plan for Maldon District has begun. So my previous post on the matter revealed my own ignorance of the Maldon District Local Development Plan (LDP) Review: Issues and Options Consultation, which ran from 17 January to 14 March 2022.
From this, I learned that ‘the Plan Period for the review of the LDP Review is going to be 20 years.’ As the current plan runs until 2029, this indicates that its successor will cover the period up to 2050. As noted previously, the UK government is committed by law to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by at least 100% of 1990 levels (net zero) by 2050. The next Local Development Plan will therefore set out a vision and a framework for the future development of Maldon District that must include complete decarbonisation.
Dengie Bioregion 