The Spiders That Ate Ebbsfleet

0:07Thanks for listening to A Long Time in Finance with Jonathan Ford and Neil Collins.

0:17We have to loosen the chokehold on building in this country. Take the project at Emsfleet to build more than 15 ,000 new homes. Homes we desperately need in a housing crisis. a ready-made railway station and a 17-minute commute into central London. The previous government bought 125 acres of former industrial land and quarries, the definition of grey belt, to build around the station. The plan was blocked by Natural England. Why? The discovery of a colony of distinguished jumping spiders. The dream of home ownership for thousands of families, held back by arachnids. It's nonsense. and we'll stop it.

1:00Those were the words of the Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer, in March of this year. And he was talking about a housing project just south of the Thames, east of London.

1:11Neil Collins: Was he telling the truth that it was all held up by these arachnids? I think this is the subject which basically we're going to talk about today. We're going through, as you know, one of these periodic pushes to build a lot more housing, lots of new towns and so forth. governments pledging to build up to 40 ,000 new homes on disused railway land now including former goods yards, industrial sites and station buildings over the next 10 years. And these plans will start with a whole load of identified projects in Manchester, Newcastle, Nottingham and Cambridge. A new development company is created, it's called Platform 4, by rolling together two railway company bodies, Network Rail and a thing called London and Continental Railways that built the HS1 high speed link from the channel to St Pancras.

1:55Both of these have responsibility for managing disused railway land, but the Department of Transport said that this fragmented approach had led to inefficiencies, duplicated efforts and what they call missed opportunities. So we thought we'd take a look at the history of one of these missed opportunities and try to find out whether it was due to the fragmented approach of some railway owners or something more fundamental. And here, to pick through the entrails of this tale, which involves the so-called new town of Eppsfleet. We're joined by Michael Dines, a former civil servant at the Department for Transport and now head of transport policy at the consultancy firm Stonehaven.

2:33So welcome. Lovely to be here. Let's kick into the tangled tale of the spiders that ate Eppsfleet. So Michael, maybe you can tell us a bit about the background to this story. The story starts in 1994 with the opening of the Channel Tunnel, which obviously was a spectacular piece of engineering to connect the UK to the continent. But the railway on the English side was comparatively poor. It was running off of the existing railway tracks and there was this long-running problem that you could be on a high-speed railway in France, you came to England and you slowed down to a crawl. So they created something called HS1 to go and connect the channel tunnel to St Pancras.

3:07Along the way they realised they were coming through some interesting sites including one where the tunnel just popped out to south of the Thames. It was in the middle of this, as you say, disused industrial land consisting of old quarries, ex-landfills, all these sorts of things. And somebody had the bright idea of, if we stick a station there, we can just fill this with houses. It's exactly the kind of place we naturally want to try and create new towns or new kind of places for people to live, which isn't going to be on the green belt, which isn't going to be in the middle of anyone's life going and sort of disrupting existing established communities.

3:36It would be almost a perfect development site, you think. So pretty much what the government's now talking about in terms of building on railway land. Precisely. Although this was industrial land which became railway land because they built a station on it. Yes but I mean it's the kind of place where when the government talks about Greybelt they are very much thinking of places that are notionally outside of cities but are not in any sense charming. It's quarries, it's sheds, it's an old sewage works. It is really spectacularly un-cinematic landscape. So this is 1994 which is by my calculations over three decades ago.

4:07Presumably the town has been built. There definitely are some houses that are there, which is better than it would have been if you'd gone back there 10 years ago, let's say. And the plans did go up a gear in the late 2010s when the government of the day decided that there is a housing crisis on. We really want to go and build some houses. Let's find some of the best sites that we can easily get going. And there already was quite a lot of development infrastructure. There was a development corporation and there were plans and there was a junction going in that I was loosely involved in to go and improve the road net.

4:34work so it was a great place to go and have a sort of first running site for be house building plan they gave about 60 million pounds to the development corporation say let's supercharge what you're doing the town was being run by a sort of development corporation which was in charge of everything yes so the development corporation went under new leadership and was given this money to go and develop the land and was told to go on and really shake things up which they broadly speaking did they took the land that was next to the station this 125 hectares the prime minister talked about bought it all up and we're going to go and build something called absolute central on the middle of it.

5:04About 2020, they had all these detailed plans in place and they were going to start doing their planning application. Everything was going really well until February of 2021. And what happened then? They got a letter from Natural England, which said in a polite but very formal sense that they were going to take almost all of this land and turn it into a site of special scientific interest, what's called a SSSI, in order to preserve the biodiversity that was present on the Swanscombe Peninsula, which is the area where this is all based. You've described this land which they were going to build on as disused industrial land.

5:31What was so interesting natural England? We're taking a very human-centric view to that question because, yes, to you or I, this does not look like a particularly prepossessing piece of land. But if you are something that's, let's say, a distinguished jumping spider. A what? A distinguished jumping spider. Neil's woken up. Distinguished from what? That is, I think, a reference to how it looks if you go and look at it under a microscope. It's got very distinguishing features.

5:52Neil Collins: Yes, I dare say they all have distinguishing features under a microscope. So what's particularly special about the distinguished jumping spider? I think most of it is very rare. There are only two sites of it that have been known in the country. I've read of it showing up and the Swanscombe Peninsula is one of them. As far as the environmental system is concerned, its rarity is its defining feature. Did they pick on that because it was rare? Perhaps if they'd looked at it harder they would have found more of them or indeed other species which were even rarer. Well they found quite a few species on the site.

6:23There's plenty of biodiversity around here. The spiders are simply the one that the rarest and most celebrity status in terms of the environmental listings. There are plenty of other species there as well, so if you want to find a five-banded weevil wasp, this is the place to go to. Excellent. I'm not sure I want to find one of those.

6:38Neil Collins: Talk it long time if an answer is of little else. But the species do enjoy having a landscape which has got quite short grass, which is a bit like something that might have existed in nature beforehand, but which doesn't tend to survive terribly long in modern England. The places, ironically, where it survives best are the places which are industrial wasteland, where other plants can't really grow. And if Natural England declares a zone, an SSSI, is that it? Can they just declare anything, like my back garden or whatever takes their fancy? They have the power to designate land to protect species.

7:13In fact, they'd argue they have a duty to designate land to protect species. They don't get a choice, they would argue. They are obliged under law to go and turn your back garden into a SSSI if they find, say, one of these spiders living in it. The challenge around that, though, is that how they actually go through that process is not entirely straightforward. One of the quirks of this, as I've been discovering since the Prime Minister's speech, is that these spiders aren't actually living on the site. They're living about two kilometres away.

7:38Neil Collins: Were they living on the site at the time? They've probably never lived next to the train station. I mean, it's very hard to say definitively because these are tiny spiders. We've done three searches and they've never turned up near the station. We need to probably take a step back for a moment and consider natural England. and essentially Neil's raised the question, is that it, if they declare a site to be protected? But maybe it's worth sort of taking a step back and kind of understanding what is the role and powers of natural England. Yes, so natural England was created in the mid-2000s to bring together a variety of environmental functions, particularly around dealing with what were then European requirements to protect various different species.

8:15They have a responsibility to go and take land where you find these rare species and to put this protection on the top of them. Now, once they've done that, and it's been signed off by their board, and I think by the minister as well, then it's very hard to go and build on top of it. They wouldn't say it's impossible. They're actually very concerned often when there are SSSI's where there is building planned on or near it. But as far as the planning system is concerned, having an environmental designation put on top of a piece of land is a big red flag to anything going on. Natural England wouldn't think of it as absolute, but almost everybody else would.

8:45Just to home in on the SSSI and where the net gets thrown, You said earlier, it struck me as interesting, the idea that the spiders hadn't actually been seen around the railway station, but they were several miles away. And therefore, how does Natural England decide where is the habitat? Well, I think the short answer is because somebody in Natural England wants to draw a red line on a map in that particular space. And there isn't a very clear sense in which each square inch of that land has to be justified. In this case, the land outside the station falls into a classification for the nerds keeping up at home is F111.

9:20The same classification applies to where the spiders are and because of how the algorithms around this work the spiders are assumed to be in all of the comparable land. So although it's two kilometres away they functionally teleport to the station and are protected as if they have.

9:36Neil Collins: The spiders can't teleport can they? No they have to go quite a long way if they're not going to teleport. They have to cross about 80 metres of an industrial park which is quite a busy place and not particularly conducive to nature and then Then they have to scale a 30-foot wall, and then they have to go down a 30-foot wall on the other side. And then they have to survive whatever they're going to try and eat them along the way. You might argue it's quite hard for them to do this, but Natural England's assumption is they will go to this area and we will have more distinguished jumping spiders, which will be nice.

10:00I suppose there's one other thing we need to think about to do with Natural England. Well, two things, really. One is, are there any trade-offs in terms of... So a distinguished jumping spider is found crossing the road in Ebsleet, the red line is drawn and nothing can happen. But if there's a large number of distinguished jumping spiders in other places, even though they're on the protected list, or indeed more distinguished jumping spiders might be found, is there any point at which they might say, actually, as long as this area is OK, we're not going to go to the wall, as it were, for a single distinguished jumping spider inevitably?

10:35Or do they say, actually, one jumping spider must be protected, come what may? Well, this is what the government's trying to change at the moment with the planning bill. So where we start right now, no, there's no trade-offs between sites at all. That's not allowed. And this is what happened with the HS2 bat tunnel, where we had a substantial increase in the population that we knew about of Bechstein's bats, but naturally it was very clear, we're going to keep protecting them exactly as if it was before we got all this new information. Just to fill in for the listeners who haven't followed the exciting story of the bat tunnel, this was HS2, the high-speed link, was obliged to spend£100 million designing a shelter for bats who would otherwise be disturbed when fast trains went past.

11:12Neil Collins: Actually, I think it is to keep them out of the line of the railway. OK, and it was that or essentially stop the railway line wherever those bats were hanging out. Yes, Natural England had to sign off the plans and they would not sign off a plan that didn't go and make sure they had done the absolute maximum to mitigate any impact on the community of bats. And presumably Natural England pointing out that they're obliged to do all this. However silly it may sound to the rest of us, They have no choice. They have to do it. It may be true, though, that they are charged with legal responsibilities, which mean they have to do them.

11:46That's certainly what they say, yes. The way in which the law works does seem to match that. What I would say is that when Natural England was set up, the Act in Question discussions in Parliament were very clear that this was going to be a principle of sustainable development. So that balance you were mentioning a moment ago, that has changed. And now the line Natural England takes, which they say is firmly based in case law, is that they don't have a choice and they can't do that balance and they are not permitted to do that balancing. OK. Natural England have struck and drawn their lines. Does that mean it's curtains for Ebsfleet?

12:17All the money that's been spent on the land is valueless and nothing will be built? Well, some things will get built. There is some housing that has gone in since this happened. There are parts of the wider Ebsfleet area which are still open for development. So Ebsfleet Central, as it was, became Ebsfleet East, which covers off the land that wasn't covered by the SSSI and that's going to have something on it by way of a centre. We'll have a lovely view of the sewage works when it's done. But what you won't have is the middle of the town. So at Feet Central is toast. Unless someone can find a very, very, very good way of convincing the Secretary of State for Housing and local government to overrule the environmental designation, which might, in this case, possibly be justified.

12:55I don't want to go and play Angela Rainer's hand for her. That station, that glass box that's sort of nestling in the undisturbed countryside, as it were, or undisturbed landfill, if you'd rather, that is going to remain unsurrounded by development.

13:05Neil Collins: But if our wonderful Prime Minister drew this to our attention in March, we're now in August. Has anything actually happened? That's still within the cloistered space of the Planning and Infrastructure Bill, which does have a way out of this possibly. What it's going to do is create a mechanism for essentially offsetting environmental damages from one site and going to another. OK, let's just fill in the gap here. The government has announced and published a bill to amend quite a lot of planning and infrastructure development rules. Yes, and the most contentious part of this is something called an environmental improvement delivery plan.

13:44Neil Collins: So it usually means the opposite to that expression, I would guess. Well, it means that what you can do is you can essentially pay to offset environmental impacts on another suitable site. And what that means is that in theory you could create a way of justifying developing in an area where you weren't going to see unacceptable levels of damage and pay to have it improved somewhere else. So that might create a practical mechanism for saying, well, this is obviously a very good development site. Let's go and put some houses here and fix a problem somewhere else. So in this case, if they said, yes, it's fine, you can develop this, they're going to have to create some equivalent somewhere else of broken down machinery, broken concrete, wasteland, former sewage works.

14:28Something like that, yes. There are some sites up and down the estuary that show just what you can turn into an environmental site. So there's a place called Canvey Wick where they were going to build an oil refinery and then stopped because of the oil crisis. And they completely totally levelled it. that destroyed everything of any nature on there. And nature just swarmed back into the ruins so that it's now one of the most biodiverse sites in the entirety of the Thames estuary. So who knows what the future might be able to hold for some kind of compensating site. But let's take a step back again.

14:53We've had a lot of stuff like this in the past few years of people getting very frustrated about how difficult it is to plan and build anything. I mean, in terms of this story and similar ones, And what's the impact on developers, in your view, in terms of how they go about trying to build new towns, for example, even on railway land, brownfield sites and so forth? It's amazing, I think, the impact this has on developers. I was struck, as I was going through all the records on this, most of the biodiversity surveys that we have on this come off of a development called London Resort, which is going to be on the northern half.

15:33Resort? London Resort. It's going to be a theme park on this. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. This is the Disney theme park. Yes. It's arrival to Disneyland for the Tempest Street. It was going to be amazing. And it was going to be built on the northern part of what's now the site of special scientific interest. They had to pay for multiple levels of surveying, which basically showed up all the species that meant they couldn't build anything there after they'd bought the land. And there's no compensation for them on this. Foolish of them, wasn't it? That's certainly what the environmental chargers would say, and they might have a point in terms of how the law works through here.

15:59As you buy the land, you then have to survey it, and if anyone surveys it and finds protected species, you lose the ability to build on the land. It's basically like a game of Russian roulette for developers where you've got to buy your own gun.

16:12Neil Collins: Presumably if you started doing your own surveys before you bought the land, somebody else would say, well, you're trespassing, you have no right to be here. Yes, that's true. And also you'd be effectively increasing the price you pay for the land. You're buying this risk in the land. I'm presuming the vendor has no desire in conducting surveys of Bechstein bats or distinguished jumping spiders in case their land value drops to nothing. Quite, yes. It's quite a good first in terms of the incentives. If you did the survey yourself beforehand, you might ensure that the distinguished jumping spiders jumped into something which destroyed them.

16:47Yes, if you did that, you would be in a lot of trouble. But I think all the incentives that currently operate, it is probably encouraging people to do that and then try and get away with it, which is what nobody really wants here. That is a bit of a worry for me, joking aside. We do seem to build a system where everyone's incentivised to get rid of the nature before anyone checks, which we should probably think through. Yes, I think that's a good point. But Neil's got contempt for many species but particularly small furry ones with eight legs, I think.

17:15Neil Collins: Well, yes, there's plenty of them, I'm sure, once you start looking. And if you start looking too carefully, you'll probably find something that hasn't been found anywhere before since there are so many species and that really does put the kibosh on things. Don't look is the moral of the story. You won't get planned information if you don't look. So they've got you coming on that one. Before we part company with the distinguished jumping spiders, can I just tell you my own experience of running into a distinguished jumping spider, which was not in the Swanscombe Peninsula, but north of the Thames, near the kind of oil depots of Dagenham.

17:48I was cycling along, stopped to lean over a concrete wall to look at the Thames, but sort of swishing past. And there was this little spider kind of on the wall. and the person I was with, who basically knows a lot about nature, said, goodness, you don't see many of those. It was indeed a distinguished jumping spider. Well, they then jumped off and we didn't see it anymore. So they're all over the place.

18:09Neil Collins: I think genuinely the EBS Fleet Development Corporation would probably like to have a chat about that. I would strongly advise you not to do that if you have any interest in where you were sitting. Well, actually, it depends. So under the new system that the government's putting together, actually, what you could in theory do is you could try and create a protected site for them at the old oil depot up in Dagenham. full of oil. Then yes, you would be able to say in the way the new system operates, okay, yes, there is going to be a risk posed to spiders in and around Ebsfleet Station, but we'll create a second habitat around here.

18:38And given that, as I say, probably the nearest spider to Ebsfleet Station is about two kilometers away in practice, for the distinguished jumping spiders, that would actually be a net win for the environment in quite a serious way, and would potentially overcome this. I mean, there are other species involved, it's not just the spiders, I should be really clear about that. There are a number of different invertebrates, there are some birds as well there are some plant types that are in the area around the station but it is the distinguished jumping spider that is the only one that has this high level of protection amongst the invertebrates so if you were able to go and demonstrate you were going to be making life better for them that's actually what the government wants to try and do we should move on finally to government obviously the backdrop to this story is an attempt to build more homes this is an illustration of a government development corporation embarking on spending 35 million on land which is now worth considerably less so a lot of public money has been lost the objective of building all these homes is at best you know it's uncertain whether they will be able to do what they want and presumably all the developers who've been involved in the builders are kind of grinding their teeth about the fact that there's this project which seemed to be going to go ahead is now up in the air given all of that if we want to do this is there an obvious solution there Our prime minister talks about curses these arachnids and basically says we'll stop it.

19:56But are there kind of ways he can do that? How should we change this system to make it work more effectively and at least give ourselves a better shot of building some of these homes people want to build? So I think the key challenge that we face at the moment is that the system for environmental protection kind of has primacy. And whereas I think in a democratic society, you'd naturally expect it to be a trade off. To my mind, the thing that's really obviously missing from this story is that when Natural England wanted to protect the site, there should have been a conversation between themselves and the housing ministry about, well, where does this balance overall?

20:28How do you weigh up a community of 15 ,000 homes against some sites that need some environmental protection? Because they're in the same building. DEFRA and MHCOG literally are in the same building. They need to go up and down a corridor. They can wave to one another.

20:41Neil Collins: Oh, I don't suppose they do, though. Not after this, they probably don't, no. So I think the first thing for me is that there should be someone in the middle of this representing the public, democratic society, who are able to take a balanced view on it all and strike the correct trade-off between the two. But also, I think you can do a lot by recognising the idea that you can make the environment better away from the site where you're building. There are some places that are really good to build. Having a high-speed rail station to the heart of London with an 18-minute train journey, those are scarce sites.

21:08They're probably scarcer than most of the species that we're looking to protect here in terms of the country.

21:12Neil Collins: Just the one. Indeed. What you could say is there's a site, I feel, half a mile away. It's a great place for sorting this out. Let's sort it out there and let's go and free up this land for doing something else for public benefit. That feels like that should be a very easy trade to make, but the system currently is designed to really very consciously rule that out. I think if you fix that, you'll make the system work better for nature and better for people. And is there anything in the government's great big bill which would achieve that? Or is that something which remains tantalisingly out of reach?

21:42So that's what these EDIPs are here to do. This what? Environmental Development Improvement Plan, I think. Silly me, yes. That's the mechanism through which you could achieve this. What I will say is the really controversial bit of the bill. It's the one that a lot of nature charities are concerned about the impact of because they see this as being a charter for developers to go out and cause environmental damage without having the same level of oversight they've currently got on them. I think that's a bit of a problem, the fact that there's such an animus against compromise here. The system could stay in a world where it's very heavily tilted towards protecting nature until it breaks, and then when it breaks, what you will have to take its place will not be good for nature.

22:18I don't imagine that a reformed government in the future will be particularly fussed about the fate of this distinguished jumping spider. What you have right now is a chance to get a compromise, and the government's compromise is proving quite controversial, and there's some questions about whether amendments proposed in the Lords are going to undermine that element and kind of make it fairly ineffective or whether it's going to go and stay the course. We don't know how that's going to turn out. So it really is up for grabs when Parliament comes back.

22:42Neil Collins: There'll probably be another government department set up to adjudicate between the two of them. So a possible improvement at hand but not really yet certain. But how do we end up in the situation in the first place, do you think? Because, I mean, it seems fairly obvious that you would as a government say let's always bear in mind that there are trade-offs and let's try and keep them intact. But why then have we got in a situation where we haven't built very much for yonks and now people are looking at it and saying we seem to have armed environmental bodies with huge vetoes which they can impose?

23:19This is an extremely good question. I think if you've got my take on it, it's that there was a reliance on autopilot. There are many, many, many complex problems in the world and frankly, people don't want to spend a lot of time thinking about any one of them. They like to build systems which will deal with the problem them in a way that feels right and then walk away and deal with something else. Environmental protection really does go and fit into that category. Most people don't want to think about how you're going to protect invertebrate species, but they know they want to have something done.

23:44And you can set a couple of very high level principles. You don't want to go and see endangered species put at risk. You want to see nature put first in these situations. You want damage to be mitigated where it happens and to be minimised wherever you can. Those are all very easy principles to follow. But put them together and tell a human to go and operationalise this and you suddenly end up in a world where you've taken out the heart of a town for a spider a mile and a half away, which I don't think is what any human would have naturally gone towards. So it's how that system of laws and processes and algorithms and everything else manifests in the real world that I think is probably the heart of what's driving this right now.

24:18I have a simpler answer. I blame John Prescott. There we are.

24:26Neil Collins: that was a long time in finance with jonathan ford and neil collins production and editing by nick hilton if you enjoyed the show please rate and review it on your podcast app as that will help new listeners find us