England Has 85% Of World's Chalk Streams; These Vanishingly Rare Habitats Now At Risk From Labor Development Bill
Walk along the gin-clear River Itchen in Hampshire and you might see otters, salmon, kingfishers and clouds of mayflies, all supported by the unique ecosystem of the chalk stream. The UK has no tropical rainforests or tigers; its wildlife is arguably more modest in appearance. But its chalk streams are some of the rarest habitats in the world – there are only 200, and England boasts 85% of them. If you look properly, they are as biodiverse and beautiful as any rainforest.
Despite the rarity and importance of these very pure rivers, which are full of minerals from the chalk aquifer, they have no specific legal protections. Environmentalists fear the Labour party’s planning bill will use the country’s departure from the EU to make it legal for developers to destroy them, as long as they offset the damage by paying into a fund to create nature somewhere else.
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Chalk streams currently have some protections under the EU-derived habitats directive, which safeguards some of the rare creatures the streams support. But Labour’s new planning and infrastructure bill overrides these protections, allowing developers to pay into a nature restoration fund instead of avoiding destruction and pollution in building. While this tradeoff will be beneficial in some cases, nature campaigners argue that you cannot offset damage done to a rare habitat as irreplaceable as a chalk stream. Tann said: “I think the levy is almost designed to create a replacement or an alternative habitat somewhere else for the thing that you’re impacting. That isn’t going to work in a chalk stream context. You can’t just create a new one somewhere else.”
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The Wildlife Trusts have supported an amendment to the planning bill, tabled by the Labour MP Chris Hinchliff, that would enshrine protections for chalk streams as irreplaceable habitats. Planners would have to ensure they were not harming the rare habitats with abstraction, pollution or runoff when designing their developments. Tann said: “We would like to see chalk streams properly classified as an irreplaceable habitat and have proper protection within planning. We’re not anti-development. We never have been, but it’s about the right development in the right place, and there has to come a point where there’s just too much surrounding these precious sites.” But Starmer has described people such as Tann and De Retuerto as “blockers” because of their nature campaigning. The government has also described nature protections as “red tape” that needs to be cut.
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https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/may/02/irreplaceable-habitat-planning-bill-raises-fears-for-englands-chalk-streams