The spiders that ate Ebbsfleet
8 min read
As we – once again – await the unveiling of a host of proposed new towns, Michael Dnes tells the extraordinary cautionary tale of how an industrial wasteland in Kent just 17 minutes by high-speed train from central London remains a spiders’ paradise
Ghost towns are something we associate with the Wild West, but Ebbsfleet in Kent comes close. Back in the 90s, the planners of the Channel Tunnel Rail Link had the bright idea to create a new station in the brownfield land through which they would pass. With metal sheds, disused quarries, endless pylons and a sewage works, fields do not come any browner.
On paper, the site was perfect: 17 minutes from London by high-speed train; six trains a day to Paris; hundreds of hectares that not even a Nimby could love. Thus, Ebbsfleet Garden City was born, and for 20 years struggled to crawl its way off the drawing board.
To humans, this was Northfleet Landfill; but to Sitticus distinguendus and Cerceris quinquefasciata it was Eden
It didn’t help that the land next to the station was divided between 6,000 car parking spaces and a fenced-off landfill. By 2015, only 3,000 houses were built, none of them within a half-mile walk of this superlative station. Government, increasingly exercised by the housing crisis, stepped in to sort it out. They shook up the government-run development corporation that ran the project, bringing new leaders, new governance, and a £60m war chest.
In 2019 this new leadership spent £35m of that money buying 125 hectares around the station: the place where building obviously had to begin. They were going to build, and build big! There were pictures of towers and promises of 15,000 homes. After years of being a joke amongst planners, Ebbsfleet was finally going to happen!
And then, in February 2021, the development corporation got a letter from Natural England, the body responsible for biodiversity sites. It announced plans to designate the land next to the station as a site of special scientific interest (SSSI). Which means you cannot build on it.
This may seem odd. Didn’t I say that this site was an industrial wasteland? Quarries and landfill? Polluted, scrubby and blasted? One in which, as Natural England romantically describe it, “high pH and significant concentrations of chloride, sulphate and potassium associated with [cement kiln] dust result in greatly stunted plant growth”?
Yes. And that was the point. Not all protected species are visible, and for tiny invertebrates, this scraggy biome is precisely where they thrive. What nature once provided as sand, chalk and scrub was now more easily found in post-industrial wasteland. To humans, this was Northfleet Landfill; but to Sitticus distinguendus and Cerceris quinquefasciata, it was Eden.
As a result, species such as the critically endangered distinguished jumping spider have claimed it for themselves. At the north of the site, the construction ponds for the Channel Tunnel Rail Link were themselves now host to a quarter of all the water beetle species in the UK. Pantheon, Natural England’s in-house invertebrate species modelling database, calculated the richness of the site and concluded this mosaic of habitats simply had to be protected.
So the letter came in February, and Natural England’s board met in November. They heard the objections from Ebbsfleet development corporation and all the other parties whose land would be given to nature. But Natural England, as its paperwork noted, has no choice. It is obliged to protect rare nature where it is found, without question. The designation went ahead.
Since 2021, Britain has been through four prime ministers, all of whom have promised more housebuilding. But it is hard to do so when it is impossible to build in towns because of the neighbours; impossible to build in the countryside because of the trees; and now impossible to build on stunted industrial wasteland because of the spiders.
For the development corporation, the decision meant that, of the 125 hectares purchased, only 35 could now be built on. Not the bit linking the existing housing to the train station, but the bit sandwiched between two railway lines and the aforementioned sewage works. On the planning prospectus ‘Ebbsfleet Central’ became ‘Ebbsfleet East’. What should have been tens of millions in value gained, as infrastructure went in and the site rose to its potential, was written off as a £25m loss.
As with the infamous bat tunnel that left HS2 with a £100m bill, Natural England protests that its hands are entirely tied
But a bigger question sits behind this. Many plans coincided at Ebbsfleet – the 15,000 homes, the high-speed railway stations, a new motorway junction and even a theme park aspiring to look Disneyland in the eye – and all of them were stopped dead by Natural England’s decision. The puzzle is even more stark as the land around the station was by some distance the least ecologically valuable part of the site, and the place where compromises could have been possible.
Yet Natural England’s response to all these concerns was blunt: the science showed the presence of protected species; and the entire diverse site must be protected. When challenged over jobs and housing, they replied: “The courts have been clear that Natural England cannot take account of socio-economic issues.”
This last point is particularly notable because, since 2015, all public regulators have been under a legal duty to consider the impact of their activities on growth. But Natural England is of the view that it is not a regulator, merely a body that gathers scientific evidence and designates things in line with the law. As with the infamous bat tunnel that left HS2 with a £100m bill, Natural England protests that its hands are entirely tied.
Let us take Natural England at its word, and assume for the moment that it has no discretion to do more than confirm the validity of the scientific evidence driving site designation.
If so, we have to ask: how did government lose £25m to its own processes; and how did it prohibit itself from building Ebbsfleet as originally planned? While the affected site may only account for a reported 1,300 of the 15,000 planned homes, essentially the overall plan is wrecked. Questions around how this was allowed to happen are particularly pertinent given that the two principal ministries involved – the Ministry of Housing and the Department for Environment – are even headquartered in the same building.
Few people wish to see the destruction of protected species, including those as small as the distinguished jumping spider. To achieve this, legislation sets positive requirements to protect nature. Few would object to this in principle, and many have sought to push it further.
But the practice is what concerns us. At Ebbsfleet there has been no effort to balance costs against benefits – and no effort to adapt decisions to consider the will of the government of the day. Nor does this process appear to follow the steer of Parliament: when the bill creating Natural England was in the House, the then-minister promised that “Natural England will actively seek long-term economic and social benefits and avoid unnecessary negative economic and social impacts”. The thing they now say the courts prohibit them from doing.
The government is looking to make changes: for general development, it proposes a system where, instead of mitigating every impact on a site, builders pay in to a general fund to support the growth of nature. This will greatly streamline most kinds of building. But designation – the power to ringfence certain sites for biodiversity – is unlikely to be addressed directly.
This is where central leadership is key. Left to itself, the process is like rogue AI, turning whatever comes into its purview into whatever it is programmed to create. But with a human balance at the top, it can look to deliver other goals at the same time as protecting nature. Forthcoming planning legislation is a good moment to unbind Natural England’s hands and let them consider wider factors.
Contacted for a response to this piece, Natural England supplied the following quote from Edel McGurk, its regional director for the South East: “We will continue to work with developers within Ebbsfleet Valley to explore innovative solutions to support the new development and help them comply with environmental law. We share the aim of supporting development in Ebbsfleet, while incorporating wildlife and enabling people to benefit from a nature reserve close to where they live and work.”
Can Ebbsfleet be saved? Building on an SSSI is almost impossible. But the final arbiter on all matters of planning is the Secretary of State for Housing, Angela Rayner – and if some compromise, on the less ecologically valuable parts of Ebbsfleet, could deliver one per cent of the government’s entire five-year housing target, she does have the power to say yes. Who knows what is next, in the web of intrigue?
Michael Dnes is a former Department for Transport civil servant, now head of transport policy at Stonehaven
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