River Pollution and Nutrient Neutrality with Paul Hadaway

Interview Transcript

Rob Smith: This is Talk on the Wild Side. 

I'm Rob Smith, and this is the all natural podcast created to bring you the full glorious sound, taste, and texture of the British countryside without artificial flavours, colourings, or preservatives.

In this episode, water, water everywhere.  I've been to Northwood Hill on the Hoo Peninsula, where the mix of farmed, grazing land, and freshwater marsh is successfully creating perfect habitats for lapwing and red shank.

Alan Johnson: I say, I think this is a connoisseur's landscape. Yes, it's flat, but it's very mysterious. It can feel-you can't quite tell where it ends until an enormous ship goes through and it's really baffling when that happens.

Rob Smith: And a bit of politics, we get into some hot water with the Ding-Dong battle in the House of Lords over nutrient neutrality and how unrestrained housebuilding could spell disaster for our most fragile river systems.

Paul Hadaway: We've got old Victorian sewage works and infrastructure trying to deal with 21st century housing numbers, and it doesn't work.

Rob Smith: Kent Wildlife Trust, Paul Hadaway also reacts to the recent publication of the alarming State of nature report, which warns one in six of British species are threatened with extinction. But on a more positive note, we also visit the Fungus Festival at Emmett's Garden celebrating all things mycological.

Rob Smith: They really excitingly pop out of the ground like a little circle, and then they get bigger and bigger and bigger and expand into this lovely disc where you can see all their gills and they're just perfection

Rob Smith: Yes, from the shaggy ink cap to the fly agaric we're going to have some 'fun-guys'. Let's start with the political stuff.

The other day, I had a great conversation with Paul Hadaway, who's Director of Conservation and Engagement at Kent Wildlife Trust. We met up at Ham Fen, which is that remarkable spot where the trust released beavers into the world in England for the first time in 400 years, a couple of decades ago. It was a really relevant place for our chat, focusing on two main topics, the State of Nature Report, which, to quote the official blurb, provides the most comprehensive overview ever of species trends across the UK. And it doesn't make for pretty reading. Since 1970, UK species have declined by about 19% on average, and nearly one in six species are threatened with extinction.

We also delved into the recent government bust up over nutrient neutrality with an amendment to the levelling up and regeneration bill being blocked in the House of Lords. It's all over the fact that the government says 100,000 homes are being blocked from being built by defective EU laws. Conservation groups said that scrapping the nutrient neutrality rules would in fact be disastrous for our already stressed rivers.

Now, you might think this is all a bit technical, complicated, dull even. Well, it's not.

Unfortunately, Paul Hadaway is great at unpacking it all and explaining everything in comprehensible English, so it is worth sticking with. I started by asking him to explain why Ham Fen is so important.

Paul Hadaway: A real jewel in the crown for us as Kent Wildlife Trust, but also for this part of East Kent, restored from almost secondary woodland and dried out to fenland to this incredibly vibrant, rich, habitat you see behind, fundamentally done by beavers.

Rob Smith: Yeah, because beavers are the poster kids, aren't they, of what's gone on here? But there's a whole bunch of other stuff that has happened as a result of the beavers actually doing their thing for the last what, 20 years?

Paul Hadaway: Twenty years. So, beavers have been here 20 years. They are an ecosystem engineer. And people want to understand what that means, they don't have to look around us. We've got trees here that were sucking the water out of the peat on this site that are now dying because the site is rewetting, but also because the beavers are engineering that area. New channels created four dams on this bit of the north stream, which from a water quality perspective, is doing incredible work to filter out pollutants, filter out algae. So, all of that diversity, that vibrancy that's then given us-we've got water all on this site returning in large numbers. It's a county important site for turtle doves. We have cuckoo breeding here. We have hobby here. We've just had a stork fly over.

Rob Smith: I know, that was amazing. I've never seen a stork in the UK before.

Paul Hadaway: That’s pretty incredible. So, we've got heron regularly visiting this site during the summer. So, it is an incredibly important site, and it fits within this complex of wetland sites that sit in and around the Stour.

Rob Smith: Okay, let's talk about the Stour. There's two big things I want to have a chat with you about. One is the State of Nature report that's just come out, and the other is nutrient neutrality. So, let's dig into nutrient neutrality first, because I think as a term, it's just confusing for people who don't know what it means, because nutrients are a good thing, aren't they? We like nutrients and yet there's a massive issue for our rivers because there's just too much of the wrong stuff getting into the river.

Paul Hadaway: So, under the old water framework directive, which was the European frameworks, the directive that governed water quality, we were required to try and improve the condition of all our water courses. And when you looked across the UK, most of our water courses at that point were failing or recovering condition.

We had very few that are in good condition, and that included the Stour.

And this is a historic problem of agricultural runoff of nitrates, nutrients, coupled with the boom we've seen in housing development in East Kent and in a few other places nationally, which has seen a massive increase in phosphates. We've got old Victorian sewage works and infrastructure trying to deal with 21st century housing numbers, and it doesn't work. So, nutrient neutrality was a scheme brought together by DEFRA to try and tackle that issue. So, effectively, there is a moratorium on development in Canterbury and Ashford until those nutrient issues are dealt with, primarily phosphate, but also nitrate as well.

Rob Smith: Right, okay, so I just want to clarify that. So nitrates is primarily an agricultural problem?

Paul Hadaway: Yeah.

Rob Smith: …and phosphate is primarily a sewage problem?

Paul Hadaway: Exactly. It's exactly that. And this is what makes it such a challenge to deal with. So, the impact of collectively of that phosphate and nitrate coming from that new development has seen a massive impact on the Stodmarsh National Nature Reserve. And that is what has driven this this Nutrient Neutrality scheme. So, if you go to Stodmarsh, and many people watching this will know the site very well. This time of year, throughout the summer, you are seeing massive blankets of algae across those lakes caused by these nutrient levels. And you're getting fish kill and you're getting a reduction in other biodiversity

There's also an additional element to this, which around public health and around people using the river, swimming, canoeing, all those different things, which has to be accounted for as well. The solution is, as I say, initially a moratorium on development until those developers can show that they've got schemes in place that are reducing and bringing out or taking out the system out of phosphate that potentially would add in through the development occurring.

There is a complicated calculator that allows you to do those calculations.

All that effectively means is it needs to be investment in the end of pipe solution, so those Victorian sewage outlets and water treatment works that need upgrading.

There is an opportunity to build constructive wetlands within developments, which actually clean water through natural processes, through reed beds and other solutions before they go into the river. And we feel there is a requirement really to start looking at some arable reversion, some land reversion to natural grazing marsh, rewetted areas on the edges of the stour to help particularly with the nitrate issue, but also to help long term with locking up some of that.

Rob Smith: Okay, so there are natural solutions to actually sorting all these problems out, and they are already being put into place. You look around here and you can actually see it, can't you? But recently, the government looked to effectively knock that nutrient neutrality agreement out the window with the levelling up and regeneration bill, which would have meant that local authorities couldn't stop any developer from developing where they wanted to. There was a big fuss around that. Explain why if that had actually gone through-it got knocked out in the House of Lords. If that had gone through, what would that have meant?

Paul Hadaway: Yeah, so effectively, that would have removed that requirement to deal with those issues. So, we would have seen increasing levels of phosphate and nitrate going into the Stour system. And so that damage that we're attempting to undo at Stodmarsh and throughout the system would have just been exacerbated, and we would have seen greater fish kill, great loss biodiversity. I think that the two things to say on nutrient neutrality are, as we've just said, it's quite a complex scheme, probably more complex than it needed to be. And there are perhaps simpler ways of doing that, and potentially there is a greater role for the nature-based solutions within that. Politically, you've got to look at it that government making that announcement, it was absolutely shouted down in the Lords, quite rightly.

It may still go back to the commons, we don't know, so it's not an end to that. And it probably arguably is partly a response to the fact that the conservative party have lost a lot of local councils in the last three or four months. So, this is partly a play, I think, back to try and look at that. And it's a return to that horrible anti-growth coalition stuff that we were hearing last autumn, which really did no one any good and was called out for what it was.

Rob Smith: Okay, so what do you say to a developer who says, look, there's a requirement for building to go on in East Kent. We know that there's not enough houses to house the population. Massive pressure. We want to build 2,000 houses here and you guys are stopping us. So, what do you say to them?

Paul Hadaway: It's interesting because that's not the conversation we're having. The conversation is actually the other way in many ways. It's developers working with us. And I think this, again, is where what the government is doing at the moment is so damaging, because they're not taking account of the fact that on nutrient neutrality and on biodiversity net gain, the other mandated scheme that developers have to account for where they have to do proper mitigation for the impacts of their developments. These approaches have been co-designed and co-developed in Kent between planners, planning officers, local authorities, developers, and environmentally NGOs, government agencies.

We've been working together for years to make these work. So, actually, for them, it's a business-as-usual approach. It's like what is the amount of money I need to set aside, what are the sites I can do this on? What are the approaches I need to take? That's what they want to know to give themselves business certainty. And so, you know the irony is that while there is an attempt to suggest that it's environmentalists versus developers, which in the wrong place with the wrong development, absolutely, we'll object. And we'll object right the way through the planning system. Swanscombe Peninsula being an absolute classic example of that.

But on the flip side of that, you've got to at some point get the best you can out of what is going to be coming down the line and what is actually granted permission. And so, it's in all our interest to work together to do that. And that's where I find the government stuff so, so damaging and disingenuous and just wrong-headed.

Rob Smith: I'm going to come on to the State of Nature report in just a moment. But as we look over our shoulder here, we've got a little footbridge next to us. And on one side, we've got beautiful clear water, and on the other side is all pond weed and blunched up. Is this what we're talking about here?

Paul Hadaway: It is. It is. So, this is the North Stream.

Rob Smith: I thought we’re being attacked by a rush there.

Paul Hadaway: This is the North Stream. It's spring fed from a couple of miles upstream, and there is a water treatment works. This is in failing condition. And you can see this is primarily nitrate driven, but you can see the algal blooms that are growing on this side. What is interesting is you say the foot bridge here acts almost like a natural dam. You can see the vegetation dropping off it. As we go further down and we pass the three beaver dams that are below us downstream, that water becomes clearer and clearer and clearer. So that again, that role of beavers and natural processes and actually filtering the water through. I won't quite say you can drink it at the other end, but it's certainly a lot more attractive looking than this is. And it's certainly-

Rob Smith: And in terms of what that means for the wildlife and the plant life that's in the watercourse, what does that all mean?

Paul Hadaway: So again, it's reducing this blanketing of algae is actually what is then causing fish kill, causing invertible death, causing all those things. It's just sucking the oxygen and the life out of the river.

You go further down, as I said earlier, we've got water vole, kingfisher, all sorts of things back on this site that have returned as the beavers have done their work. And so, it's just a water quality thing. It's much better for biodiversity because there is that reduced algal level, reduced nutrient level.

Rob Smith: Okay, so the state of nature, the report's been released yesterday. It makes a pretty grim reading, doesn't it?

Paul Hadaway: Yeah, grim and unsurprising, I'm afraid. So, when you look down just the headline statistics, 20% decline in species since the 1970s, and we can talk about creeping baseline syndrome and the fact that that means that my reference point as a child growing up in the 70s and 80s is very different to that of my children. The impact that that has in our psyche is huge.

One in six of our species facing extinction, 30% of the population not having access to natural green spaces, which does come back to that developer question again. And only 11% of our land actually properly protected for wildlife. And that includes those designated sites that arguably are actually not that good for wildlife either. So, in terms of, again, of a government aspiration for 30% of land being in good environmental condition, good condition for nature by 2030, it's clearly not going to happen. And it's really-

Rob Smith: Well, you've dedicated your life to doing this. I mean, how does it make you feel when you see these figures written down in such a stark format?

Paul Hadaway: Yes. I won't say it's depressing, it's challenging. I think if you reflect on has conservation in the last 20, 30, 40 years has been a success in the UK, the evidence says no. And I think you have to look at that. And you then transpose that over what we're talking about through our Wilder Kent 2030 Strategy, through some of the things we're trying in Kent, through ecosystem engineer species, through the Bison project, through this application nature-based solutions and the understanding that we need to be looking at things at scale and changing how we do things.

So, move away from protection of small areas to restoration at scale and think about how you do that. That's a challenge on us as much as it is on anyone else to make that happen. So, I think you're seeing a change in the mindset within conservation that's taken a long time to come through. And we don't like to admit that perhaps things haven't worked the way they should. But the evidence tells us that and we're evidence-led people. So, we've got to follow that. We've got to follow the science. We've got to think about new ways of doing things.

Rob Smith: I mean they do say the darkest hour comes before dawn, don't they?

Paul Hadaway: Hmm mm.

Rob Smith: Does this potentially mark an inflexion point then? That enough people are going to get it for the senior levels in big organisations, in government to actually go, do you know what?  We have genuinely got to change the way that we do things. Because you look around here and you can see that successes do happen.

That when you let nature do its thing in a space like Ham Fen, you do get a remarkable quantity of species just magically reappear again. So, nature can heal itself, but you have to give it the space to do that. So, do you think that we're going to reach that point? Is this that point?

Paul Hadaway: I think we will reach that point. Whether this is it, I think we've got, without getting too political, another year of this government to continue to do whatever madness it is that they're attempting to do before we can have a really cogent conversation about policy. What I find really interesting, we have a lot of conversations with private businesses, quite big businesses, with developers, with landowners and others. They recognise both the need to do something around biodiversity crisis, but also the fact that it’s linked to the climate crisis. You know, we're here in Kent. We are going to get hit the hardest, the quickest, and we already are by climate change and by everything that brings.

It's an additional level of land management challenge. Whether you're a farmer, a viticulturalist, or conservationist, you've got to look at how you do business as usual. And I think it's really telling that in the kind of world of big business, the protection of supply chains, the insurance industry, are the ones who are driving this change behind the scenes. They're the ones putting large amounts of money into protecting the Amazon basin. And are beginning to realise action needs to be done more at home. There is a company not a million miles from here who's investing in this site because they recognise the importance of offsetting their carbon footprint by investing in a site which locks up lots of carbon. So, it's happening. And I think as ever with these things, they'll reach a critical tipping point where government will have to catch up.

I think you just need that firm policy basis from which to work. And the fact that people have to understand there's going to be some really tough choices and there's going to be some tough lifestyle changes that have to happen. And to be the bearer of that news is not always easy, and people don't like it. But I think you are seeing that change. So, the more examples we can point to, the more that we can demonstrate through doing, the more that we can actually create these slightly different innovative partnerships and be able to come together and work together to make these changes happen, goes back again to talking to developers and others. The bigger the impact we're going to have. And that's where we are. So, it's an exciting space. I mean, it's the most terrifying space at the moment that I can remember professionally, but it's also conversely, the most exciting.

Rob Smith: So as a final thought then, what do you want people to do? People are watching and listening to this. What do you want them to actively do?

Paul Hadaway: Clearly want people to support organisations like the Trust. Of course, we do. And we want people to just be aware that there has to be a political pressure born here. It's a really challenging time. We understand that people are facing all sorts of problems across the board in terms of just living a day-to-day life.

There has to at some point, be a movement from this stage we're at of climate denial and climate anger to climate action and climate acceptance. And the sooner that we can move people on that journey, people can come with us and understand that the better. So, we need people to support what we're doing to have that voice politically, locally and nationally. Think about voting around green policies, because actually, the idea that green growth and sustainability are somehow odds with your standard of living are absolutely false. And there is a massive weight of evidence internationally that shows that in other countries. We've just come back from the Netherlands, where they do this really, really well. So actually, there are different ways of thinking that we need to integrate. So, people just have that awareness to educate themselves to come talk to us, join some of our walks, do all those things.

Rob Smith: Well, great, Paul. It's always great having a chat with you.

Thanks ever so much for your time today and keep going.

Rob Smith: Thank you very much.