Wildflowers © Gillian Day
Planning
Built development is one of the most significant pressures facing wildlife in Hertfordshire and Middlesex.
These pages will help you understand how the Trust gets involved in planning, and how you can help.
The Trust gets involved in the planning process to secure opportunities for habitat creation and restoration and to prevent harm to biodiversity. We engage with planning at all levels: strategic, local and neighbourhood plans, and on planning applications. We are neither pro- nor anti-development and assess the potential impact of development purely on biodiversity issues. We don’t comment on Green Belt or landscape issues, for example, as these lie outside our charitable remit and expertise. We provide information based on available evidence, sound science and without bias.
There are a huge number of planning applications each year in Hertfordshire and Middlesex, so we have to prioritise cases where potential biodiversity gains or losses are the greatest. We have casework criteria to help us do this, so we engage with all:
- Strategic plans
- Minerals plans
- Local plans and associated documents (eg biodiversity Supplementary Planning Documents)
- Planning applications where there is likely to be significant harm to protected sites (statutory and Local Wildlife Sites) or significant opportunity for habitat creation or restoration, such as:
- Environmental Impact Assessment development
- Housing >1,000 dwellings
- Business use >10,000 sq m
- Minerals
- Golf course
- Solar or wind farm
- Nationally Significant Infrastructure Projects
- Planning applications where there is likely to be an impact on a HMWT reserve
You can help by alerting us to relevant plans and applications. Contact us by emailing planning@hmwt.org. Please give us a site address and planning application reference number where relevant. We will review any planning application on request, but will use the above criteria to decide whether to respond or just provide advice. Read on for more details on how you can play a part in saving wildlife through planning.
