Causing us a problem in East Kent.
All the councils in the Stour Valley catchment area seem to have been caught out by NE’s change to the acceptable levels of phosphates (generally from farm fertilizers) & nitrates (from sewage) in the watercourse and are scrambling to come up with a policy to address the issue.
The current plan seems to be for the council to convert some of their land to wetlands and then create some sort of offset credit system, but until they do, everybody’s applications are on hold, unless you can show ‘nitrate neutrality’. Of course, a system to purchase offsite credits also raises the questions of how much they will cost, how many will be available and how they will be allocated, and I fear that the self-builder will end up at the bottom of the pecking order.
At the moment it seems the only way to achieve consent is to incorporate a wetlands area, which needs to be at least 2 hectares in size to be effective (so not much help for most sites) or to take agricultural land out of production in order to offset the nitrates of your development (hence larger developers buying up & ‘closing down’ arable farmland). The council also tell us that on-site treatment plants don’t help as the outflow always eventually reaches the water course.
The nett result for me is that the outline application for 4 x self-build plots that I submitted in March last year remains on hold, with no resolution in sight. What I also can’t work out is how I can be expected to produce nitrate calculations on an outline application where no house plans are specified, and why they can’t provide outline consent with the nitrate issue left as a reserved matter, based on the final design of the houses.
And, of course, no one is addressing the elephant in the room which is the Southern Water Authority preferring to pay £90m fines for polluting the rivers rather than spend money upgrading their sewage treatment plants!
If anyone has any suggestions on how to best deal with this problem, I‘d be glad to hear your ideas.