Are new laws a threat to nature?

New legislation to tackle river pollution could bring with it a whole new set of problems

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UNLESS YOU'VE BEEN LIVING ON Mars for the past five years, you will know there is a problem with excess nutrients - well, pollution - in Britain's rivers. The vast majority of this is down to agricultural runoff of fertilisers and livestock manure (cattle slurry, for example, though chicken dung is a big issue for some rivers such as the Wye). But a small yet important contribution comes from human waste, too. Of course, that's largely down to the failure of our water companies to upgrade their infrastructure, but legislation currently going through parliament is intended to resolve the problem of what we do about new houses that create an additional burden on our creaking sewage system.

Here's the basic idea. A new home brings in more people. They create more waste that could - say, after heavy rain - end up being discharged through a combined sewage overflow into a river, rather than passing through a treatment plant as it ought to.

Proposals in the Planning and Infrastructure Bill (PIB) will require house builders in designated protected areas to pay into a kind of communal kitty called the Nature Restoration Fund. This kitty money will then be used to reduce the overall nutrient load going into the catchment by, for example, creating wetlands that act as a filter for runoff, stopping nutrients such as phosphorus and nitrates going further into the freshwater system. Wetlands are great for wildlife and store carbon, too, so this is a brilliant way to address the issue.

The government has partly been forced into taking action because this issue of human waste is stopping developers from starting work on somewhere between 100,000 and 160,000 homes - which is nearly 10 per cent of Labour's manifesto pledge of building 1.5 million houses by the end of this parliament.