Promises to mitigate environmental damage caused by Cardiff train station plan ‘worthless’ say critics

Martin Shipton

Campaigners who oppose the construction of a business park and mainline railway station on a site of special scientific interest (SSSI) say promises to mitigate the environmental damage that would be caused are worthless.

Businessman Nigel Roberts’ plan involves building an intercity station at a public cost of up to £200m called Cardiff Parkway to the east of the city adjacent to a proposed family-owned business district called Hendre Lakes. He claims that up to 6,000 jobs could be created in due course.

But critics say the city does not require the new office space envisaged in the plans and that a smaller train station just for local trains should be built nearer to housing.

Permission

A decision is expected soon on whether planning permission for the project should be granted.

Planning policy has recently changed in Wales in a way that makes it far harder to justify building on SSSIs. The new rule states that such developments should only be permitted in “wholly exceptional circumstances”.

The developers have offered to mitigate the damage to the SSSI but the campaign group Save the Gwent Levels says attempts to mitigate the damage to another SSSI at Llanwern, near Newport, were a disaster.

Mike Webb of Friends of the Gwent Levels said that despite promises made by the developer, “The Monitoring Reports and consultee responses have identified failures to meet the stated objectives of ecological work and ecological management undertaken on the site sufficient to trigger contingency measures and revisions to various ecological works that have been undertaken, or should have been undertaken at this stage of the development.

“No details of that contingency have been submitted to or agreed by [Newport] council and the condition is breached and cannot be further discharged.”

Obligation

Catherine Linstrum, also of Friends of the Gwent Levels, said: “There is an obligation now for developers to achieve ‘biodiversity benefit,’ which means that a site needs to be improved overall in terms of biodiversity. [but] in many ways, the means of assessing whether planning conditions have been effective, ie. whether the mitigation has worked, isn’t really fit for purpose.

“Meanwhile, there are two other problems with the system as it stands. Firstly, developers aren’t required to provide empirical evidence to back up their assertions that a mitigation measure will work. The blind continue to lead the blind. Secondly, the system for monitoring developments post construction isn’t fit for purpose.

“It falls upon the local authority to monitor developments and, of course, they simply don’t have the resources to do this. Even when – as is the case with Llanwern – they recognise that the developer has failed to meet the objectives laid out in the planning conditions, there is no comeback on the developer. The development isn’t ever going to be taken down. So once the damage is done, there’s nothing that can be done to undo the damage. The developer has no incentive to put things right.

“This is even more of a problem given that large-scale solar developments will change hands very quickly post-construction. This has happened with Llanwern. The original developer has long since disappeared over the horizon, so chasing them up on their promises is really hard.

“In the case of the Gwent Levels SSSIs, we’re talking about a fragile and complex ecosystem, almost unique in Wales. There have been no other solar farms in Wales built on this kind of habitat. So all the assurances from developers that the mitigation will work are based entirely on desk studies at best, and optimistic (or opportunistic) speculation at worst.

“Despite the fact that Natural Resources Wales [the regulator] are supposed to be ‘evidence-based’, they don’t demand that developers provide empirical evidence from real-life situations when proposing mitigation. NRW rely on their own teams of over-worked ecologists who, when challenged, don’t seem able to come up with examples of where mitigation has worked.

“However, we do have some evidence from the Llanwern solar farm. The inspector said in her report that she was ‘confident’ that the development would deliver benefits for biodiversity. This clearly hasn’t happened. NRW and Newport council have (finally) acknowledged that the developer has not only failed to improve the site but has made it worse.

“The common cranes have gone. Lapwing numbers are down. Bat numbers are down. Shrill carder bee numbers are down (shrill carder bees are a notified feature of the SSSI and therefore should have the highest level of protection).

“The cranes are mentioned in the first monitoring reports but are then quietly dropped. They literally show up as n/a [not applicable] on the 2023 monitoring report and there’s just one line to say that no crane were recorded there. This despite the fact that the first pair in South Wales for 400 years had bred on that site pre-construction.”