Defeated by the Government. I'd like to know why. The cost is minimal £35 and the benefit to wildlife is obvious. I really don't understand. https://www.theguardian.com/environ...ks-proposal-for-swift-bricks-in-all-new-homes
I imagine this being done in decent countries like Belgium or Germany, but there's no room for whimsy in Britain anymore - ya know, the country that grew up on David Attenborough, Steve Irwin, Beatrix Potter...
I’m not saying you should agree with the reason but they did say why. They said that they didn’t think that ‘mandating the use of specific wildlife features’ is something a government should do. I guess it’s the specific bit that’s important. If you mandate this brick for birds do you need to mandate a log as a bug hotel and a pond for frogspawn etc? They’re not banning their use or campaigning against them, they just think it’s a bit nanny state to say it must be included by law in all new houses. As I say, I’m not saying you should agree, just providing you with their reasoning as you asked.
Yes your answer makes sense but we all know that builders are unlikely to do anything unless they are forced to. To be fair these bricks are not high on my priority list, solar panels aught to be mandated on all new builds and 100% grants for retrofitting on all properties.
It’s this sort of stuff that really peeves me about Labour. This is such an easy win. They’ve still not mandated good insulation and solar on new builds yet either. It amazes me we’ve rolled back some of our most important environmental protections to give builders cart Blanche to make even more profit without any remit to improve quality and bake in climate protections. The amount of scrub land being lost is shocking, that green belt could be concreted and crap houses built on it is criminal in my mind.
This is why I think @JamDrop , for example, is wrong. Not mandating it for ideological reasons would be a perfectly legitimate political choice for any number of politicians I could name. Thatcher wouldn't have wanted the state to mandate something like this, nor would any of her cabinet. Probably Blair would have been ideologically opposed to it - certainly the likes of Prescott would. Gordon Brown I'm not so sure. Probably a few of Thatcher's cabinet and a lot of early Blair politicians might have thrown tax breaks in return if they thought it was a neat idea (which I actually don't think would be the worst way of getting these things through in principal). But everybody knows that this lot don't have an ideological bone in their body. It would be such an easy win to lean into being the apolitical guys who are laid back and don't give a damn, but instead of either doing that or laying out any kind of grown up economics they've just gone and implied that swallow bricks are woke. This is particularly impressive, because it somehow simultaneously gives the impression that the Reform voters they're obviously trying to attract back are both correct and stupid. Which means that, as usual, nobody ends up happy.
The only thing I know about this issue is the article linked above so I may be missing important context but nowhere in there does it imply that they think swift bricks ‘are woke’. It says they don’t think government should be insisting on specific wildlife features, not that think those features are bad or, as you put in, woke. They didn’t say a negative thing about them, just that they won’t be mandating their use.
The electrical infrastructure couldn’t handle solar panels on every house retrospectively. Far better to mandate that every massive commercial unit a la the Evri building or Amazon buildings that are being thrown up everywhere should have to have solar panels. Much bigger and more effective arrays and the infrastructure and substations are generally new so can be sized appropriately.
for the last 3 years I’ve had birds nesting in my roof, at first I’ll always say well they’ll only be here a few weeks and it’s quite nice waking up to the chirp of birds. Then it’s not a few weeks, and it’s not waking up to the chirp it’s actually not being able to sleep because of the chirps. While I generally am an outdoors guy and I do love nature, I will say f**k a bird nesting in my new property. They can come and visit my bird bath and bird feeder but I don’t want a new lodger
Swifts, Swallows, and House Martins do not build their nests in holes but build them on the side of houses by using mud built like a cup. You always know when you have a nest on your house with the pile of bird s*** on your path. I get 2 House Martins every year grandkids watch them for hours.
