The planning process can have a significant effect on the habitats and species in Carmarthenshire. Fortunately today there are policies and legislation that planners can use to ensure that biodiversity issues are taken fully into account and which should help ensure that significant impacts are avoided, mitigated or compensated for through the planning process. This fits with the council’s requirement to try and make sure that all development is sustainable. In addition, increasingly biodiversity issues are being considered much earlier in the planning process, so that protected species such as bats and dormice and important habitats are surveyed before the applications are submitted. As seasonality is often important when surveying for plants and animals timing of these surveys is important.

Recently WAG has produced revised planning guidance for local authorities about how the land-use planning system should contribute to protecting and enhancing biodiversity conservation and sets out the key principles of planning for nature conservation. This comprehensive guidance (Technical Advice Note 5) will be a vital tool for protecting biodiversity during the planning process.

A development at Ty Croes Primary School is a good example of how, through early consideration of the impacts of the development on the natural environment, an important habitat that may have been lost to development can be saved.

The primary school at Ty Croes is being redeveloped and extensions to the school building and car park are being constructed. Early survey of the site identified that the playing field had been managed in a way that has conserved its floristic diversity since the school was built in the mid 1930s and the grassland habitat here represented a habitat that has rarely survived agricultural intensification and the use of agrichemicals. Instead of the normal management of cutting the grass and leaving the mowings to rot down into the field the mowings had be removed. This meant that the soil remained poor in nutrients, ensuring that diversity of flowers survived, instead of grasses taking over.
Due to the frequent mowing regime needed to maintain the field for sports and other school activities, few of these plant species ever get to flower or seed, which is probably why its floristic value has not been noticed in the past.

The field has some uncommon species - meadow thistle (Cirsium dissectum), Devil’s-bit Scabious (Succisa pratensis), and whorled caraway (Carum verticillatum) were recorded and are representative of a meadow community which was once widespread in Carmarthenshire but is now one of the most seriously threatened grassland types in the county. This area will be affected by the construction of the new school extension but through discussion with the National Botanic Garden of Wales (NBGW) this habitat is to be translocated to the Botanic Gardens – in total 320 m2 of turf of ecological interest will be re-laid.

Turves will be cut out using an excavator bucket (a flat-bottom, untoothed front-end bucket) and placed on pallets and transported to the NBGW. Here they will by re-laid in a carefully chosen ‘reception area’ under supervision of NBGW staff. The turves should be re-laid within 24 hours of cutting. Cutting turves ensures that an area of soil together with the surface vegetation is collected intact so the vegetation is moved largely undisturbed and, importantly, along with the important soil fungi and microflora that are an important but largely invisible component of a meadow habitat.

Ironically, the school’s conservation area must also have originated from similar vegetation but due to irregular mowing (except for the paths through and around it) and inappropriate management, together with the planting of alien trees and bushes, it has lost much of its biodiversity value.

Bats were also found in the school buildings and the application will have to evidence how the works to the school will not disturb the bats whilst it is taking place and how roost features for the bats will be incorporated so that the bats can continue to use the school.

A swift nesting site and potential breeding sites of house sparrows and other birds are present within the fabric of the school building and replacement nesting sites provided should be designed in the new building.

This development is a good example of how early consideration and appropriate action driven by planning policy and legislation can ensure that development need not be detrimental to biodiversity.