Latest news with #HannahBourneTaylor
The Guardian
26-05-2025
- General
- The Guardian
Country diary: My fear is that one year the swifts will not return
My beloved swallows, talisman of my summer happiness, are busy nesting in the stables. Their blue-black shine glistens as they acrobatically insect-catch, collect mud and chatter from the beams. This year, I'm just as obsessed with the return of another migrant species – swifts. It is the fault of the author and campaigner Hannah Bourne-Taylor. We've spoken recently about her new book, Nature Needs You: The Fight to Save Our Swifts, detailing her battle to have a single swift brick made mandatory in every new-build home. Swifts are totally reliant on our buildings for their (diminishing) nest spaces. My eyes turn skywards several times a day, watching and waiting. The contrails of planes crisscross the skies, but no dark crescents yet cut through the air. I feel a sense of unease, fearing a year will come when the waiting will never stop. But in the next few days, I hear reports of swifts just a few miles away. At the farm, the insect-packed wildflower meadows of purple phacelias, pink sainfoins and oxeye daisies will be their feeding grounds. Hundreds of swifts from surrounding villages and the city will gather, screaming in what sounds like excitement, especially when the tiny black pollen beetles swarm. There is surely not another creature so dedicated to the aerial lifestyle – sleeping, mating and feeding on the wing. Even their scientific name, Apus apus translates as footless. And then I see one. A sole scythe, black against the sky, slicing through the air. In the coming days, my count reaches a dozen – not many, but a start. Now, after weeks of dry, it is rain we are waiting for. Ponds are empty and dust swirls. We've had to cut the meadows for hay early because although it is sparse, the grass was going to seed. This at least gives a chance of a second crop – if it rains. A parched hedgehog visits my little garden pond that I've been topping up, and drinks for 10 minutes. I think of Hannah and how she won't stop fighting for swifts. It's devastating that something so simple and so cheap as 'a brick with a hole' is not happening. Really, what hope does the natural world have? Under the Changing Skies: The Best of the Guardian's Country Diary, 2018-2024 is published by Guardian Faber; order at and get a 15% discount
The Guardian
23-05-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
Labour blocks proposal for ‘swift bricks' in all new homes
Providing every new home with at least one 'swift brick' to help endangered cavity-nesting birds has been rejected by Labour at the committee stage of its increasingly controversial planning bill. The amendment to the bill to ask every developer to provide a £35 hollow brick for swifts, house martins, sparrows and starlings, which was tabled by Labour MP Barry Gardiner, has been rejected by the Labour-dominated committee. Despite the Labour party having supported the swift brick amendment when it was tabled on Conservative government legislation in 2023, housing minister, Matthew Pennycook, told the House of Commons committee: 'We are not convinced that legislating to mandate the use of specific wildlife features is the right approach, whether that is done through building regulations or a freestanding legal requirement.' A new petition calling for swift bricks to be made mandatory for new homes has rapidly reached 80,000 signatures in recent days, two years after activist Hannah Bourne-Taylor won a parliamentary debate to help the rapidly declining migratory birds after 109,896 voters signed a government petition. Bourne-Taylor said there appeared to be 'no logic' to the government's opposition to swift bricks when they precisely meet its ambition of creating win-wins for the economy and nature. 'They are going to be building millions of bricks into walls. I don't understand why there's such a problem with a brick with a hole in it. It seems ludicrous,' she said. 'Why say your new legislation is a win-win for new homes and the environment and exclude the only measure that is a true win-win? 'They are tone-deaf. This is such a tiny thing they could do, but it's brewing such a distrust and sense of betrayal among the people who voted for them.' Although some housebuilders are incorporating swift bricks in newbuilds, a recent University of Sheffield study found that 75% of bird and bat boxes demanded as a condition of planning permission for new housing developments had failed to materialise when the housing estates were complete. Asked if he would meet MPs to discuss how to encourage the building industry to adopt swift bricks more widely, Pennycook said he would be happy to have conversations with MPs despite claiming his correctly reported opposition to mandatory cavity-nesting bricks had been 'spun' in a Guardian report. These comments follow Pennycook's recent defence of the planning bill's proposed amendments to the Protection of Badgers Act that MPs warned would lead to 'hostile treatment' of the much-persecuted animal in which the minister joked: 'I would just like to make very clear, for the Guardian article that will no doubt appear tomorrow, that I have no particular animus against badgers in whatever form.' Bourne-Taylor said she hoped that the swift brick amendment would now be championed by the House of Lords. If that fails, Bourne-Taylor hopes to take her campaign to the wider public once again. The rising new petition for swift bricks 'just goes to show the public concern,' she said. 'The government are not listening to the public or the experts.'
