Planning advice for you and your hedgehogs

19th January 2018

If you are worried about a housing development in your area impacting your local hedgehogs, read here to find out what you can do to help protect hedgehogs.

Hedgehog Street do not normally respond to individual applications. We prefer to focus on ensuring housing developers mitigate for hedgehogs in any development work that they do.  This is because hedgehogs are only partially protected, objections along those lines are often disregarded.

However, we have provided a quote from Hedgehog Street that you can include in your own responses to applications. In this we have outlined our strong concerns around hedgehog declines in the UK and that new housing developments put these at risk.  In this document we also suggest various mitigation practises that can be adopted during development to ensure minimal disturbance. We also urge that hedgehog-friendly features are included in the design of the new housing.

Hedgehogs travel around one mile every night through parks and gardens in their quest to find enough food, nest sites and a mate. We suggest that for any new housing developments, Hedgehog ‘highways’ are cut in the garden fences. This improves connectivity throughout the development and helps protect this endangered species.  Examples of this have been seen across numerous UK developers in the media, including Barratt Homes/David Wilson Homes, Russell Armer Homes, Redrow Homes and Morris Homes to name a few.

If you are a developer who is interested in joining these and introducing simple solutions like ‘Hedgehog Highways’ into your developments please contact hedgehog@ptes.org and we can work together to bring these animals back from the brink.