My Environment: Hannah Bourne-Taylor

16 May 2025

Hannah Bourne-Taylor on the fight to save Britain’s swifts, the politics of nature, and why swift bricks must become standard in new housing

As author and campaigner Hannah Bourne-Taylor tells me over video call about her new book, Nature Needs You: The Fight to Save Our Swifts, a lively scene is taking place behind her. The view is of Bourne-Taylor’s Oxfordshire garden, where a motley crew that includes blackbirds, house sparrows and a dunnock that she raised herself, are singing, foraging and bickering in the early spring sunshine.

It's an apt background view for a campaigner who is so passionate about our feathered friends that on 5 November 2022, she walked naked – save for a thin layer of body paint – from Speaker’s Corner to 10 Downing Street to launch a petition to make nesting boxes for swifts mandatory for new housing. After the petition gained 100,000 signatures, mandating swift nesting boxes was debated in the House of Commons, but the government voted against it.

This was just the beginning of a tortuous – and ongoing – campaign that Bourne-Taylor brings vividly to life in Nature Needs You, alongside the compelling stories of many other British species currently under threat.

Swifts have been dependent on cavities in buildings for their nesting habitat for thousands of years. As we renovate and demolish older properties, this nesting habitat is lost, putting the species in grave danger. The bird was added to the UK Red List for conservation in 2021, along with house martins, who also nest in man-made structures.

The onus, says Bourne-Taylor, is therefore on new development to provide homes for swifts in the shape of so-called ‘swift bricks’: cheap, sustainable, zero maintenance bricks that provide cavity nesting habitat for swifts and other cavity nesting birds. The campaign is supported by Natural England and Wildlife and Countryside Link, which represents 88 environmental NGOs, including the RSPB.

No swifts are in evidence in Bourne-Taylor’s garden this morning – partly because these visitors to the UK only begin to arrive in late April after their long journey from Africa, and partly because, when they do arrive, the only time they land is to nest. These amazing creatures eat, drink, sleep and mate in flight, spending up to 10 months a year on the wing.

Swifts are represented in our call in a sense though – sitting proudly on a shelf behind Bourne-Taylor is a swift brick. It’s the very one, in fact, that she has carried with her to countless ministerial and civil service meetings since the start of her campaign. She calls it her “comfort blanket” in the book.

What’s the latest on your campaign?

Steve Reed, the environment secretary, agreed to support mandating swift bricks through a provision in the Planning and Infrastructure Bill. Primary legislation was then turned down by the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG), but Barry Gardiner MP has since tabled a swift brick amendment.

I now understand that MHCLG are considering making swift bricks a National Development Management Policy, which is brand-new and untested but carries statutory weight, so that would be a win from my point of view. The only thing that I can do now is make sure that MHCLG understand that [this measure] has cross-party political and public support, and that they really need to do it.

How are you feeling about it all?

As a campaigner, it’s horrible, because in 2023, Labour whipped for Zac Goldsmith’s swift-brick amendment to the Levelling Up Bill. That's really key, because the MPs haven't been reshuffled, it’s not like there are new people in place that don't know anything about it. And from the swifts’ point of view, it’s two years more urgent than it was in 2023. This tiny little thing – this life raft for these birds – is wrapped up in this awful, human, political fight at the same time as being insignificant to all of it.

You write in your book that you “knew absolutely nothing about politics” before starting your campaign. What did you make of what you found?

Because this is a public campaign, and hundreds of thousands of people are included, it means that people from across Britain contact me all the time, and I can tell you that there is no awareness on a generalised level of the link between nature and politics, and how we as constituents can operate our MPs to serve our needs. Unfortunately, the politicians have almost no awareness of nature either, and climate and nature are completely siloed in the workings of government.

We are a nation of nature lovers, so I really hope this book could be that first step for a reader to realise how ignorant they are, and if they love nature (which they will do, or they wouldn't be reading my book), that it’s time to take some responsibility. Because few MPs are not going to step up unless we make them.

Image of a Swift Brick

Your campaign has the backing of the UK conservation community – what has been the impact of that?

The RSPB were my first supporters. Before all this, I just thought of them as this big machine. But then through this campaign, they and all the other NGOs have been broken down, for me, into very passionate individuals. They've raised my voice and fuelled me to keep going, but also they gave me the credibility I needed to be effective.

How do we ensure that nature and climate don’t lose out in this government’s agenda for growth?

Firstly, I should say that I'm apolitical. My experience with swift bricks makes me very nervous and distrustful of this government. Because if they can't do that which isn't a burden on them or the taxpayer, then it begs the question, are they taking the nature recovery targets seriously? I know that Ed Miliband is a really authentic advocate for the climate, and so I feel like those initiatives are much more on track.

But ironically, it's his department that has no mitigation set up for the Great British Insulation Scheme that is destroying cavity bird nesting habitat [inadvertently, by blocking nesting sites with insulation]. So I don't think nature is on Miliband’s agenda at all.

You recount being inspired by the responses of children during visits to primary schools to raise awareness of your campaign – how can the environmental movement harness that energy?

Running workshops or assemblies that focus on individual campaigns is really useful, because it’s a way to empower children without them feeling too anxious [about the challenges facing our environment]. That balance is really key. You don't want to scare the children and make them feel like they're helpless and everything's dying around them. But at the same time, if you can empower them to help out, that's really important.

A pet peeve of mine is that a lot of primary school children know about pandas and polar bears, but they don't know about the nature on their doorstep. Finding a way to connect them with the stuff that they can actually see and help, would be great.

The new GCSE in natural history will help so much because it will engage children with the conservation space. Having curriculum-based information about nature is really key.

What can CIWEM members do to help swifts?

It's very important that they acknowledge that swift bricks are not supplementary. There is a lot of misinformation around swift bricks being labelled and considered, even by the NGOs, as a sort of supplementary measure that’s a ‘nice-to-have’, along with hedgehog holes.

There are clear surveys that show the benefit of hedgehog holes, but the difference is very obvious: one is supplementary and the other is critical nesting habitat. I've had to rebrand swift bricks to show that they are critical cavity nesting habitat for a whole category of birds that have been excluded in legislation.

Local plans involving swift bricks are great and it's definitely better than nothing. But the non-compliance rate of local planning authorities stipulating swift bricks for developers is 75 per cent. So if planners, or anyone working within local government, took it on board to collectively tell the government, ‘This is not working; you need to mandate swift bricks’, that would be great.

Having that custodianship instilled within planners and these district councillors would go a long way to success.

This article originally appeared in the Summer 2025 print edition of The Environment. CIWEM members can read the issue in full (and all back issues dating back to 2016) via MyCIWEM.

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Jo Caird is editor of The Environment