Question to the Department for Levelling Up, Housing & Communities:

To ask the Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, what steps he is taking to protect hedgehogs by ensuring that new housing developments include hedgehog highways, a hole at the bottom of a fence that allows hedgehogs to move freely between gardens.

The Government welcomes any action by individual developers who wish to provide hedgehog highways. The National Planning Policy Framework makes clear that planning policies and decisions should minimise the impacts on biodiversity and provide net gains. Moreover, our Planning Practice Guidance was updated in 2019 to highlight that relatively small features can often achieve important benefits for wildlife, including providing safe routes for hedgehogs between different areas of habitat