Dr Alison Caffyn: “We need Shropshire Council to stop allowing ever more levels of unsustainable industrial agriculture in Shropshire.”

It’s been an interesting start to 2025 as someone with my name on a current judicial review against a proposed new ‘chicken shed’ in Shropshire.….

First, both Steve Reed and Daniel Zeichner, perhaps panicked by angry farmers, say planning processes will be made easier for farm developments, so farmers can grow their businesses by putting up new ‘chicken sheds’. Then, Keir Starmer announces that judicial review (JR) rules will be amended to make it more difficult for NIMBYs to block and delay developments. Both announcements seem to be part of Starmer and Rachel Reeves’ growth agenda being pushed across all government departments.

To take the JR point first, I’m no legal expert but as I understand it you already have to prove there is a case to answer at the start of the process. It’s already a tough road to go down, with only a small proportion of cases being successful. So I’m not sure making it more difficult is necessary – maybe the announcement was just sending a pro development signal. With the case River Action and I are taking against Shropshire Council the judge agreed there was a case to answer on several grounds in our argument that Shropshire Council had inadequately assessed the environmental impacts of the proposed Intensive Poultry Unit (IPU).

It is unfortunate that citizens must take their local planning authority to court to stop more and more IPUs spreading across the landscape. But Shropshire Council has approved 64 applications for around 120 additional ‘chicken sheds’ housing over 5 million birds in the county in the last 10 years, taking the total chickens in the county to over 20 million at any one time. That’s 64 chickens per resident and maybe ten
times the amount of chicken poop than human poop.

Despite objections from local communities and businesses the Council continues to grant permissions without properly assessing the cumulative impacts of this industrial scale agriculture on air and water quality. That’s before you factor in risks such as antimicrobial resistance and bird flu. (Shropshire’s biggest IPU has had to cull two million birds in an outbreak this month.)

And that’s why it’s alarming to hear ministers suggesting government policies should support more ‘chicken sheds’ and make it easier to build them. There are many parts of the UK that are well beyond saturation point with intensive livestock farming. The River Wye catchment has proved the point and Shropshire, Lincolnshire, East Anglia, parts of Yorkshire and Northern Ireland are all on, or over, the brink of the same situation. Building more intensive livestock units will lock the UK even further into an industrial agriculture system, controlled by global multinational corporations, producing cheap but unhealthy food at the cost of nature, climate and communities.

And the crazy thing is we don’t even need more ‘chicken sheds’. The UK is already 90% self-sufficient in chicken and eggs. In fact, if we follow the advice of the Climate Change Committee and the National Food Strategy, we should be reducing meat consumption by 30%.

This type of agriculture is unsustainable and simply generates profits for supermarkets, fast food chains and global commodity giants. By all means make the planning system simpler and reduce the need for citizens to challenge planning decisions, but I would suggest doing it by developing clearer guidelines on, for example, how close IPUs can be built to neighbours, to watercourses and to other IPUs. In fact, why not introduce a moratorium on more IPUs in some areas? That would save everyone time and money!

If would be helpful if government policy focused on encouraging green growth and the types of farming that produce healthy food, boost local economies and help address our climate and nature crises.

– Dr Alison Caffyn, River Action Advisory Board member