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I wonder: what is the bad character? It's apparently not 0x20, but what is it? How did it get there? What keeps this from happening again to someone else?

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It is U+00A0 [1], a non-breaking space [2], can be typed in some office applications using ⌃+⇧+␣.

[1]: http://fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/00a0/

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-breaking_space

Ah, my old nemesis, the shifted space. Haven't been bitten by one of those in a while. Thanks for digging that up!

No-break spaces aka   can be quite useful for preventing line breaks for example between a value and its unit, or between label and value. Or when writing for example 'e.g.', although you could argue that in this case a NARROW non-breaking space U+202F would be preferable.

If I had to guess, the no break space that macOS has on [alt]-[space]: " ".

EDIT: Hmm, that doesn't seem to be it, here's the commit in question https://github.com/alphagov/govuk-puppet/commit/63b36f93bf75...

It IS the no-break space. The hex UTF-8 representation of it is C2A0; you can find that sequence in original version of the file.

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