During the last Conservative government, it was common to hear the refrain that the prime minister of the day was waging a ‘war on nature’. As someone who played a role in advising a string of environment ministers, I always thought that to be somewhat hyperbolic. I always admire the passion of campaigners, and I share with them a longing for our government to go further and do more for nature; but, at least until the last couple of years of Conservative government, I didn’t think many of the criticisms were fair.
I’m starting to worry now, though, that we’re living in an altogether different world. The new Labour government was elected on a promise to protect and restore nature. And yet here we are a year later wistfully contemplating those halcyon days when No. 10 was criticised for ‘lacking ambition’ on nature recovery. Seemingly every environmental protection in the statute book is under threat.
Every promise Labour has made to protect the natural world has been placed in doubt
Nature is not voiceless in today’s government. Defra Secretary Steve Reed cares and is certainly doing what he can to stand up for nature. Ed Miliband, while much more concerned with the drive for net zero, is also an ally in the struggle for more nature in Britain. But no matter which way you cut it, it’s clear that siren voices in the Ministry for Housing, Communities and Local Government, and more so in the Treasury, are leading the charge and calling for the sidelining or scrapping of protections for nature, as well as the defunding of incentives aimed at nature recovery.
The government’s efforts to diminish protections are starting to seem relentless. Part three of the Planning and Infrastructure Bill, currently working its way through parliament, appears explicitly designed to rip apart decades of legal protections for our green spaces. Pledges to create new nesting sites for swifts by mandating the inclusion of ‘swift bricks’ in new developments have been ditched; the chalk streams action plan, for restoring the health of these waterways, shelved; the chemicals strategy for safe chemicals production has vanished; the list goes on.
There are also credible reports that the government’s nature-friendly farming fund, known as the Environmental Land Management scheme (ELM), which replaced the EU’s common agricultural policy with the aim of paying farmers to look after nature, is set to be cut drastically. This would catastrophically undo efforts to meet legally binding targets to reverse the decline of nature in Britain.
Quite why Treasury officials are contemplating such cuts is beyond me. Nature-friendly farming incentives represent a drop in the ocean in the context of overall government spending, but deliver huge bang for our buck. The benefits of ELM are already beginning to be felt across tens of millions of acres of our world-renowned countryside. Without it, farmers are unlikely to continue their individual efforts to piece back together the natural fabric of our country. They’ll be too busy just trying to stay afloat.
Now, in the newest assault, the government is turning its crosshairs on the ‘biodiversity net gain’ (BNG) policy, the key legal requirement that all developers must ensure their projects add to nature, rather than just build over it. In other words, when you build a house over meadows, you must seek to restore other meadows near your development. Now, I declare a partial interest here, as I helped with the formation of this policy. It’s a world-leading initiative which, introduced last year, has the potential to create huge reserves of nature. I’m such a believer that I’ve even invested in Nattergal, a new venture that aims to use BNG and other market mechanisms to restore nature at scale, first in England and eventually elsewhere too.
Already, hundreds of millions of pounds of investment have been poured into efforts to create nature gains in the country. But, in an instant, the government has threatened to undermine the whole basis of the policy. By specifically stating that it intends to exempt ‘small sites’, which account for well over 80 per cent of all planning applications and a massive proportion of all land use change in England, the government is launching a missile at the very heart of this world-leading policy. Scrap small sites, scrap BNG.
What’s particularly galling about this is that the government promised, just a few weeks ago, that BNG was safe under their watch. In response to repeated requests for reassurance that this world-leading policy would be protected, the government promised that they wouldn’t touch it.
Pushing for the dismantling of BNG are the same ministers who claimed to be consulting with green groups and campaigners on part three of the Planning and Infrastructure Bill, but then refused to accept a single amendment to it. They have exploited the goodwill of many, including me, who have entered into talks in good faith, only to find that nothing changes and the systemic dismantling of nature’s protections has continued unabated.
For evidence of this, consider how the government announced its intention to wreck BNG yesterday: the housing minister Matthew Pennycook went on the radio to announce that a consultation would be held, only to declare that the result would be the scrapping of BNG for the majority of sites. In other words, there is to be no ‘consultation’. The conclusions have already been drafted.
Anyone who believes that nature matters deeply, which according to polls is most of us, should now be worried about where this government stands. Every promise they have made to protect the natural world has been placed in doubt. Every pledge they have made to talk to campaigners has so far come to nothing.
This week’s announcements on ELM and BNG leave me stunned and wondering whether this government is the one now waging an actual war on nature. We badly need people from all walks of life to make their voice heard – now.
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