Unnatural England

Gloomily contemplating a tweet by the Natural England quango this morning, I immediately wondered if it was time to put the poor, mutilated and hobbled beast out of its misery.

The tweet is a one-minute video claiming that “together, we can unlock growth, scale up nature recovery and strengthen national security”. It’s just the latest bit of propaganda from a Government which has built on its predecessors’ Treasury-driven obsession with house building to the point where the body supposed to lead protection of nature now says its new strategy “marks a shift in how we work: from regulator to partner and enabler”.

This is, of course, how the environment gets destroyed, but is all of a piece with Treasury-driven fantasies that, if you destroy planning and environmental regulation, house builders will forget their commercial interests and start building crazy numbers of homes. Meanwhile “growth industries” will suddenly turn the northern Home Counties into Silicon Valley and we’ll all be able to buy ourselves luxury yachts.

Natural England chair Tony Juniper recently published a book called Just Earth (Bloomsbury Continuum, 2025) in which he argued that environmental challenges lie atop a series of interconnected levels like a geological formation. Environmental remedies in isolation fail because they ignore, inter alia, economic priorities.

“This is characterized by an obsession with growth,” he wrote.

This shapes the level above, he wrote, with “promotion of economic development time after time trumping environmental progress”.

Quite.

Below economics, he says, lie other layers: politics and culture.

While this is obviously true, policy thinking is also bound by vertical siloes. One is the belief that “growth” can be “unlocked” simply by adding a bit of nature on to offset the massive damage it can do. This is central to current, destructive, Government policy.

Truly sustainable development, including protection of nature and an economy which provides for our needs, doesn’t just look at nature as part of house building and infrastructure construction. We need to manage a wide range of ecosystem services, which current policy either downgrades or ignores altogether.

The Government urgently needs to stop bashing planning and create an integrated system which also gives central attention to things like food security, water security, drainage, flooding, sea-defence, soil protection, carbon sequestration, sustainable transport etc., etc., etc..

So if we’re starting to realise that Natural England is no longer fit for purpose, we need to think about what’s needed in its place. Perhaps we need some kind of “Resilient England” body (and counterparts in the devolved administrations) which would play a central role in a planning system rebuilt to include those urgent concerns.

Jon Reeds