Correspondence

Defra nature recovery green paper consultation: Environment Agency response

Published 9 May 2022

Applies to England

Introduction

The Environment Agency (EA) welcomes the opportunity to respond to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs’ (Defra) public consultation on the “Nature recovery green paper: protected sites and species”. In this document we summarise our key issues.

We welcome the government’s ambition for a more resilient natural environment as part of its commitment to leave the environment in a better state. We support the intent to improve nature’s protection and enhancement and to better enable its recovery. Nature recovery is central to the EA’s ambition to create better places.

The EA is well placed to enable nature’s recovery given our advisory, regulatory and operator roles. Strong support from other government departments and organisations along with partnership working will also be crucial for successful delivery of these ambitions. The EA’s work with others has shown that we can significantly increase the scale of our outcomes while also delivering other multiple benefits for society. This will continue to be a vital principle for how we fulfil our role in future.

Key issues for the Environment Agency

Delivering for nature through public bodies (Chapter 6.1)

We agree with the green paper that the EA and Defra’s other Arm’s Length Bodies (ALBs) provide vital services to communities and businesses across the country while protecting and enhancing our environment.

We also agree that now the UK has left the EU it is right to consider how best to deliver the government’s long-term targets and commitments to protect and restore the environment, while developing the capability to respond to new and emerging challenges. And we agree too that if we are to reverse nature’s decline, we need to change how we think and act.

We believe that the test for any changes to the EA or other relevant public bodies should be whether or not they will deliver better outcomes: for the environment, for nature and wildlife, and for the people and places we serve. The basis for decisions should be the evidence: what is working, what is not, and what would produce the better outcomes we seek. No organisation is perfect, including the EA. Nevertheless, there is good evidence that much of what the EA currently does is working: our delivery of the last six-year flood defence building programme on time, on budget and on target; our effective response to flood incidents; the fact that our regulation is effectively protecting much of our environment despite limits on our powers and resources.

Any proposed changes to organisational structures should be subject to a full cost and benefit analysis, identifying the potential financial and other benefits; the costs, risks and disruption of delivering the new model; and comparing these with the alternative options and present arrangements. We should learn from previous experience (such as the NAO’s 2010 analysis of the “bonfire of the quangos”).

We should remember our people. The EA’s staff are professionals with highly specialised technical knowledge, passionate about what they do, and proud of the organisation they work for and their status as public servants. We rely on their goodwill to turn out during flood and environmental incidents and other times of national need. We should avoid decisions which would lose us that goodwill, cause staff to leave, or deter other talented people from joining us. That would undermine our ability to deliver for the people and places we serve.

As an organisation we want to stay focussed on delivering the outcomes that create better places for people and wildlife. The government has just given the EA a significant uplift to our flood and environment grants, and we believe our focus for the next few years should remain on delivering the outcomes that money is intended to fund. We are concerned that structural change would take resources, staff time and management focus away from that.

While we would not oppose significant structural change provided it delivered better outcomes, we see a lot of merit in non-structural options. There are non-structural measures that would greatly help us and the other Defra Group ALBs deliver the outcomes the government seeks. These include practical steps to improve the way ALBs work with each other and with Defra; additional powers for ministers or the relevant ALB where necessary to deliver nature recovery; and a root-and-branch reform of the EU legacy environmental regulations, to simplify and streamline both the regulations themselves and how they are implemented in order to deliver better for business and the environment.

We are pleased to see the government recognise the importance of mechanisms to enable environmental regulators and public bodies to recover more of the cost of regulation in line with the polluter pays principle. The EA has cost recovery powers to resource our regulation and services through charges in many areas, but there are gaps. We agree that effective cost recovery will lead to better services and better outcomes for the environment. We will continue to work with Defra and other government departments to improve environmental outcomes through the most effective and appropriate cost recovery provisions.

Financing nature recovery (Chapter 6.2)

We support the government’s view that delivering its goals for nature recovery will require a whole economy effort. We continue to work with government, ALBs and partners to develop nature-positive investment solutions so that opportunities in nature can be scaled-up across the country. From our experience, there is growing demand for nature-positive investment opportunities, but there is a large gap in the supply of projects for investment. By aligning policy drivers with the potential markets, and developing a roadmap and overarching market rules, private sector, public and third sector partners can develop this supply pipeline. We suggest some of the key elements in our detailed response, including bringing forward a private investment in nature strategy to accelerate private investment in UK nature recovery.

We believe a new private investment in nature strategy should include a clear policy framework. There should be robust standards, clear market rules, supportive regulation, incentives and effective partnerships (investment governance); support for the development of business models for investing in nature at scale (investment readiness); and defined pathways to secure private funding for nature (investment pathways).

Urban environments are vital to support nature recovery. We recommend government considers what tax and fiscal incentives could be introduced to encourage further greening of our urban spaces. Access to green space and nature is not just an environmental issue, but a matter of social justice and tackling health inequality. One target we would support, for example, is that all urban dwellers should live within a 10 minute walk of green space with high biodiversity value.

Protecting wildlife sites – on land and at sea (Chapter 3)

We welcome consideration of whether we have effective designations and systems of management and protection to deliver nature recovery and address the drivers of nature’s decline. There is much to support in the government’s proposals to streamline designations, processes and regulations. However, there is also a risk that any over-simplification could downgrade the present protections, which have to date proven to be robust, and so reduce the ability to protect the environment. The precise design and implementation of the proposals is therefore key to their success or failure for the environment.

Successful nature recovery will be dependent on positive actions across a significant proportion of the landscape (including the water environment), not just nationally prioritised protected areas. We want to ensure actions deliver environmental outcomes in the right place and at the right scale and support the restoration of dynamic processes, to create resilience in nature and deliver value for public money. Spatial prioritisation, the provision and interpretation of evidence, monitoring and evaluation and partnership working will all need to be properly resourced. This will be critical to provide the ‘appropriate authority’ (the Secretary of State) with sound evidence for decision making.

We are not yet sure that any of the individual options for terrestrial sites suggested in the paper will meet the government’s aspirations to secure nature’s recovery. We would be pleased to support any work on the development of a future option for terrestrial sites to allow priority habitats and supporting networks to be included. Our detailed response to the consultation questions makes a number of recommendations for the principles which we believe any future system of designation should achieve. In the short to medium-term (to 2030) we suggest that significantly changing the designations and processes is more likely to hinder than help achieve environmental outcomes, as it will inevitably divert attention away from action for several years. Alternatively, we suggest many of the benefits of reform could be secured by a rethink of how what we currently have is applied, funded and resourced.

We welcome many of the suggestions put forward in the green paper to promote nature recovery beyond designated protected sites. In addition, we believe that new Biodiversity Net Gain (BNG) and Local Nature Recovery Strategy (LNRS) frameworks should align with and be supported by proposed planning policy reforms. This includes future changes to planning obligations, digitisation of the planning system and updates to the National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) plus the vision for a revised environmental assessment framework that secures wider environmental enhancements.

We welcome and broadly agree with the findings of the Habitats Regulation Assessment (HRA) working group. There are some areas within the proposed solutions which we think require further thought, including the proposal to merge HRA and Sites of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI) assessments into one as this combines two very different legal tests. We also need to look carefully at the risk that increased use of habitat compensation could prevent some applicants properly considering all forms of mitigation and alternatives when applying for permitted activity.

Delivering 30 by 30 (Chapter 4)

We support the more holistic approach to delivering the commitment to protect 30% of land and sea in the UK by 2030. We believe that more needs to be done to secure lasting sustainable nature recovery and improvement outside of the core of protected sites. Currently there are no ‘Other Effective area-based Conservation Measures’ (OECMs) in England. The evolution of policy and potential reform proposed in the paper therefore needs to look at how to make this happen in reality. It is critical that there are effective measures to promote nature recovery in the wider countryside/seascape. Without these any protected site network will always be limited in what it can achieve. We suggest that Site Improvement plans (SIPs) should be statutory. Consideration should be given to other statutory provision for priority sites and properly protected and managed local wildlife sites should be integral to the ambition.

Ensuring effective species protection and their habitats (Chapter 5)

We welcome the government’s proposals to modernise wildlife and species legislation to support more effective protection and recovery of England’s wildlife. We agree that species protection, licensing and enforcement need rationalising and consolidating, and would be beneficial for regulators, consultants and the public. We support the proposal to simplify protection and produce a new tiering system. However, we believe that the current proposal needs more work with the scope widening to take into account the destruction of habitats used by protected species and to broaden the offence to bring landowners, occupiers, contractors and tenants into its remit where obvious persecution or habitat destruction has taken place.

Making space for nature and species should also be part of the considerations for the species protection and licencing review and modernisation. A more joined up approach is especially important for species recovery to enable the movement and migration of species. We suggest more recognition of the value of connectivity in the landscape to support species movement and migration, which is even more important now given the challenges of climate change.

Evolution of policy language for the natural environment

We believe future legislation presents an ideal opportunity for policy language to become more inclusive and expanded to encompass explicit reference to the aquatic environment (freshwater, wetlands, estuarine and coastal waters) in addition to the existing terms terrestrial/land and marine. Rivers, wetlands, estuaries and the species they support are an integral part of nature and of delivering nature recovery. The historic use of the terms ‘terrestrial’ and ‘land’ to describe both land and water environments does not reflect the deployment of nature-based solutions for improving water quality, flood protection and other benefits by management of rivers and wetlands, nor is it consistent with proposed water and biodiversity targets within the Environment Act.

Modernising the terminology around terrestrial and marine environments would also be helpful from a species perspective.