England’s once thriving countryside is falling silent. As our bird, insect, and mammal populations disappear, so too does nature’s symphony. Depressingly, this is mirrored by the hollowing out of our pastoral communities caused by the Government’s failure to support farmers and the rural economy. This dereliction of duty could not have come at a worse time, after rural communities have been battered by a summer of droughts and wildfires.
For any self-respecting conservative, the erosion of our unique, British countryside should be felt deep in our core. We derive our strength, values, and sense of place from the communities which have inhabited these lands since time immemorial. We admire the farmers who watch over our land, growing our food and stewarding the myriad habitats and species which live across our islands. This is why, from Burke to Scruton, our philosophy has been rooted in those typically rural values of passing on a better inheritance for the next generation and of loving — and nurturing — the place we call home.
Protecting and restoring our natural inheritance is a core conservative value
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This rural ideal is married with the hard-nosed reality that a resilient natural environment is critical for our national security. We require a stable food supply, an environment which helps to protect us against extreme weather events, and a productive rural economy which helps to drive our nation.
For these reasons, protecting and restoring our natural inheritance is a core conservative value.
That is why the last Conservative government helped to create private natural capital markets to leverage private finance and harness the expertise of rural communities rather than rely on distant bureaucracies. It rightly recognises that taxpayers’ money cannot pay for everything and avoids handing more power to meddling governments and inefficient quangos.
These markets put a real value on nature, allowing farmers and landowners to compete to restore the natural environment, whilst being paid for the extra value that they are providing. This creates new income streams for our hard-pressed rural communities, restores our precious natural heritage, and gives farmers greater flexibility to reap the benefits from their land.
The biggest demand for nature restoration comes from developers, who are channelling tens of millions of pounds each year into nature restoration projects across England to quickly and easily offset any harm done by their work. This is a win for the environment, developers, and rural communities: the environment is restored, developers have an easy one-time payment to mitigate any problems they cause, and rural communities get a new funding stream.
Yes, there will be some who point out that new infrastructure and housebuilding projects are slowed down by having to offset any harm to nature at a time when the Government should be letting them build. But there is a good reason for this. New developments harm our natural environment by default. A green field being replaced by houses will lead to a reduction in spaces for nature. Given that we know a strong natural environment helps to protect farmland and critical infrastructure from extreme weather, this is a live concern. So, rather than forcing taxpayers to pay for these projects, it is right that those who cause the damage pay to restore nature elsewhere. To make sure these payments lead to effective projects, we can then use private markets to create competition for this investment: farmers and landowners bid to create the best projects for nature with sound value for money.
Unfortunately, the Government is turning its back on these markets, instead relying on more centralisation and state control to achieve nature restoration. This month began the process of the Government handing vast new powers to Natural England (a quango which is too often failing in its primary duty as a regulator) to deliver nature restoration. The headline new measures are Environmental Delivery Plans (EDP), designed to restore the natural environment in defined geographic areas. The first of these was announced this month for Norfolk, restoring, for example, wetland habitats to mitigate against nutrient pollution from the construction of 15,000 new houses. This approach squeezes out private markets and makes nature restoration efforts rely too heavily on an underperforming quango.
What is most concerning is that this planned EDP is just the beginning, and it could be replicated across the country, effectively halting the potential of private nature markets and the benefits they provide.
This is why the Conservative Environment Network has produced Growing Returns, our new paper which explains why we need to protect and restore our natural environment, before setting out policy proposals to nurture new markets and drive private investment into nature restoration. We can — and must — tie nature restoration and economic growth together.
We should not rely on the Government to rescue our countryside. We should retain, improve, and expand space for private markets and the private finance they bring. At most, the state should support the creation of new markets and act as an impartial regulator, not interfere with the delivery of nature projects themselves.
The Starmer Government made it painfully clear how little it cared about rural communities with the Family Farm Tax. Let’s hope that Andy Burnham shows them more compassion. If the Government truly wants to empower farmers and restore nature, it needs to get serious about leveraging nature markets. Capitalism is the way forward, not squeezing ever more money from taxpayers to hand to unelected bureaucrats and unaccountable quangos. That’s how we will hand a better countryside to future generations — the most conservative of desires.