England likes to think of itself as a green and pleasant land, yet the Conservatives have been waging a vicious political war against Natural England, the watchdog that is supposed to protect the countryside. During the past decade and a half, Natural England has been undermined by austerity and rendered toothless by deregulation. The Conservative government slashed the organisation’s already insufficient budget by two-thirds, rendering it incapable of carrying out even basic functions. Almost half of England’s nature reserves have not been monitored by government ecologists in recent years, and only 39% of our sites of special scientific interest (SSSIs) are now in “favourable condition”.
It’s much the same story as what has happened to the Environment Agency. Yet in recent years, spending cuts have been the least of Natural England’s worries. The watchdog has also had to withstand a barrage of attacks from Tory MPs, landowners, developers, the shooting lobby and even environment ministers. And under Rishi Sunak’s government, it has come close to being destroyed entirely – simply because it tried to do its job.
Ministers’ anger with Natural England was first piqued by its efforts to stop raw sewage being pumped into our rivers. “Nutrient neutrality” rules, which oblige developers to mitigate sewage pollution from new homes, have been one of the few levers available to Natural England to stop this problem getting even worse. But last year, the watchdog was crucified by free-market thinktanks and the rightwing press for daring to enforce the law. “Green quango blocks housing developments,” screamed the Telegraph. Robert Colvile, the director of the Centre for Policy Studies, raged against Natural England’s “ceaseless, monstrous bureaucracy”. Fortunately, Labour’s Angela Rayner and Steve Reed stood up for nature and ensured the government’s plans to scrap nutrient neutrality were defeated in the Lords.
Yet Natural England’s woes were only just beginning. After it sought to protect the endangered barbastelle bat from the controversial Norwich Western Link road – again, carrying out its legal duties – it was publicly excoriated by a group of Tory MPs led by Liz Truss. Truss accused Natural England of making an “arbitrary decision” (one that was based on science), and demanded the environment secretary, Steve Barclay, “bring sanity” to the government’s ecological advisers. She has since blamed “environmental extremists” in the civil service for contributing to her downfall as prime minister.
The biggest backlash to Natural England doing its job, however, has come from landowners, agribusiness and the shooting lobby. In England, where 1% of the population owns half the country, landownership has always been intertwined with power. In April this year, a legal case brought by the conservation group Wild Justice found that the environment minister Lord Benyon, owner of a grouse moor in Scotland and pheasant shoot in Berkshire, had unlawfully overruled the advice of Natural England when granting licences for game-bird shoots. With shooting estates releasing some 50m pheasants into the British countryside every year, there’s growing disquiet among environmentalists about their ecological impacts.
On Dartmoor, a simmering feud between sheep farmers and Natural England over livestock numbers erupted last year when three local Tory MPs leapt on the case, prompting ministers to intervene and set up an independent review. Once again, Natural England was under attack for trying to carry out its core mission: to protect our degraded SSSIs. Decades of overgrazing have left Dartmoor in a terrible state. Even so, the Totnes MP Anthony Mangnall tweeted that “NE’s powers need to be reviewed and curtailed”.
Natural England has found itself under assault even for creating new nature reserves. Recently, it designated West Penwith in Cornwall as an SSSI, giving its wildlife-rich heathlands legal protection. But this, too, sparked fury from farmers and Tory politicians. In March 2024, Derek Thomas, the Conservative MP for St Ives, introduced a bill aiming to strip Natural England of its powers to designate SSSIs, and hand them instead to ministers. While the bill stood little chance of being passed, Thomas and 17 other Tory MPs wrote to Barclay, urging the government to support the legislation. The secretary of state was still deliberating what to do when he was met with a storm of protest from thousands of furious voters, causing him to back down.
Other clandestine efforts to undermine Natural England were already under way. At the end of 2023, Robbie Douglas-Miller – owner of a 1,600-hectare (4,000-acre) Scottish grouse moor and a former director of the Game and Wildlife Conservation Trust – was suddenly and mysteriously appointed a Defra minister. “Our man in Westminster?” asked Shooting Times, speculating that the appointment had been “the result of pressure within the Conservative party to appoint a minister in Defra who is pro-shooting”. I’m told that as soon as he took office, Douglas-Miller expressed a strong desire to be made minister responsible for Natural England, a wish he was granted.
So when the then president of the Country Land and Business Association, Mark Tufnell, called for a “full scale review of Natural England’s remit and track record”, fellow landowner Douglas-Miller was only too happy to facilitate it. Barclay was persuaded to announce this review at the Oxford Farming Conference in January, where – addressing a huge audience of landowners and farmers – he publicly attacked his own environmental regulators for having “treated [you] with suspicion and not trust”. A Whitehall insider tells me that a stakeholder meeting was subsequently convened by Defra with representatives from the big landowning and shooting lobby groups, and that the resulting review was intended to “eviscerate” Natural England and “finish it off”.
Such moves were only halted by the unexpectedly early general election. The Tory manifesto, however, continues to attack Natural England and the Environment Agency, pledging to “improve their accountability and give them clearer objectives to focus on”: code for gutting them of their powers. And the attacks on Natural England will continue long after the Tories have left office, thanks to a last-minute appointment railroaded through by ministers. Two days after the election was called, it was quietly announced that Tufnell had been put on the organisation’s board. He will now have great sway over the watchdog he has previously castigated, in a role he will hold until 2027.
The fox has been put in charge of the henhouse. The next environment secretary should have him removed from post. Enough of these endless attacks on a regulator simply trying to protect what little wildlife we have left in England. This government has been in hock to a small clique of landowning, shooting and agribusiness interests. If Labour wins the election, it must give Natural England back its budgets and independence. Only then will it be free to start restoring England’s green and pleasant land from the mess the Tories have made of it.
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Guy Shrubsole is an environmental campaigner and the author of The Lost Rainforests of Britain, Who Owns England? and the forthcoming The Lie of the Land
