“We have to not just create the habitat, we have to tell the story.” Mary Creagh and I meet in a side room in County Hall at a New Statesman event in the last week of April. Her aides stand guard, parrying the handful of people that try to enter the room for various reasons throughout our 25 minutes together.
The UK is one of the most nature depleted countries in the world, meaning we have registered profound declines in animal, plant and marine life. One in six species in Great Britain are currently at risk of extinction. The UK ranks 189th on the Natural History Museum’s biodiversity intactness index, with just 53 per cent of its nature and biodiversity intact.
“We’re taking action on all fronts,” Creagh assures me. “So first of all, we’ve published our environmental improvement plan in December, which is a five year road map backed by 500 million pounds for large scale nature recovery.”
For decades, British politics has been stuck in a paradigm of the economy or nature. A brief look at similar economies undermines such a binary outlook. France is ranked 5th out of 240 countries by the biodiversity intactness index and the island nation of Japan, the fourth largest economy in the world, has retained 78 per cent of its nature and biodiversity.
Creagh says there is a “false dichotomy” between nature and economic prosperity. She highlights the importance of supporting farmers and the positive response to the Land Use Framework, which will shape land use in order to accommodate new renewables, housing and nature. “We’re going to create a quarter of a million hectares of wildlife rich habitats by 2030,” she says, pointing to schemes in the Cotswolds and the Lake District.
Environmental groups, including Friends of the Earth, say that the UK does not lack ambition on nature but that successive governments have failed to meet their targets. “The plans that we inherited from the previous government were not fit for purpose,” Creagh responds.
As chair of the Environment Audit Committee during the 2017-19 parliament, Creagh scrutinised the Conservative government on issues ranging from fast fashion to sustainable tourism before losing her Wakefield seat in Labour’s comprehensive defeat in the 2019 election. She returned to parliament in the 2024 landslide, this time for Coventry East.
As Minister for Nature, Creagh is hoping to succeed where her predecessors have failed. “There was a lot of stuff in the previous delivery plan that was essentially not backed up by policy or by funding. So we’ve tried to set out the funding and the policy maps as to how we’re going to deliver that,” she says.
But the holistic message of nature and economy may still have its detractors. While Defra is organising releases of beavers, the Treasury has been criticised for its hostility to bats as blockers to development. Indeed, the Environmental Audit Committee has a current inquiry into “HM Treasury and the economics of climate and nature”. Creagh assures me that “Treasury is bought into this. In the last budget, we had a 250 million pounds fund that they’ve allocated to us.” This is funding for the Woodland Carbon Purchase Fund for which Defra is exploring buying woodland carbon credits in order to create financial certainty for the forestry sector.
The current government, like the previous one, is hoping to leverage private sector money to invest in “nature markets”. “The private sector pension schemes want to invest in this, and they know they must invest in this, for flood prevention, for national resilience, for carbon sequestration,” Creagh says.
Adding those quarter of a million hectares of habitats could also go some way to addressing another key challenge for the UK public: access to nature. 20 million people in the UK do not live within 15 minutes of a green or “blue” (rivers, lakes etc) space.
In response, Creagh highlights work her department is doing on improving access to national parks for people with physical disabilities, investing £33m to do this, alongside a scheme to get more school children to visit the parks and expanding the network of coastal paths. “How do we get nature for everyone? It is by designing to the extremes,” she says, adding, “not everyone is a fit guy on a bike or a fit woman on a bike”. Creagh also mentions work within cities, including Coventry where she recently saw her first kingfisher on the canal and the Canals and Rivers Trust has created a habitat for water voles a mile from the city centre.
The government also plans three new national forests in the Oxford-Cambridge corridor, Bristol and the Midlands. “The National Forest company has shown you can build new housing on desecrated landscapes, create places where people want to live, want to walk their dogs,” Creagh says.
The minister also holds responsibility for the nature component of the UK’s Overseas Development Aid (ODA) programme. The government confirmed in March that Defra would receive £115m of the ODA budget. “We’re prioritising programmes which leverage in extra money or which can become self financing,” Creagh explains. She adds that their focus is also on the poorest communities, following criticism from the Independent Commission for Aid Impact (which is currently under threat of being scrapped), and on coastal communities.
One could argue that the UK has the same “delivery” problem with nature that it does with what we might consider traditional infrastructure. Moving the UK from its current position to that, say, of Japan, would be a challenge on par with resolving the housing crisis.
Creagh borrows a building metaphor when describing the task at hand. “We fixed the foundations with the new environmental improvement plan and the delivery plans attached so there’s transparency,” she says. “The land use framework is another important building block, and all of these things are going to get better as we go along.”
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