Governments have a golden opportunity to reverse neglect of UK protected nature sites – Inside track

This post is by Meriel Harrison, senior policy officer at the RSPB.

Earlier this month the Office for Environmental Protection (OEP) published a landmark report. It laid bare the magnitude and extent of failures by successive governments to fulfil essential legal responsibilities to care for protected sites for nature in England.

It sets out, in clear and unambiguous terms, the long term neglect by governments and statutory bodies that is undermining our most important places for nature. It concludes that the legislative framework we have is largely sound but is simply not being implemented at anything like the scale and pace needed to drive nature’s recovery.

Yet protected sites still offer a “golden opportunity”, as the OEP describes it, to support the achievement of biodiversity targets and the ‘30by30’ commitment. Importantly, the report’s recommendations chart a clear course of action to recover the potential of protected sites.

What does the OEP say? What emerges clearly from the OEP’s investigation is the central role protected sites play in nature conservation, and the proven track record of their value, not only for the specific species and habitats they are designated for but for other wildlife too, through beneficial effects that spill over beyond their boundaries.

With 380 million visits to them per year, people benefit from them as well, as they provide widespread health and wellbeing benefits and support climate change mitigation and adaptation.

Yet, since 2010, the natural capital of these sites has been undermined and depleted, leaving them in increasingly poor condition and unravelling important progress made in the preceding decade. Failures span the breadth of responsibilities of the government and statutory agencies, covering designation, management, monitoring and implementation of their protection. The OEP identifies four root causes of the issues: insufficient action from government to drive progress; insufficient investment to achieve outcomes; a lack of incentives and engagement for owners and occupiers of protected sites; and gaps in evidence to inform and underpin decision making.

The report proposes a suite of 15 recommendations to turn things around. In summary, they are:

– Set long term legally binding targets for protected sites: the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) and Natural England should also publish a strategy and delivery plan to achieve these targets.

– Properly resource protected sites: work out what money and people are needed to deliver legal requirementsand commitments, and make these resources available, recognising that “the effective implementation of protected site laws also depends on the adequacy and continuity of funding.”

– Speed up and scale up the designation of protected sites: this should include improving engagement with landowners as part of the designation process.

– Create a new statutory duty to monitor protected sites: ensure outcomes can be properly tracked and information is shared with landowners.

– Encourage farmers with better agri-environment schemes: incentivise positive management and provide better advice and support.

It is clear from these findings that it is not protected sites that fail nature, rather governments and statutory agencies are failing protected sites. This OEP report adds to a mounting body of evidence of these failures across the UK, including its previous report on protected sites in Northern Ireland and a recent Audit Wales report, highlighting Natural Resources Wales’ failures in relation to protected sites designation. We are also awaiting the results of specific investigations into potential failures across the UK with regard to Special Protection Areas for birds.

How UK governments respond is a crucial test The UK championed ‘30by30’ as a global target in the Convention on Biological Diversity negotiations but, when it comes to delivery, all the UK’s governments are dragging their feet, and, with 2030 only a handful of years away, time is fast running out.

In England, more effort from ministers is going into dismantling nature protection than into securing its recovery. The environment sector is having to mobilise against repeated attacks on established and successful frameworks such as the Habitats Regulations. In recent months, we have faced damaging provisions in the Planning and Infrastructure Bill, threats to repeal the strengthened National Parks duty, only passed into law in 2023, and, most recently, the Prime Minister welcoming proposals from a nuclear taskforce to sweep away nature regulations and clear the path for nuclear development in sensitive nature sites.

At a time when we should be doubling down on efforts to save nature, the government has recently weakened protected sites targets in the updated Environmental Improvement Plan, the same targets that the OEP says should be strengthened. The government has delayed the interim target for sites to have actions on track to achieving favourable condition and scrapped altogether a target for up to date condition assessments. Meanwhile, Natural England, responsible for notifying Sites of Special Scientific Interest and ensuring their management, has just published a new strategy with a conspicuous absence of commitments and actions for these nationally important protected sites.

All of this ignores the well established fact that that our economy and our wellbeing depend on a thriving natural environment. As Dame Glenys Stacey, chair of the OEP, says, “the need to act is urgent. Failure to do so risks further depleting the natural resources on which society and economy depend.”

Defra now has three months to respond to the report’s recommendations, and its response will be a crucial test. A clear message from the report is that, at times when governments has invested priority and resource, protected sites go on to thrive and recover. Neglecting them is a choice to ignore statutory duties and responsibilities, and it’s one UK governments must reverse if they are going to deliver on environmental targets and promises, and leave future generations with the rich natural heritage they need to thrive.