Environmental Improvement Plan 2025

Lord Harlech Excerpts

Thursday 8th January 2026 Grand Committee

[Lord Harlech (Con)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Young of Old Scone. Although the Environmental Improvement Plan 2025 applies only to England, as we all know, nature does not understand county, country or political lines. I therefore declare my farming and land management interests in Wales.

I welcome the plan’s ambition and the Government’s stated commitment to delivering the statutory targets of the Environment Act. The direction of travel is right, but ambition alone will not restore nature unless it is matched by delivery, accountability and, above all, coherence across government. I will focus on three issues: delivery on the ground, policy contradiction and accountability when targets are missed.

First, the plan rightly acknowledges that land managers are central to nature recovery, but acknowledgment is not the same as empowerment. Many actions in the plan remain expressed in aspirational terms, dependent on future consultations or lacking long-term funding certainty. If we want farmers and landowners to commit to landscape-scale change, they need stability, trust and confidence that policies will endure beyond a spending round or a change of emphasis.

The second and more serious point is policy contradiction. The plan speaks of restoring habitats, reconnecting landscapes and reversing species decline, yet at the same time other government policies are pulling hard in the opposite direction. Nowhere is that clearer than in land use. We are allowing large-scale solar developments on grade 1 agricultural land, the most productive biologically rich soils we have. These are landscapes that support food production, soil biodiversity, farmland birds and ecological connectivity. Converting them to industrial land uses may serve a narrow interpretation of net zero, but it often does so at the direct expense of nature recovery and food security. Some net-zero policies are therefore not merely neutral to biodiversity; they are actively harmful.

This is not an argument against renewable energy. It is an argument against poor siting and the absence of a coherent land use framework. Along with the noble Baroness, Lady Young of Old Scone, I sat on the Land Use in England Committee, which in 2022 reported that a framework was essential. As a Defra Minister, I listened to repeated calls from all parties—including from the Minister, then in opposition—for a land use framework. The Government’s consultation closed in April 2025, so I join in asking when we will see some progress there.

I am afraid that government policy contradiction is not confined to energy. Housing and infrastructure policy continues to fragment land at large scale while biodiversity requirements are weakened or made more flexible in the name of growth, all in contrast with goal 1 of the plan. Conservation organisations, including wildlife trusts, have warned that nature is increasingly being treated as an obstacle to development, and even scapegoated, rather than as the foundation for long-term resilience and prosperity. That rhetoric is deeply damaging and entirely at odds with the plan’s stated objectives. Once a habitat, a hedgerow or an ancient woodland is gone, it is gone for ever, and no amount of biodiversity net gain or carbon credits will bring it back. Brownfield sites must be prioritised for housing development and greenfield sites used only as a last resort, not an easy land grab by DESNZ or MHCLG.

There is also a tendency to rely on designation and access as proxies for recovery. Drawing lines on maps or increasing public access—this is where I may lose the Committee—does not restore ecosystems. Many species require quiet, undisturbed space. Wild animals do not thrive under human pressure. If we conflate access with recovery, we risk creating landscapes that are busy, accessible and even more biologically impoverished.

The Environment Act targets are legally binding, but what happens if they are missed? At present the consequences are largely procedural: reporting, explanation and future adjustment. The OEP can scrutinise but it cannot compel corrective action or force alignment across government departments. That is a central weakness of the current framework.

My questions to the Minister are as follows. When Environment Act targets are missed, what concrete, enforceable action will follow? How will the Government ensure that net-zero, planning, housing and energy policies, including solar development on grade 1 farmland, are brought into alignment rather than continuing to undermine nature recovery?

The environmental improvement plan does not lack vision. What it risks lacking is honesty about trade-offs, courage in land use decisions and mechanisms to resolve contradictions at the heart of government policy.