Environmental Improvement Plan 2025

Baroness Grender Excerpts

Thursday 8th January 2026 Grand Committee

[Baroness Grender (LD)]

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, and all other noble Lords for this timely debate on precisely how the Environmental Improvement Plan 2025 intends to deliver the legally binding targets set out in the Environment Act 2021. Given the alarming trajectory of nature decline in this country, such scrutiny is critical. In the Liberal Democrats, we acknowledge that the revised EIP offers structural improvements compared to its predecessor, showing clearer responsibility for some actions and providing delivery plans. Yet, as we have heard from so many other speakers, if we are honest about the scale of the climate and nature crisis, the EIP 25 remains profoundly underwhelming and fundamentally lacking the necessary ambition, pace and long-term funding certainty required to haul the Government back on track to meet their 2030 legal obligations.

As we have heard, the Office for Environmental Protection has repeatedly cautioned that the Government are largely off track to achieve their environmental commitments, stressing that

“the window of opportunity is closing fast”.

This plan, presented late last year, should have been a transformative response to that warning. Instead, in too many critical areas, we see weakness, delay and backsliding on previous commitments, when what is needed is urgent delivery and real-world change.

Nowhere is this inertia more evident than in the marine environment and I thank the Marine Conservation Society for its briefing, as mentioned by the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb. The plan risks entrenching managed decline, instead of enabling genuine recovery. The commitment to achieve good environmental status for our seas, originally targeted for 2020 under the marine strategy framework, has seen its date pushed back and effectively faded from view. This is despite the UK previously meeting only a fraction of the indicators for healthy seas. Targets for marine protected areas are now effectively folded into a broader 30% by 2030 headline, while the conspicuous absence of the promised marine net gain framework means we have removed a vital mechanism to catalyse and encourage private investment into marine restoration and recovery.

I turn to land. The core statutory target to halt the decline of species abundance by 2030 is, as other speakers have mentioned, under immense pressure. While we welcome the target to restore or create 250,000 hectares of habitat outside protected sites by 2030, rising to 500,000 hectares by 2042, this cumulative target does not account for nature lost or degraded in the meantime. To deliver the scale of habitat creation needed, we must empower and properly fund our farmers, who are the true stewards of our land and are already grappling with climate impacts and volatile markets. Can the Minister say, in modelling for the farmland wildlife delivery plan, what assumptions are made of the proportion of ELM funds dedicated to Countryside Stewardship and landscape recovery?

The Government’s current approach to funding leaves too many farmers unsure whether they can commit to long-term schemes. We note the headline announcement of £500 million for landscape recovery projects over the coming decades, but this averages a relatively modest annual sum set against the scale of change being asked of land managers. There is genuine concern that without a clearer vision and greater certainty, this will not be enough to shift the dial for the many farmers being asked to do more.

That is why we made the case in our own manifesto for an extra £1 billion a year for the farming budget, focused on nature-friendly farming schemes that support both sustainable food security and nature recovery, particularly for smaller family farms and tenanted holdings. Fundamental reforms are needed, including establishing upland reward schemes to remunerate those who cultivate some of our toughest landscapes—that point will be no stranger to the Minister, given where she lives—for their public good outputs, from carbon and biodiversity to flood mitigation and access.

The revised EIP claims to be a flagship delivery plan, yet it often defers definitive actions through consultations and sometimes vague commitments. We must move beyond this cycle of promised and not delivered, particularly when communities are already living with polluted rivers, depleted soils and declining local wildlife. That is why we call for decisive action: urgent implementation of a truly comprehensive national food strategy; the creation of a new, strengthened water regulator to enforce the clean-up of our waterways; and a renewed commitment to fund and quantify the actions needed now to meet the 2030 deadlines. As others have mentioned, we were promised a White Paper by Ministers on water by the end of last year—with a clear understanding of the urgency, for instance, about chalk streams—when we discussed this on the Planning and Infrastructure Bill. Where is that urgency now? We really need to see that White Paper.

If the EIP 2025 is genuinely intended to deliver the targets of the Environment Act it requires immediate, quantifiable and bold action.