Environmental Improvement Plan - update on our legal case

September 2024

This year, Wildlife & Countryside Link brought its first ever Judicial Review against the Government. We have now formally closed the case because the new Government has granted the remedy we wanted—a review of the Environmental Improvement Plan (EIP). We are hugely grateful to Leigh Day who represented us and David Wolfe QC and Emma Foubister from Matrix Chambers for helping secure this important result.

So, how can this Government produce a plan capable of halting the destruction of nature?

Compared with some Judicial Reviews, battles over fossil fuel licenses or new runways, a challenge to force a policy review may sound dry. But the Environmental Improvement Plan (EIP) is a crucial document. It should set out the steps needed to meet the statutory targets set in the Environment Act 2021, including the target to halt the decline of wildlife by 2030.

We challenged the Government’s failure to consider a review of the EIP in light of the Office for Environmental Protection’s 2023 annual progress report, which concluded that Government was “largely off-track” towards its legally-binding targets. The plan wasn’t working.

With just six years to halt the decline of nature, we could not afford to settle for an ineffectual Plan. While many aspects of the EIP are brilliant—it includes some excellent ambitions for nature and some lyrical descriptions of the benefits of biodiversity—it falls short in four main ways:

1. The EIP is largely unprioritised: it sets out hundreds of actions, without a sense of which will deliver the biggest benefits for halting nature’s decline.
2. The Plan sets out broad intentions, but not a programme of delivery: it lacks time-bound, measurable actions, allocated to responsible Departments for delivery.
3. The EIP includes no evidence that its actions add up to success: it is missing the scientifically-supported scenarios for delivery that you might find in a Carbon Budget.
4. The measures included in the plan are not bold enough: leaving a significant gap in the effort needed to halt and reverse the decline of biodiversity.

The result of these failings is reflected in ecological reality. Since the 25 Year Environment Plan was first published in 2018, the scale and pace of change needed to reverse nature losses has not been achieved. Instead of driving the major reform in land and sea management, economic policy, infrastructure development, and pollution management, the EIP has become a classic “mood music” policy document.

So, it’s brilliant that the new Government has promised a rapid review to “develop a new, statutory plan to protect and restore our natural environment with delivery plans to meet each of our ambitious Environment Act targets”. Already, the Environment Department has begun a plan of engagement with stakeholders that should help ensure this plan is fit for purpose.

What should it include? There are many scenarios the Government could choose from to restore nature. The balance of effort between options is a policy choice—for example, more public spending on nature might mean less need for regulation—but the big areas for improvement will surely include:

A more rapid and ambitious transition to nature-friendly farming. Intensive farming has been a primary cause of biodiversity loss in the UK, as well as a dominant source of water pollution. Nature-recovery cannot succeed without nature-friendly farming. The Government could rely more on boosting the budget for higher-tier and Landscape Recovery options (which are the best value for money), lean more into stricter regulation, or a combination of the two.

Planning reform to achieve 30x30. The Government’s massive housing and infrastructure development plans, and the huge effort needed to meet 30x30 (the promise to protect 30% of land and sea by 2030) make planning reforms essential. Options include more traditional conservation approaches like protected sites, better spatial planning to optimise land-use, and ramping up economic options like Biodiversity Net Gain.

Pollution reduction. Water and air pollution are terrible for public health as well as major environmental challenges. The Government’s plans in the Water (Special Measures) Bill offer a useful starting point to make polluters pay in one sector, but much more is needed to clean up the economy. Here, options include stringent taxation measures, incentives for cleaner production methods, banning toxic substances, new governance, and nature-based approaches to strip out air and water contamination.

There are countless ways Government could shape the UK’s future in a greener way, but whichever it chooses will require decisive leadership and action across Whitehall. The priorities and plans laid out in the EIP should be clearly assigned to responsible leaders for delivery, and they should then guide critical decisions like the allocation of resources in the forthcoming multi-year Spending Review.

Success will require close partnership working, with land-owners and civil society stepping forward to help Government delivery its plans. A strong and clear plan is the first step to rally that combine effort. We hope that this time, Government will strip away all the window-dressing and present a plan guided by this simple question: are there clearly defined actions in this plan capable of halting nature’s decline by the end of the decade?

We look forward to seeing how this Government will honour the legal aims of the Environment Act with a plan that is fit for purpose and we look forward to playing our part in achieving its wonderful and essential goal of restoring our environment.

The opinions expressed in this blog are the authors and not necessarily those of the wider Link membership.