Craig Bennett on why nature is the foundation of the economy

Welcome back to Sustainable Views, the podcast looking at sustainability policy and regulation in depth. My name is Florence Jones, a journalist at Sustainable Views who covers UK climate and sustainability policy. And today I'm delighted to have Craig Bennett here in the London studio. Craig is CEO of the Wildlife Trusts, as well as being honorary professor of sustainability and innovation at Alliance Manchester Business School, an associate fellow of Homerton College, Cambridge, and a fellow of the Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership. Hopefully I got everything there. And today Craig and I are going to discuss the UK Government's policy approach to nature and what it means for how we're preserving biodiversity and nature-based resilience in the UK. So Craig, maybe you could start with a bit of scene setting and introduction for us. The UK, as we know, is one of the most nature-depleted countries in the world, which the Wildlife Trust is looking to tackle. And I wondered what this poor state of nature means for the UK, people living here, and businesses.

Well, let's start with the easy thing. It's a great sadness. I'm in my 50s and I remember when in the early 1970s when I was born and growing up, you know, we had a lot more nature around us and you'd go on a long drive, sort of my parents would take us on holiday up in Yorkshire or something like that. And when you get to the other end, there'd be lots of insects splashed over the front of the car. That doesn't happen now, you know, because there's been this thinning of nature. We've seen catastrophic declines in the abundance of some of our once common species here in the UK, 75% declines in some of our insects, the very insects that we need to pollinate our crops, for example, similar declines in some of our farmland birds and so on. But it's not just sad, much as we shouldn't overlook that. These are also, of course, the things that underpin our economy. I mean, that very fact there that we need insects to pollinate our crops, the very fact that we need species like beavers even, which have been missing here for hundreds of years, but we need them to hold water back in the landscape and reduce the risk of flooding. If water is behind a beaver dam, it's not in someone's living room. We absolutely need earthworms and good soil health again for our food security. And we need nature for our health and wellbeing as well. It's intimately linked to people's health and wellbeing. And of course we need nature to be holding carbon rather than it being in the atmosphere. I could go on and on and on, but it's really clear the role that nature provides in underpinning our economy, our health and wellbeing, and indeed our national security as the most recent National Security Report showed.

Absolutely. So you're really clearly presenting it as a risk, which is definitely interesting and suggests that there should be kind of a proportionate policy response from government to address that risk. But over the past year or so of this current government, we've seen some perhaps mixed messaging around nature or frustration from those in the nature sector. So I'll cover a few of the kind of big headlines. We've got the Planning and Infrastructure Bill, which got Royal Assent at the end of last year, which is looking looking to kind of streamline planning, and some have warned that it will reduce the amount of protection for nature. We've got the Nuclear Regulatory Review published in November, which is also kind of a planning streamlining process. And we've had a bit of a slimming down of the biodiversity net gain policy, although not as dramatic as initially proposed. There's also been a few other things around kind of rhetoric and framing. I wondered if you could speak to where all of this leaves us on nature. If it is a risk, why is the government saying that we should maybe be doing less? And is that what the government's saying?

I'll give you the headline first. This is classic performative politics, exactly the type of performative politics that Labour promised in opposition that they would not deliver in government. And that's a really sad situation of events. But let's get into it a little bit more. Labour promised in their general election manifesto that they gave a solemn promise that they would be a government that would restore nature, that would turn around the decline of nature in this country and make sure that actually we do see nature as the foundation of the economy. That was all in there in one form or another in the general election manifesto. And for the first few months of this Labour government, nature organizations in this country worked really well with DEFRA and also actually with the MHLCG, that's the Ministry for Housing, Local Government and Planning, for example. We worked really well with them. They made it clear that there was a planning bill coming and they wanted to try and ease up the planning system to allow development to be built, to build 1.5 million homes that was already also in the Labour manifesto. And the Nature Organisation said, we're really happy to work with you and make that happen. We want to see new homes being built. We believe new homes, new energy infrastructure, grids and so on, these can all be built in what we'd call a nature-positive way. In other words, let's rebuild our natural infrastructure at the same time as building new homes and building energy infrastructure and transport infrastructure. And so on. And we had productive conversations for the first few months. But then that was torpedoed really, very simply, by Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves. I mean, it really was from Downing Street, Number 10 and Number 11. Suddenly out of nowhere, this rhetoric appeared that suggested that somehow nature was the whole reason to blame for the economy struggling. And so you heard Rachel Reeves talk about we need to worry less about bats and newts and worry about the economy. So we are reducing the environmental requirements placed on developers when they pay into a nature restoration fund that we have created so they can focus on getting things built and stop worrying about the bats and the newts. Keir Starmer joined in by talking about jumping spiders and so on, and of course they love to talk about the bat tunnel, the so-called bat tunnel that supposedly was costing £100 million, you know, on, on in the building of HS2. But all of that was misinformation. I mean, let's just call it out for what it was. It was misinformation and lying by the government around the situation on nature. So take for example, if you heard Rachel Reeves talking, you would've thought the whole reason nothing could get built in this country was 'cause of bats and newts. Actually, we commissioned a review of planning appeals that took place in 2024. So these are the actual appeals around planning, and it was only 3% that even mentioned nature or bats and newts. You know, that's not what her rhetoric was suggesting. So in other words, all this attention on trying to solve issues around 3% of planning appeals, she had nothing to say about the other 97% of planning appeals. Nothing to say really about why it is that the 1.4 million homes that already have planning permission and have had it for over 10 years are not being built. Nothing to say about all the delays amongst house builders as to why they're being built. Nothing to say about any of these other kind of reasons. Just blame it all on bats and newts. And that's what I mean about it being performative politics. Is that I think Rachel Reeves and Keir Starmer felt they needed someone or something to blame for the struggling state of the economy. So they thought, "I know, we'll pick on nature 'cause nature can't talk back." Well, actually, as it happens, we've got good nature groups in this country like the Wildlife Trust and others, and we have challenged that narrative. We have called it out. But it's really, really disappointing to have seen that what was clearly just, as I said, performative politics, trying to blame nature and all this. And then you have things like the Bat Tunnel, which, I would say the lies we've seen about the back tunnel around HS2, they're almost like the equivalent of the story around straight bananas that was told with the European Union. There was never any truth in it. The EU never forced us to have straight bananas. That was something that was completely made up. But it was told enough times that then people believed it and it almost became a truth even though there was no truth to it. The same has happened around that infamous bat tunnel on HS2. Anyone would've thought that nature laws or Natural England, the government's regulator on this, forced that bat tunnel to be built. Not true at all. All the nature laws said is that when you're building this high-speed line, you need to take steps to stop it harming protected species like bats. And there are multiple ways in which HS2 could have come up with a better way of doing it, slightly amend the route or indeed just create new bat habitat in a much bigger area somewhere else. Instead, a bunch of engineers at HS2, 'cause HS2 HS2's got a lot of engineers, came up with an engineering solution for an ecological problem. And they created, guess what, 100 million bat tunnel. And just like every other bit of HS2, it ends up costing way more than it should have done. But it's much more convenient to blame bats than to blame HS2 for their failings on this. And much more convenient to blame bats than it is to actually try and think about how we could build a high-speed line in a nature-positive way. So that's what's been so depressing for us as the Wildlife Trust in all this, the extraordinary misinformation we've heard around this debate over the last 18 months.

And you talk about it kind of really being spearheaded by Number 10 and Number 11. We do hear some kind of slightly different rhetoric or storytelling from different parts of government. I mean, I was speaking to Mary Cray, the Nature Minister, a few weeks back and she was talking about, you know, the importance of biodiversity for underpinning the economy. Why do you think there is this kind of disconnect? And do you hope that the kind of words on the more nature-positive side will kind of come through and cut through to the highest echelons of government? Or are you not positive at this point?

I mean, you're absolutely right, Florence. The extraordinary thing is, is you could go back and look back to the general election in July 2024 and look at various speeches by ministers around nature in that time. A bunch of ministers and also the Prime Minister, Rachel Reeves. And the only thing that's clear about them is the inconsistency. There's not a joined-up narrative, and it's a very different narrative from Downing Street than from ministers. And so what you've not had is joined-up government or joined-up approach on this. What you've actually had is plenty of ministers like Mary Cray and others trying to do the right thing and then being undermined by Downing Street. I mean, I've actually As I've said before, it's indicative of the other problems that this government has had in the last 18 months on areas completely different to nature, but indicative of it. If you want to understand why this government's struggling, you could look as this is a microcosm of it really, how it's failed to sort of win a coherent narrative, failed to actually deliver the solutions even though everyone wanted it to succeed on what it had in its general election manifesto of restoring nature. I think what is interesting is I think maybe, just maybe now, Number 10 and Number 11 are starting to realise that this is really bad for them politically. And that's the interesting point here. I think my sense of what the thinking that was going on, and perhaps this was under Morgan McSweeney as well, under the previous sort of Downing Street machine, was I think they did a very simplistic thing, is that they were worried about losing Labour voters to reform. And because reform very clearly is anti-action on climate change, And we know that's very clear. I think they kind of assumed that represented all environment. And they assumed also that reform voters had the same view necessarily of Nigel Farage and Richard Tice. And so they assumed reform voters were somehow anti-nature as well. I think all the evidence shows they're completely wrong on that. The extraordinary thing about the British people is when you poll them time and time again, love of nature and the desire to see nature being restored is the one thing that unites everyone across the political spectrum, whether you're talking Labour voters, Green voters, Lib Dems, Reform, Conservatives, they all poll really highly on wanting to see nature put into recovery and restored. And they might use slightly different language on that. And people that are Reform and Reform QS voters are much more likely to say care about nature on their doorstep and close to where they live and where they walk their dog than perhaps worry about international agreements and so on. But at the end of the day, People right across the political spectrum in this country care passionately about nature. And what Luke Trewell has written in for More in Common, wrote in the Financial Times just before Christmas, he said nature enjoys like North Korean style of support in terms of the opinion polls on this. And I think Labour leadership made this really ridiculous error in thinking that somehow British people or particular segments that they were worried about, a voter segment, reform or reform curious voters, didn't care about nature. And as a result, they thought they were looking big and strong in trying to blame nature on this. But it's clear that they've lost quite a lot of support because of this. So we had an opinion poll commissioned by the Wildlife Trust just a month ago indicated that up to around almost 20% of the public think, are less likely to vote Labour because of Labour's very poor record on nature and because of the rhetoric from Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves over the last year or so. So we really shouldn't underestimate how they've miscalculated here. And actually, I think if Labour is going to try and win back some of those voters that it's been losing, it's got to move fast on a positive story about restoring nature in this country. And perhaps most importantly, doing it in a way that's integrated to its other things. I mean, this Labour government says it wants to build 1.5 million homes. Fine, it can do that in a nature-positive way. It wants to try and deal with the problems in the health service. Well, let's look sensibly at the role that getting people out into nature and restoring nature in and around our towns and cities can play in helping deal with the health crisis, particularly mental health crisis in this country. Country. This government says it wants to ensure food security. Well, you're not going to do that if nature's in decline because we're absolutely dependent on that. And then there's things like the National Security Report that the Joint Intelligence Committee published a little while back that is absolutely clear about the huge threats to our national security because of the breakdown of ecosystems here and around the world. So there is no good future for the UK unless we restore nature. And that's the narrative we need to hear from Keir Starmer right now.

In terms of the policy impact of all of this, you kind of said it was performative politics. Do you think, aside from the examples we mentioned at the top of the episode, like the Planning and Infrastructure Bill, do you think there's gonna be like a material impact on policy here? Do you think we're gonna see more changes or do you think it's just a question of rhetoric and the underlying kind of policy will remain the same.

I mean, you ask at a really interesting time, Florence, because I think we've got a test coming up very soon around something called the Fingalton Review, which was the review of nuclear regulations. I mean, let's just put this in context a minute. You were talking earlier about the Planning Infrastructure Bill that went through Parliament last year, became an act, and that did weaken our nature protections. It removed the ability of some parts of the former habitats regulations Put this in context. You know, for the whole of my career, and actually you could say going back to the 1940s, really what's happened is we've seen incremental improvements to our nature protections and regulations in this country. Never kind of the breakthroughs that someone like me would like, but we have generally, things have gone in the right direction slowly but surely. 2025 was the first year since 1940 that we actually saw environmental regression in this country. In other words, a weakening of nature protections. I mean, one or two other prime ministers like Liz Truss, for example, did indicate she wanted to do this in the past, but she didn't get long enough, of course, thankfully, for that particular act. But actually, this Labour government is the first government to have actually presided and make happen a weakening of nature protections. And that was disappointing enough. But then in December, just before Christmas, Keir Starmer said he'd received this thing called the Fingerton Review. Review, which was looking at the regulations that exist around building new nuclear power stations, which from the economist John Fingleton, which we said erroneously has recommended weakening of nature protections to enable faster building of nuclear power stations. And Keir Starmer said he welcomed it and he wants to implement the findings across the economy, not even for nuclear power. We think that review is deeply flawed. It's got some huge errors in it. I mean, I'll give you one. One of the talk about this, the equivalent of the Bat Tunnel thing here is some of the lobbyists talk about something called Fish Disco, which is this idea of these acoustic fish deterrents. In other words, sort of underwater speakers, to put this as simply as possible, around the water inlet valve for Hinkley C Power Station. And of course, a power station like Hinkley C is sucking up vast, vast quantities of water from the Bristol Channel. It will be when it's operational for its cooling. It needs to do that, whatever. But then how do we make sure it doesn't suck up loads of fish, endangered fish in the process? And they've been trying to figure that out. And they've again come up with an engineering solution solution, which is these basically blasting them with sound to keep fish away from these inlet valves. Not entirely sure whether it's going to work or not, but that's the so-called solution that EDF, Hinkley C, came up with in doing this. And then that's been dubbed this kind of fish disco. It's estimated really that will cost about £50 million to put in, which in the scale of the cost of this nuclear power station, which I don't know, looks like it's going to cost £30, £40 billion, is absolutely nothing to protect fish stocks in the Bristol Channel, which are hugely important for all kinds of reasons. But instead the Fingalton Review said, oh no, it's going to cost £750 million because they included the cost of all these, the water inlet valves. But you'd need these inlet pipes anyway, whether you're worried about fish or not. You need those for operating any nuclear power station. So yet again, we've seen a piece of work that we think is deeply erroneous, hugely flawed. The Prime Minister's just taken it lock, stock and barrel and now trying to apply it to the whole of the economy. So I rather like the straight bananas example, rather like the Bat Tunnel. We're now seeing yet again the risk that the Prime Minister is going to do something based on flawed evidence. And it is again, it's performative politics, almost a kind of ideology that we've got to deregulate and get rid of nature regulations, whether there's a good argument for it, an evidence-based argument for it or not. Right now, we were thinking that the government was going to make an announcement to move forward with the Fingerton Review this week. But of course, last Thursday, we had the Gorton by-election in Manchester where the Greens won with a bigger, much bigger majority than was expected. And I think all the indications are is that's finally causing the government to wake up and smell the organic coffee and start to think about maybe we need to rethink on how we approach nature. We'll see in the next couple of weeks or not, are they going to move forward with the Fingalton Review as proposed or not? And that's going to be the real test as to whether things have changed in government or not.

Hi there, this is Florence popping back in. Since editing this podcast, the government has issued its response to the Fingerton Review, also known as the Nuclear Regulatory Review, on March 13th. The government decided to accept in principle all 47 recommendations of the review, but has held back on the most intense deregulation, which would've legally weakened the habitats regulation as environmental groups feared. The goal is to implement the recommendations by 2027. Including the streamlining of environmental planning for new nuclear. Government says that this will be the most significant reset of nuclear regulation this century. Craig's colleague Joan Edwards, Director of Policy and Public Affairs at the Wildlife Trusts, said that the government had seen sense, but that we're still a long way from the government's election promise to halt and reverse the nature crisis, and that the changes could still mean damage for nature. The review will also introduce a streamlined mandatory biodiversity net gain framework for nationally significant infrastructure projects, which include nuclear power stations. And this adds to the existing BNG policy for house builders. It is, however, worth noting that Prime Minister Keir Starmer's opening to the report continues in the slightly combative tone that Craig is referring to here. Starmer says that the way we protect nature has deteriorated into an adversarial system that sees building and nature as a zero-sum competition, with some participants that defend regulations, not nature itself. Okay, back to Craig. In terms of this deregulatory appetite, as you say, the government is really kind of, when it comes to nature and particularly planning, it's really pushing this deregulatory agenda. Do you have a sense of where this is coming from in terms of business and investors? Is this something that businesses are asking of government? They want deregulation because so many of the businesses I speak to say that they want stability, they want consistency. Do you again see that this is government kind of doing its own thing, or do you think there is kind of a demand from the business and perhaps financial community there?

I think you're absolutely right. What I find time and again is the vast majority of business say what they want is clarity and consistency and security to be able to invest. Smart businesses understand that we need flourishing nature if you're going to have a flourishing economy, and what they don't want is chopping and changing and flip-flopping on regulations every they just want to get on with it. And actually, in many cases, they want to see much more regulation. I mean, for example, to create nature finance markets. Actually, the number of businesses and investors I talk to all the time that are desperate to start investing in nature recovery, but the main reason they're not at the moment is because they can't be sure where government's going on this agenda. And so it produces loads of regulatory risk. So that's really frustrating. Of course, there are other bits of the business community, the real dinosaur bits of it, that will argue for vested interests, for short-term vested interests. No, we want deregulation. So you even see splits within sectors. I mean, there were house builders that the Wildlife Trust work really closely with to look at how we can build new housing estates in a nature-positive way. And we enjoy really good relationships with them. And then there were sort of dinosaur bits of the housing industry that would actually like to get rid of all those kind of requirements, are quite happy to put up really pretty rubbish houses with plastic grass in their back gardens and so on. And the sad thing is, is I think Downing Street has listened much to the latter. They're listening to the dinosaurs of the industry that hold us back, whilst the more progressive bits of, in that case, the house builders that are trying to move us forward. But I think it's systemic of another issue, which is that so much of our politics and so much of our policy is so Westminster and Whitehall-centric. There is a Westminster-Whitehall bubble of the same group of special advisors going in and out of government, just regurgitating the same old ideological arguments and talking amongst themselves in the Westminster Whitehall village and repeating these kind of, these lies that get told about what's really happening and not really understanding what's happening on the ground, not really understanding what business wants, but repeating ideologies that have been there for years. So I would say, for example, Liz Truss was very clear when she was Prime Minister, her ideology, which was all about deregulation and enabling growth and so on. Of course, we know how that ended. But actually very often, certainly around issues to do with the environment, Rachel Reeves doesn't sound any different. She's repeating very similar soundbites, very similar messages to exactly what Liz Truss was doing. In that sense, you can say Liz Truss won. 'Cause Rachel Reeves, a Labour Chancellor, is regurgitating very much the same ideological lines that Liz Truss, when she was Prime Minister, was saying around nature and the economy and regulation. So what we want to see as the Wildlife Trust now is we want all politicians across this political spectrum to wake up, read things like the National Security Report that says very clearly there's no such thing as a flourishing economy. There's no such thing as a resilient and safe society unless we put nature in recovery. We've got to realize here this is fundamental to everything we hold dear and actually start getting serious about it. If you look at that National Security Report that was just published a month or so ago, and the Financial Times have done some brilliant writing on this, yourself included, I think, once, It says very clearly that if we don't restore nature, then it could result in further diseases like COVID and pandemics. We know that COVID almost certainly came from, well, many, most of the vast majority of the pandemics we've seen over the last few decades are as a result of degradation of nature and then zoonotic escapes into the population. If we don't solve the crisis in nature, we're going to have real problems with water security, food security, issues around health. Problems with supply chains for our economy and so on, problems with the need for clean air, clean water, all of these kind of things. Just ask yourself your question. If this was a foreign dictator that was threatening this to the UK, it would be absolutely the top of every political in-tray, would be thinking we've got to take action fast to deal with this. And it would be absolutely top of the news. Instead, because it's the way we are eroding and declining nature, then it's somehow brushed under the carpet and it's very low in the political priorities. But the science is saying the same thing. The science is saying really clearly this is a huge threat to our security and wellbeing and prosperity in the future. And we've gotta turn things around and we've got to start creating an economy where nature can flourish and the economy can flourish together.

Yeah, perfect. Well, I think that is an appropriate point to end. Alison Taylor, thank you so much for coming in today. Really appreciate speaking to you. And thank you to our listeners for being here. If you want to find out more about Sustainable Views, head to our website sustainableviews.com, where we cover sustainability regulation and policy, as well as due diligence in depth. You can sign up for a free trial online.