How Natural England saps economic growth

Are you familiar with Natural England?

Don’t worry if you’re not. You were never asked to be. Nobody has ever stood on your doorstep asking you to vote for it. It has no manifesto or elected leader. Yet, right now, this body has more influence over what gets built in our country – reservoirs, railways, homes, hospitals and power stations – than almost any politician. They hold a de facto veto on building in much of England.

Natural England is a quango, created in 2006 to ‘conserve, enhance and manage the natural environment for the benefit of present and future generations’. It sounds laudable. Arguing against Natural England sounds to most people like objecting to the very idea of our green and pleasant land. Before you have even heard a single fact about what it does, you have already been told that it’s fighting the good fight.

And that is its trick. A more appropriate name would be the National Office for Preventing Everything – or NOPE for short. That’s because Natural England is a taxpayer-funded ‘statutory consultee’, which means developers and public bodies are legally required to get permission from it on a huge range of projects. When it objects, projects can be delayed by years, redesigned entirely, taken to court, and subjected to costly new conditions. A body that nobody elected exerts enormous influence over decisions that impact millions of people, daily.

This has led to all manner of absurdities. Remember the £700million ‘fish disco’? This was the burdensome requirement imposed on the nation-defining Hinkley Point C nuclear power station, which effectively placed the safety of Bristol Channel kippers over the UK’s energy security. And the £100million HS2 ‘bat tunnel’? Here again, a critical national infrastructure project was tied up, this time because of concerns over a small colony of Bechstein’s bats, which are not endangered locally or globally. We have Natural England to thank for these bewildering outcomes.

The list, in truth, is endless. In 2024, Natural England killed off a community kite festival in Royston that had been running for 30 years, simply because they were concerned that mowing the grass for the festival would damage some flowers on around one per cent of the heath. In Sussex, Natural England spent four years blocking the construction of over 20,000 new homes because it would increase the demand for water. This, we were told, could damage the habitat of a snail – the little whirlpool ramshorn snail, to be precise. And, in Dartmoor, it even wanted to force landowners to cull 75 per cent of wild ponies because of grazing concerns.

In fact, Natural England is so committed to preventing everything that it objected to its own planning application. Three years ago, the lead adviser for the Devon, Cornwall and Isles of Scilly team at Natural England wrote a four-page letter seeking more information and then formally objected to the construction of its own one-storey office in Cornwall.

This matters because everything now costs far too much and takes far too long to build. Projects seemingly always go over budget and past the deadline. And that blocks the things that raise living standards: transport connections that put better jobs within reach and allow companies to scale, homes that allow young people to move out and start a family, reservoirs and desalination plants that mean we don’t have to endure hosepipe bans every summer, and nuclear power stations that will stop blackouts and get bills down. In short, it stops growth – the route to a better living standard for people across the country.

Britain is now in a growth emergency. Economic growth has been stagnant for decades. We have gone from one of the richest countries in the world to having some of the lowest GDP per capita growth in the developed world. Every month, around 1,900 British businesses go bust – a third higher than the average in the decade after the 2008 financial crisis. Opportunities once afforded to our young people are now harder to come by: youth unemployment has nearly doubled in four years, and around a million 16- to 24-year-olds are now not earning or learning.

The basic infrastructure that the British people rely on is breaking down. This summer, homes in the south-east of England have been forced to live off bottled water because of leaky infrastructure and, at the same time, have endured hosepipe bans. Trains are cancelled in the winter due to snow and ice, then cancelled in the summer because of the heat. Our energy prices remain among the highest in the developed world, and yet we still aren’t building cheap, secure, reliable nuclear power at the scale required.

The story is clear: our infrastructure is broken, our industries are leaving and the lives of millions are getting worse every single year. This is a national emergency and the government must take radical action to save us.

One of its first actions should be to scrap Natural England. For two decades, it has blocked growth in Britain without ever having to answer to the British public for its actions. This does not mean turning the Great British countryside into concrete jungles or poisoning our rivers. Rather, it means that Britain could start to just build stuff once more.

Andy Burnham shouldn’t consult, review or assess whether or not Natural England should be abolished – he should just do it. Every day the status quo continues, the British people are failed: factories aren’t opened, hosepipe bans are extended and energy bills continue to rise. It doesn’t have to be this way.

The decline we feel is not irreversible. It is not an immutable characteristic of our isles today – it is a political choice. Growth is a different choice – a better one, one that will improve the lives of the British people. It is time for the government to finally choose it.

Lawrence Newport is the CEO and co-founder of Looking for Growth, the political movement to end decline and save Britain.