MPs urged to ask hard questions about £30m nature fund

Concerns over delivery

The Moorland Association has challenged Parliament to find out how much of a new £30 million Government habitat fund will actually reach the ground.

The Wildlife-Rich Habitat Fund will distribute £10 million a year across England’s National Parks, National Landscapes and the Broads from 2026 to 2029. Announcing the fund on 25 May, nature minister Mary Creagh said it would mean “more birdsong, flower meadows full of bees and butterflies, and new areas of native woodlands”. And yet some of the minister’s stakeholders are still to be convinced. 

Andrew Gilruth, chief executive of the Moorland Association, whose members are responsible for over a million acres of moorland in England and Wales, has written to the Public Accounts Committee asking it to scrutinise whether the money would deliver measurable results or be absorbed by “administration, consultancy and fashionable partnership-speak”.

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Call for parliamentary scrutiny

Mr Gilruth told Shooting Times: “Defra must show this £30 million will reach the moor, the farm, the keeper and the practical work that actually restores habitat. It is extraordinary that ministers can talk about upland recovery while failing to name gamekeepers: the people delivering wader recovery, wildfire prevention, vegetation management and essential predator management every day. Parliament must judge these schemes by results on the ground, not press releases from Whitehall.”

The letter, copied to the chairs of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee and the Environmental Audit Committee, sets out seven questions it wants Parliament to put to Defra. Among them: how much money will be spent on habitat management rather than meetings, consultancy and reporting; will farmers, gamekeepers and land managers directly benefit from the fund; and what outcomes will be measured – ecological results or corporate  checklist items.

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Questions over overlap

The association also questions whether the new fund is genuinely additional, given the number of overlapping Defra programmes already running across the same ground, from Landscape Recovery and Countryside Stewardship to the Species Recovery Programme and Biodiversity Net Gain.

The letter closes with what Mr Gilruth describes as a simple test: “Does the money reach the ground and does it deliver measurable improvements for nature?”