Progress towards the government’s 25-year plan to improve Britain’s natural environment has fallen “far short”, with “chronic decline” in certain species continuing unchecked, a post-Brexit environmental watchdog has warned.
In a report on Thursday, the Environment Protection Office said none of the government’s 23 environmental targets for the UK would be met.
Many of the targets, which include halving the length of rivers polluted by hazardous metals from abandoned mines by 2038, and achieving net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, are legally binding.
Of the 32 trends it assessed, such as the number of established invasive non-native species, and the incidence of serious water pollution, the watchdog found only nine had improved. About 11 trends are static and eight are broken.
“We do not think the current pace and scale of action will deliver the changes needed to significantly improve the environment in England,” the OEP said in its first annual review of progress towards the goals outlined in the government’s “25-year plan” from 2018 and the Act Environment last year.
Chairwoman Glenys Stacey said the body had “little in the way of good news reporting”, adding: “Recent progress has fallen short of what is needed to meet the government’s own ambitions.”
Green groups have expressed concern that parts of the government responsible for environmental policy-making, monitoring and protection have been gutted with funding cuts over the years.
The OEP was established in 2021 to replace the European Commission as the enforcer of domestic environmental regulations after Brexit. But environmental campaigners have warned that it may not be effective enough to hold ministers back.
OEP chief executive Natalie Prosser said that “if enforcement is the right thing to do to deal with non-compliance . . . we will absolutely use our enforcement powers”.
But he cautioned that the body’s enforcement powers were “the end point”, saying the aim was to focus on tracking and highlighting shortcomings and encouraging better practice from public authorities it monitored.
The government’s plan to “review or repeal” thousands of EU-derived laws has also sparked fears among green groups as the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs has volumes of EU law “on hold”.
Prosser said changing laws, “especially established ones”, should be done carefully, citing the main concerns as the “short timescale for change” and the risk of the process being “rushed”.
Creating appropriate and strong post-Brexit environmental legislation also risks “undermining other important work”, such as progress towards green goals, he added.
In its review, the OEP said it is particularly concerned about the continued decline in abundance of so-called “priority species”, such as the common toad and erratic ants. The number dropped 82 percent between 1970 and 2018, the most recent year for which data is available, the watchdog said.
He called on the government to publish a policy statement of environmental principles, which would require Whitehall departments to protect the environment when deciding on policy.
“It’s an obvious first step. . . But it’s still not there, sorry,” Stacey said.
Ministers must publish a review of the 25-year plan, set interim targets and produce an updated “environmental improvement plan” for the next five years by the end of January.
Defra said the forthcoming EIP would “soon set out the full range of actions the government will take to reverse natural decline, achieve net zero targets and deliver cleaner air and water”.