Mary Creagh: There is a “false dichotomy” between nature and economic prosperity

“We don’t just have to create the habitat, we have to tell the story.” Mary Creagh and I meet in a side room at County Hall at one New statesman event in the last week of April. Her assistants stand guard, dealing with a handful of people trying to enter the room for various reasons during our 25 minutes together.

Great Britain is one of the most impoverished nature countries in the world, which means we have recorded deep declines in animal, plant and marine life. One in six the species in Great Britain is currently at risk of extinction. The UK ranks 189th in the Natural History Museum’s biodiversity intactness index, with only 53 per cent of its nature and biodiversity intact.

“We’re taking action on all fronts,” Creagh assures me. “So first of all, we published our environmental improvement plan in December, which is a five-year road map backed by £500 million for large-scale nature recovery.”

For decades, British politics has been stuck in an economy or nature paradigm. A brief look at similar economies undermines such a binary view. France ranks 5th out of 240 countries on the Biodiversity Invulnerability Index and the island nation of Japan, the world’s fourth largest economy, has preserved 78 percent of its nature and biodiversity.

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Creagh says there is a “false dichotomy” between nature and economic prosperity. It highlights the importance of supporting farmers and the positive response to the Land Use Framework, which will shape land use to accommodate new renewables, housing and nature. “We will create a quarter of a million hectares of wildlife-rich habitats by 2030,” she says, pointing to schemes in the Cotswolds and Lake District.

Environmental groups, incl Friends of the Earthsay that the UK does not lack ambition for nature, but that successive governments have failed to meet their targets. “The plans we inherited from the previous government were not fit for purpose,” replies Creagh.

As chair of the Environment Audit Committee during the 2017-19 parliament, Creagh scrutinized the Tory government on issues ranging from fast fashion to sustainable tourism before losing her Wakefield seat in Labour’s comprehensive defeat at the 2019 election. She returned to parliament in the 2024 slip, this time for Coventry East.

As Minister for Nature, Creagh hopes to succeed where her predecessors have failed. “There were a lot of things in the previous delivery plan that were fundamentally unsupported by policy or funding. So we’ve been trying to identify funding and policy maps of how we’re going to deliver it,” she says.

But the holistic message of nature and economics may still have its detractors. While Defra is organizing the publications of the beaversThe Treasury has been criticized for its hostility towards bats at night as a blocker of development. Indeed, the Environmental Audit Committee has a current investigation into “HM Treasury and Climate and Nature EconomicsCreagh assures me that “Treasury is bought into this. In the last budget we had a fund of 250 million pounds that was allocated to us”. This is funding for the Woodland Carbon Purchase Fund, for which Defra is exploring the purchase of forest carbon credits to create financial security for the forestry sector.

The current government, like the previous one, hopes to use private sector money to invest in “nature markets”. “Private sector pension schemes want to invest in this, and they know they have to invest in this, for flood prevention, for national sustainability, for carbon sequestration,” says Creagh.

Adding these quarter of a million hectares of habitats could also go some way to addressing another key challenge for the UK public: access to nature. 20 million people in the UK do not live within 15 minutes of a green or “blue” space (rivers, lakes etc).

In response, Creagh highlights the work her department is doing to improve access to national parks for people with physical disabilities, investing £33 million to do so, along with a scheme to get more school children to visit the parks and expanding the network of coastal paths. “How can we get nature for everyone? That’s designing to the extreme,” she says, adding, “not everyone is a fit guy on a bike or a fit woman on a bike.” Creagh also mentions work within cities, including Coventry where it recently saw its first canal angler and the Canals and Rivers Trust has created a habitat for water voles one mile from downtown.

The government also plans three new national forests in the Oxford-Cambridge corridor, Bristol and the Midlands. “The National Forest Company has shown that you can build new housing on degraded landscapes, create places where people want to live, want to walk their dogs,” says Creagh.

The Minister also has responsibility for the nature component of the UK’s Overseas Development Assistance (ODA) programme. The Government confirmed in March that Defra would receive £115m of the ODA budget. “We’re prioritizing programs that benefit from additional money or that can become self-financing,” explains Creagh. She adds that their focus is also on the poorest communities, following criticism from the Independent Aid Impact Commission (which is currently under threat of scrapped), and in coastal communities.

One could argue that the UK has the same “handover” problem with nature that it has with what we might consider traditional infrastructure. Moving the UK from its current position to that of, say, Japan would be a challenge equal to solving the housing crisis.

Creagh borrows a construction metaphor when describing the task at hand. “We fixed the foundations with the new environmental improvement plan and delivery plans attached, so that there is transparency,” she says. “The land use framework is another important building block, and all of these things will improve as we move forward.”