Tim Bonner: The government's new nature envoy must work with the countryside

According to press reports the government is planning to appoint a special envoy for nature as part of a strategy to put the UK at the centre of global efforts to tackle the world’s ecological problems. We hope that a key consideration for any potential envoy will be their ability and willingness to work with those who live and work in the countryside whether in the UK or abroad. They must understand the critical aim of nature recovery cannot be achieved by a top-down approach but only by working with those who actually manage the land.

The creation of an envoy for nature also raises questions about other appointments. In 2004 Tony Blair appointed a ‘Rural Advocate’, largely in response to the Countryside Alliance’s campaign against the hunting ban and the deep schism that policy created between the Labour government and the countryside. The role of the rural advocate was to put the case for rural people at the highest levels of government, and to make sure that the needs and circumstances of rural communities were properly understood. With the backing of his own agency – The Commission for Rural Communities (CRC) – the rural advocate produced an annual report laying out priorities for government action highlighting issues like building affordable housing, strengthening the rural economy, the impact of climate change on the countryside and the challenges of remoteness.

Successive appointees used the position to press the government to address rural policy issues and it is fair to say that whilst the last Labour government did not always follow through on his recommendations it did support the role. In 2013, however, the Conservative/Liberal Democrat coalition government abolished the CRC and downgraded the role of rural advocate to a political appointment held by a junior Defra Minister. This was an entirely different role to that originally envisaged and those who held the title were both politically constrained and in no position to understand policy development across government that might impact on rural communities.

This strange approach to people in the countryside was compounded when the Conservatives, under Boris Johnson, pushed through the Animal Welfare (Sentience) Act which created a statutory committee with powers to scrutinise the impact of government policy on the welfare of sentient animals. As our Chairman noted in the House of Lords at the time, no such committee existed to protect the welfare of rural people which suggested that the government was more interested in animals than it was in rural communities.

There is no sign as yet that the new government has appointed anyone as rural advocate or whether it even intends to continue with the role. We would suggest that it does make an appointment, but that it returns to the last Labour government’s vision of a non-political advocate especially for rural people who are disadvantaged, and on areas suffering from economic underperformance. An envoy for nature is important, but so is an advocate for people who live and work in rural Britain.