The pro-nature case for regulatory reform

Like many people, I care about nature for its own sake.

I like walking in the English countryside, watching the birds visit my grandad’s garden, breathing in some fresh sea air along a bracing coastline, and hearing wind rustle through the leaves of a tree. These things make me feel good. While I appreciate nature when and where I can get my fix, the truth is I still feel deprived of something those further up my family tree experienced in abundance — and perhaps even took for granted.

The loss of nature in England over recent generations is a tragedy. In the last century alone, we have lost 97% of our wildflower meadows. Most peatlands are damaged, degraded, and dried out, a fraction of England’s precious chalk streams remain in good ecological condition, and one in six species are at risk of extinction.

But nature is not merely an aesthetic concern. Stable ecosystems support everything from water supply to insurance markets. When nature declines, the costs do not disappear; they simply show up elsewhere — in higher food prices, water bills, insurance premiums, taxes, blocked development, and greater economic risk. In economic terms, the costs of nature loss have been socialised.

Despite decades of environmental policymaking, billions in public money, and layer upon layer of regulation, England is trapped with the worst of both worlds: ecological decline alongside endless procedural obstruction. This absolutely must prompt the question: why isn’t the system designed to protect nature working? When it comes to our regulatory environment, the answer is twofold.

Firstly, it is too focused on process, rather than outcomes.

The system we have created is extraordinarily good at paperwork, consultation, and litigation, yet remarkably poor at restoring ecosystems at scale. Boxes to tick, surveys to conduct, ecologists and lawyers to pay, but still fewer birds, pollinators, ponds, and woodlands. Procedural compliance is put ahead of ecological recovery. When environmental rules repeatedly generate delay without delivering visible recovery, those wanting to get on with building things risk not simply blaming the regulator and the governments that made the regulations. Increasingly, they blame nature itself.

However, the bats and the newts are not out there in the field holding a gun to Natural England or the developer’s head saying “protect me or else.” These creatures are not inherently the cause of the delays and costs: they are scapegoats for a system that is not working.

The second issue with our regulatory system is that it is built with nature conservation in mind, as distinct from nature restoration.

In other words, our regulatory framework was largely designed to freeze decline in place, not to reverse it. But in a country where nature has already been depleted so extensively, preserving the remnants is not enough. We cannot be held hostage by shifting baseline syndrome. While politicians have started talking in terms of restoration, this is not reflected within our regulations. It is here that YIMBYs should find an unlikely ally. Some of the strongest supporters for regulatory reform I have encountered actually emanate from within the environmental movement. Much like developers, rewilders want to do bold things in their backyard — namely, to restore nature to landscapes. But if you are in the business of restoring nature, the rules do not work.

To reintroduce butterflies, they find themselves stuck in a thicket of red tape. To create a pond that is for the sole benefit of wildlife, they must seek planning permission, facing additional costs and months of delay. To restore saltmarsh and seagrass meadows, they must apply and pay for multiple, expensive licences. This applies to businesses too: water companies wanting to create nature-based solutions to water quality, such as establishing wetlands to filter out pollutants, are blocked by regulators who would rather more expensive, concrete solutions are used because they are easier to monitor.

With this in mind, rather than ignoring the risks posed by nature loss, it should be the Right that puts forward a case for regulatory reform that is both pro-development and pro-nature. The current regulations are, after all, not working for either. Ditching one at the expense of the other is only doing half the job.

Dismissing nature because it is easier than finding workable solutions only shuts off innovative, market-based reforms and leaves us tinkering with a failing status quo. After all, if environmental policy cannot restore nature and enable our country to build, then it is not a system protecting the natural world; it is a system protecting itself.