Thank you for inviting me to your celebration today.
I’d like to thank Hilary, Rene, National Trust staff and the thousands of volunteers around the country for the work you do. And wish the National Trust a happy 130th birthday.
I’m one of the 5 million people who have a National Trust membership card like this one. We all have a special place we love to visit. For me, it’s Sissinghurst Castle in Kent.
I love the beautiful gardens designed by the writer and poet Vita Sackville-West and her husband Harold Nicolson.
Vita opened her gardens for everyone to enjoy in the late 1930s, with visitors putting a shilling into an old tobacco tin under the entrance archway.
This special place was donated to the National Trust in the 1960s, and it continues to welcome thousands of visitors every year. Admittedly seeing some inflation since Vita’s time!
As we have heard from Hilary, the National Trust is not just about preserving the past. It is carrying out vital work to prepare for the future.
The Frogmead Restoration project on the Sissinghurst Estate is restoring biodiversity – increasing flora and fauna, attracting wetland birds, bolstering the dragonfly population and allowing frogs to return to the area.
It is also reducing flood risk in the Medway catchment, protecting homes and livelihoods.
We need more projects like this so we can adapt to our changing world.
We make many competing demands on the finite amount of land that’s available to us.
Nature underpins everything. Our economy, our communities and our livelihoods.
But we have become one of the most nature-depleted countries in the world.
Restoring nature is a key pillar of the Government’s Plan for Change. That’s essential because we human beings are not merely observers of nature, we are an intrinsic part of it. When we destroy nature, we are ultimately destroying ourselves, and we can’t let that happen.
The National Trust’s new strategy to 2035 that will be pivotal in helping us restore nature. But the Government must play our part too.
I’ve just arrived back this afternoon from the UN Oceans Conference in Nice. I was proud to announce a consultation on banning bottom-trawling in our Marine Protected Areas. We can’t go on wiping out precious marine habitats just because they’re out of sight beneath the sea.
The oceans cover two thirds of our planet. If we are serious about protecting nature, we must protect our seas and the life and ecosystems they sustain.
This afternoon, my colleague Emma Hardy has told the same conference that the UK will introduce legislation this year to ratify the Global Oceans Treaty so we are part of the first group of nations coming together to protect biodiversity in the seas beyond national jurisdictions.
And yesterday, my colleague Matthew Pennycook announced that the Government will update national planning policy to ensure swift bricks are incorporated into new buildings. They make a massive impact on expanding bird populations. We will make sure that now happens in new developments right across the country.
Those three initiatives have been announced in the past 24 hours alone. But we know there’s much more to do.
We are committed to increasing access to nature for everyone, whether that’s hiking in our beautiful countryside, swimming in clean rivers, lakes and seas, or taking a lunchtime stroll around the park.
We will create nine new National River Walks, plant three new National Forests and support communities to create new parks and green spaces in their neighbourhoods.
We’ve already announced the first new national forest between the Cotswolds and the Mendips which will see 20 million trees planted in the coming years.
It’s a national scandal that our rivers, lakes and seas are choked by record levels of pollution. We’re cleaning them up with new laws to ban bonuses for water bosses who oversee catastrophic pollution incidents, and bringing in over £100bn of private sector funding to upgrade the broken pipes that are the primary cause of sewage leaks.
We’ve saved more than 40 thousand miles of footpaths and historic rights of way so they can continue to be used by the public.
And we are making protected landscapes, national trails, forests and countryside more accessible with our £33 million ‘Access for All’ programme.
I look forward to working with the National Trust to develop this work and open up more of our beautiful countryside for everyone to enjoy.
I know that we need to speed up nature’s recovery.
I asked Dan Corry to lead a review into environmental regulation. He pointed out that a very large proportion of applications come from organisations like the National Trust, the RSPB and others who have to wait months despite having a proven track record in protecting nature.
So we are going to speed things up by giving them the power to approve their own applications.
I’m delighted that the National Trust is a frontrunner for this.
The National Trust and Natural England, along with the Forestry Commission, are working together in the Peak District to pilot one of two ‘Nature Enterprise Zones’ – the other is in North Devon.
These zones will pilot this new approach, reviewing and testing how we can streamline and simplify the system so the National Trust can do more on protected sites, restoring species, and improving land management.
The Peak District Nature Enterprise Zone will span over ten thousand hectares of National Trust land. It will include trees, peat, grassland, farming, and it will open up nature to more people.
I’m excited about this pilot, and we’ll learn from it how we can expand the approach more widely.
Collaboration like this is vital to protecting nature. We are all links in a chain, and we have to pull together to get the outcomes we want to see.
I want to thank the National Trust for your continued engagement with Defra.
I know the Minister for Nature, Mary Creagh, was thrilled to be part of the historic moment at Purbeck when beavers were reintroduced into the wild in England.
We’ve fully banned bee-killing pesticides as a step towards helping pollinators recover, which will also support the bird populations that depend on them as a food source.
We are working with farmers to move towards regenerative farming that focuses on improving the soil so it needs less artificial fertiliser, fewer pesticides, and has more organic matter that helps retain water.
Approaches like this aren’t just good for nature and good for water quality, they’re good for farm businesses because they reduce input costs but increase food production and food quality sustainably.
Many people at this gathering are helping shape the first-ever Land Use Framework for England. A rather boring title for an incredibly exciting initiative that will provide the most sophisticated land-use data and toolkit ever published in our country’s history.
It will allow us to expand nature across whole landscapes while ensuring land is used more rationally for the many other demands we make of it for food, energy and housing.
The partnership between us is critical as we work together to restore nature for future generations. We’ll have to overcome tensions and disagreements from time to time. But this is a government that aspires to be the best government for nature this country’s ever had. And you are our partners in getting there.
The prize before us is huge.
Our rivers, lakes and seas cleaned up of pollution.
Birds, pollinators and wildlife back in our gardens.
Nature in full recovery and open to everyone to enjoy.
Nature underpins everything that we are as a society. It is our duty to protect it, cherish it, and restore it.
That’s the best 130th anniversary present we could wish for!