Source · Select Committees · Environmental Audit Committee
Recommendation 25
25
Not Addressed
Paragraph: 123
We support the recommendations of the Public Accounts Committee and the National Audit Office made...
Recommendation
We support the recommendations of the Public Accounts Committee and the National Audit Office made in their work on Achieving government’s long-term environmental goals. The Government must provide a comprehensive, consistent, and time-bound record of funding for the 25 Year Environment Plan. In its response to this report, the Government must set out in detail the funding committed to biodiversity since the announcement of the 25 Year Environment Plan; how much has been announced or otherwise promised to date; and how much has in fact been spent.
Government response summary AI-generated
The government's response discusses international aid spending on family planning and reproductive health, which it links to global biodiversity, but does not address the recommendation to provide a detailed, time-bound record of UK funding for the 25 Year Environment Plan or domestic biodiversity.
Summary of the government's response below — read the verbatim text to verify.
Paragraph Reference:
123
Government Response
Not Addressed
HM Government · verbatim extract
Not Addressed
The Government accepts that monitoring costs and spend is important and have agreed, as part of the Spending Review 2020 settlement, a set of priority outcomes against which Defra group will report progress. This includes a cross-cutting environment goal. The governance of the 25 Year Environment Plan within Defra will track the effectiveness of spend as part of our performance reporting. The government does, however, already publish data on biodiversity expenditure in the UK and England as part of its annual biodiversity indicator publications, which were last published in October 2020. In England, public sector funding for biodiversity shows a fall between 2013/14 and 2017/18 but rose to an estimated £335m in 2018/19. We have introduced or announced significant new funding for nature in England which is not yet included in the biodiversity indicators, for example our £640m Nature for Climate and £80m Green Recovery Challenge funds. The indicators will next be updated in the autumn and Defra is currently supporting new research to review and update our assessments. The government also knows that while public expenditure has a significant role to play, it alone will not be enough to tackle biodiversity loss. Defra has therefore been working on a range of measures to leverage in greater levels of private finance, for example through the upcoming biodiversity net gain measure and through schemes such as the Natural Environment Investment Readiness Fund.
Read the full response on Parliament ↗