Natural England

Secretary of State, Ladies and Gentlemen.

Welcome to the marvellous surroundings of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and the launch of Natural England

So here we are. Natural England. I hope the name is growing on you. We didn't employ expensive consultants to come up with it, but asked our combined staff and stakeholders for suggestions. We got 320. Some are not repeatable in polite company. Some were tempting. How about the Real Environment Agency?

One senior politician has declared he won't use the name Natural England because virtually all of England is at best semi-natural. Do we really want to be called Semi-Natural England?

Natural England brings together the whole of English Nature, landscape access and recreation from The Countryside Agency and most of the Rural Delivery Service. It emerged from the review by Lord Haskins of Rural Delivery - reducing bureaucracy on rural businesses, less public body staff coming up the farm drive.

But its much more than that. Firstly, we are urban, marine and coastal as well as rural. And, secondly, there is an overwhelmingly compelling logic in bringing together Nature and Landscape, with the access that allows people to get to it, alongside the principle delivery mechanism, agri-environment, for maintaining and enhancing our terrestrial natural systems.

Access to Mountains legislation was first contemplated as early as 1884. The Mass Trespass of Kinder Scout... 1932. My father, who died at the end of last year, and would have been 90 last month, was one of the last survivors of the Trespass. He patiently waited until 1949 for landmark legislation to be passed by the post war Labour Government, the National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act. I was conceived around the time of the 1st reading in the Commons and delivered in the week of the 3rd reading in the Lords.

So today, October 11th, is personally special. My birthday. At 57, my personal expectations are necessarily modest. And I've been particularly damping them down since the Secretary of State said we should all reduce consumption by at least two thirds.

The 1949 Act treated Landscape and Nature very differently. The highest quality Landscape, National Parks, with access provision for public appreciation and enjoyment. The highest quality Nature, National Nature Reserves, for research and conservation - not for people, nothing to do with enjoyment or appreciation.

My informal walking gang - up to 16 of us go out on public transport in the Peak District to do linear walks - always cross Bleaklow in February. But its not for the brooding Dark Peak landscape that we venture forth, wonderful though it is. We go to find the mountain hares in their white winter coats - they were featured on Autumnwatch on BBC2 on Monday. Fantastic!

We don't have one side of our brain marked landscape or scenic beauty and the other marked biodiversity or nature. Remember our strapline - for People, Places and Nature.

The 49 Act offered Agreements, including annual payments to landowners, to bring access to the high moorland. But 50 years on, few had been created and the Government brought in the Countryside and Rights of Way Act in 2000. In the Yorkshire Dales, the area of land available for walkers increased overnight from 4% to 62%.

England-wide, in round figures, something like 50% of the area of sites of special scientific interest is access land and 50% of access land is SSSI. High quality landscape, nature and access together, with few problems other than local management arrangements such as to keep dogs away from ground-nesting birds.

One other provision of the 49 Act, Local Nature Reserves, particularly helped urban areas. Normally managed by Local Authorities, by the mid 1970s, just 30 had been created. As English Nature recognized the huge benefit of high quality, accessible greenspace to urban living, that number grew to 600 by 2000 and, incredibly, doubled again to over 1270 now, many in the most deprived wards of our towns and cities.

And finally to the Act that created Natural England, the best thing to happen to our natural environment in the last 50 years. Its been a long time coming and there are many people to thank for getting us to where we are here today.

Natural England will deliver an integrated service to its customers to ensure that public money is only spent on securing real public benefits.

For example, upland peat bogs, a precious habitat rarer in world terms than tropical rainforests, are an important carbon sink and a natural management system for storing water. This reduces flood risk and the cost of treatment of water for public supply, to the benefit of the 80% of taxpayers who live in our towns and cities and support rural communities through £2billion of annual payments to farmers and land managers.

The single biggest threat to our planet, including England's natural environment, is Climate Change. Natural England will have contact with those responsible for 70% of the land mass of England and will play its part in helping the Secretary of State and Government tackle it. Firstly, by helping land managers understand their role as carbon managers. And, secondly, by adaptation.

Much of England's natural environment is impoverishes and intensively managed. Loss of semi-natural habitat has been widespread and many of our important species are potentially trapped in relatively small, isolated sites, unable to move in response to climate change due to being surrounded by inhospitable land.

Uniting responsibility for landscapes and biodiversity means that Natural England can scale up the work we do to increase the resilience of ecosystems. We will spearhead a move away from a focus on individual site protection to a new approach that emphasizes reducing fragmentation and increasing connectivity across the landscape.

I've used the uplands as examples but there are parallel issues to tackle on a big scale in lowland England, on our coasts and in the seas around us. People will know that I chaired English Nature for nearly 5 years as well as being a board member of the Countryside Agency. I've seen at first hand the passion and commitment of staff and I know the same is true of those joining us from the Rural Development Service. It's what makes me so enthusiastic about the transition to Natural England.

Thank you for coming along this evening. It's a huge pleasure to be able to celebrate with you this landmark moment for the protection and enhancement of our natural environment.

Before I hand over to the Secretary of State, we'd like to show you a short film to give you a taste of the difference Natural England intends to make.

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