For nearly all of the last Parliament, I had the privilege of serving as a Minister in Defra, helping champion nature and improve our environment.
Concern about the environment is the main reason why I am a Conservative and ran for Parliament. I’m proud of what we achieved at Defra, but am frustrated that as a party we failed to trumpet our record.
Having lost my seat in Somerset, I know better than anyone the electorate’s harsh judgement on our party’s time in government. We made mistakes, we failed to deliver, and we lost people’s trust.
And people might assume this also applies to our work on the environment. But it doesn’t.
After Brexit, we made environmental laws that are more flexible for our farming and fishing businesses, and better for the environment.
We have ended the unfair EU Common Agricultural Policy, which distributed payments based on the amount of land managed, instead rewarding farmers for actions that improve the environmental quality and resilience of their land, alongside food production.
We also required housebuilders to improve nature alongside building homes, and tasked councils with drawing up strategies for restoring local nature. Underpinning all of this was our target to halt species decline by 2030.
Contrary to what other parties have said, we took major steps to tackle the chronic problem of sewage pollution. Thanks to Conservative ministers, 100 per cent of England’s storm overflows are now fitted with monitors, meaning we know the scale of the issue, and water firms are mandated to invest £60bn in upgrading the sewerage system.
We also lifted the cap on fines for water companies for illegal pollution incidents and ring-fenced the funds for water quality projects.
Without doubt the scale of the challenge in reversing decades of natural decline and underinvestment in our water system – which is a legacy of successive previous governments – is great, and we could and should have done more.
But we did do more than any government previously to tackle the drivers of biodiversity loss and pollution.
This is exactly why I have been left disappointed with my own party. Despite showcasing ourselves as the party of rural communities, we undervalued and undersold the electoral asset that is our record on the environment.
And by tuning down our environmental ambition in our campaign rhetoric, we further eroded trust particularly with rural communities and many others that really care about the environment and were looking for a strong offering on this.
We should have championed our record during the election, especially in the traditional blue wall seats and the South-West. Instead, many of our traditional voters and potential new voters remained unaware of just how much we actually managed to get done.
This was not least through measures in the Environment Act, which I steered through Parliament, the Plan for Water and decarbonising faster than any country in the G7. This now leaves Labour the opportunity to claim our victories as their own.
The Labour manifesto was narrative heavy, lacking any meaningful policies and ideas to protect and conserve our natural inheritance. Now the election has come and gone, the King’s Speech left us none the wiser as to what specifically they intend to do to solve some of the most pressing issues of our time.
The Water Bill is a case in point. The key measures either imitate what we have already done or follow our approach. They are increasing monitoring of overflows, limiting water exec bonuses, and boosting fines – all policies we set in train.
In reality, the main improvement to water quality will come not from posturing legislation like this, but from the nearly £90bn of water company investment over the next price review, which the last government helped secured.
Though painful for many of us to relive, we cannot repeat the same mistakes of the 2024 general election campaign. It took years of hard work across multiple Conservative governments to build up our genuinely strong record on nature and climate change.
I therefore challenge all aspiring Conservative leaders to recommit to the environment, take the fight to the Lib Dems and Labour on our natural home turf, and pledge to build on our achievements in government.
First published by i Paper. Rebecca Pow is the former Member of Parliament for Taunton Dean
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