Market turmoil and the increased cost of government borrowing have led Labour to tease more spending cuts for 2026. Once again, rural communities look set to pay the price as the farming and flood defences budgets are both primed for cuts.
Cutting them would be a mistake. It will leave our precious wetlands open to further deterioration, despite being a key ecosystem and natural flood defence for rural communities.
In particular, we need our wetlands more than ever to tackle flooding. This year eight named storms have already wreaked havoc, preceded by the wettest winter on record. Climate change is making our winters warmer and wetter, this is just the beginning.
Wetlands once provided a natural reservoir and a place for water to go in periods of heavy rainfall. But, we have lost over 90% of our wetlands in the last 500 years, meaning water has had to find somewhere else to go: our towns, villages and farmland.
It is no coincidence that our bird populations have also been in freefall. We have drained, paved over, and built upon one their most important ecosystems which they called home. Rather than destroying our homes and livelihoods, excess water should be held in wetlands, providing a home for wetland birds and other wildlife.
This makes wetland restoration an essential method of halting biodiversity loss and protecting against flooding in the UK.
The previous Conservative government recognised the importance of wetlands for both nature and increasing the resilience of our farmland against flooding. That is why our post-Brexit farm payments - which operate under the principle of ‘public money for public goods’ - and the flooding budget both work to restore wetlands.
Our nature-friendly farming budget uses the same £2.4 billion budget we had in the European Union to support farmers in their efforts to farm more sustainably and restore nature. This includes payments for habitat creation on pockets of unproductive land to tackle flooding and pollution, including the creation of wetlands. These schemes are helping to restore wetlands, whilst benefitting farmers, protecting local communities, and restoring wildlife on farmland and at a landscape scale.
Equally, the flood defences budget funds projects that reduce the impact of flooding and protect communities. This budget spends billions of pounds of taxpayer money on manmade, concrete flood defences. Nature-based solutions (NBS), on the other hand, offer a more cost effective, longer term approach that can have wide ranging additional benefits for nature, such as habitat creation.
Recognising the myriad of benefits of NBS, the previous Conservative government committed to doubling the amount of nature-based solutions to flooding, with a target for 260 natural flood management (NFM) projects between 2021 and 2027. Wetlands, being one of the most effective forms of NFM, would naturally benefit from this funding.
However, wetland restoration will only be as effective as the budget allows. Labour says that it is committed to these schemes, so why has it primed future cuts to both the flood defences and farming budgets during the 2024 Autumn Budget? Blaming potential post-2026 cuts on ‘significant funding pressures’ does not give farmers the confidence they need to take up these schemes and help mitigate flooding. Not only will this cause even further damage to rural communities but it will needlessly undermine efforts to restore nature and protect communities from flooding as well.
Around 74% of our flood plain is agricultural land, making farmers both at increasing risk of being flooded but also a key player in the restoration of wetlands. Given the real term cuts to the farming budget in recent years, the government should restore the nature-friendly farming budget in real terms to £2.8 billion and index the budget to increase with inflation over the parliament. This funding is vital to ensure land managers receive the funding necessary to create and restore wetlands.
If Labour really wants to save money it should allocate a larger percentage of the flooding budget to nature-based solutions. Wetlands and other NBS simply provide more bang for the taxpayer buck, they are beautiful habitats that contribute to halting biodiversity, reduce water pollution and reduce flood risk. And yet, very little is currently spent on them with only £25 million of the £5.2 billion flood budget devoted to NFM.
We know that the UK is one of the most nature-depleted countries in the world, and we can see that flooding is getting worse. These are two problems which the nature-friendly farming and flood defences budgets can help fix by funding the creation of wetlands. These ecosystems are one of the most comprehensive and multibeneficial solutions available but, if they are going to be delivered, they need Labour to secure the budgets funding their restoration.
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