Science, Innovation and Technology Committee
Oral evidence: Insect decline and UK food security, HC 1239
Wednesday 12 July 2023
Ordered by the House of Commons to be published on 12 July 2023.
Members present: Greg Clark (Chair); Aaron Bell; Dawn Butler; Chris Clarkson; Tracey Crouch; Rebecca Long Bailey; Stephen Metcalfe; Graham Stringer.
Questions 110 - 186
Witnesses
I: Professor Lynn Dicks, Lead of the Agroecology Research Group, University of Cambridge; and Craig Bennett, Chief Executive Officer, The Wildlife Trusts.
II: Professor Alistair Griffiths, Director of Science and Collections, Royal Horticultural Society; and Mr Matt Shardlow, Chief Executive Officer, Buglife.
III: Chris Packham CBE, Naturalist, conservationist and environmental campaigner.
Written evidence from witnesses:
Witnesses: Professor Dicks and Craig Bennett.
Q110 Chair: The Science, Innovation and Technology Committee is in session. We continue this morning with our inquiry into insect decline and UK food security. To help us with our inquiry, I am pleased to introduce and welcome our first pair of witnesses. They are Craig Bennett, the chief scientific executive officer of The Wildlife Trusts. Before his appointment with The Wildlife Trusts, Mr Bennett was chief executive of Friends of the Earth and is an honorary professor of sustainability and innovation at the University of Manchester. Thank you for joining us. He is joined by Professor Lynn Dicks, the lead of the agroecology research group at the University of Cambridge and also honorary reader at the University of East Anglia. Thank you very much, indeed, for joining us.
The inquiry is looking at how and why there has been a decline in insect diversity and its implications for food security. One thing that has come to our attention is the success, or otherwise, of the various biodiversity initiatives that Governments have taken. In particular, we received evidence that sites of special scientific interest were not succeeding at insect conservation. Would that conform with your views? If so, why? I will start with Professor Dicks.
Professor Dicks: Thank you. Good morning, everyone. It is a real privilege to be here. Yes, I would like to talk about protected areas as a whole. Sites of special scientific interest are part of a network of protected sites that we have in this country, also including national nature reserves and special areas of conservation and special protection areas. As a whole, these are enormously important for insects and all nature.
I was very lucky that on Monday this week I was in a place called Woodwalton Fen, which is a national nature reserve saved for us by Charles Rothschild in 1910 and, arguably, one of the oldest nature reserves. It is a remnant of the wild, native fenland before it was drained in Cambridgeshire. While there, we saw beautiful Purple Emperors, Purple Hairstreaks, Southern Hawkers, Willow Emerald Damselflies, Large Skippers—a spectacular diversity of insects. It is really important to start by saying that our protected sites are looking after a lot of insect species.
But, and there is an important “but” here, they are not enough to reverse the insect declines that we are seeing and I will explain why. I base my evidence on a set of data. In the UK, it is true to say that we have the best biodiversity data in the world, especially when it comes to insects, because we have a very long history of biological recording. We have lots and lots of records going back of where different insect species are found. That allows us to calculate something called the probability of occupancy, which is the likelihood of finding a species in a particular place. It is not exactly measuring their abundance, although we also have excellent datasets on abundance of some groups, which you heard about in the last session.
Two studies have been published recently—one led by Rob Cooke in 2023, which I can share with the Committee. When you look at the probability of occupancy, if you compare 1 km squares that have a good percentage of protected areas with those that do not, you see the protected areas holding more species. This is an analysis just on insects—several groups of insects. They hold more species; they hold twice as many species. But if you look at how that probability of occupancy—the likelihood of finding a species there—is changing over time, it is declining. It is stable for rare species, but it is stable inside and outside protected areas. If you look at the common widespread species, it is declining. So we have this decline going on. The common species are actually declining faster in protected areas than outside protected areas.
What this tells us is that, if we are going to reverse insect decline, protected areas are really important as a starting point. But we need to do nature recovery in the wider landscape as well and we need to think about what is happening to the common species. We are looking after our rare species reasonably well; we are not looking after our common species.
We have two statutory headline targets from the Environment Act. One is about halting species extinction. The protected areas network, as it is, especially if we improve the condition of the sites we have, will do that for insects. But I do not think it will do the other target—the other statutory thing we are trying to meet—which is to halt species abundance.
The species abundance target is coming from the counted individual abundances. Each of the species in it is counted in a very systematic way. There is a whole series of schemes and about 1,200 species in that. A lot of them are quite common. All the seven common species of bumblebees are included in that. A good proportion of those species are insects; more than 60% of them are invertebrates and there are lots of common species. If we are going to meet that target and halt the abundance of species, we have to look at the wider countryside as well as the beautiful heritage of protected sites that we have.
Q111 Chair: Thank you very much. Mr Bennett, in terms of protected sites, SSSIs and others, is there anything more that can be done on those sites, as sites, to promote and protect insect diversity, or is the principal challenge facing us countrywide?
Craig Bennett: If I can, Chair, I just want to add a few extra things. It is often said that our protected sites—our sites of special scientific interest—are the very best bits of nature we have. That is not entirely accurate. They are a representative sample of the very best bits of nature that we have. More to the point, that representative sample is not yet complete. There are many, very precious wildlife sites in this country that should be designated SSSI that have not yet been so designated. If we think, it is only in the last couple of years, for example, that the Swanscombe peninsula in north Kent, a hugely important area for wildlife and insects in particular, has only just been designated in the last couple of years. Even if all the best representative sample sites in this country were designated, no one has ever suggested that that will be enough to protect our wildlife as a whole or, indeed, insects, in particular.
The second thing to say is that Natural England estimates that roughly half of our sites of special scientific interest are not in a good state. That is for a variety of reasons. Principally, it is because of the impact of activities outside the SSSI. You can imagine that, if there is a small SSSI designated for a particular insect species—and often they are not designated for insect species—if it is surrounded by a sea of intensive agriculture, where a lot of pesticides are being used and the land is being drained heavily, it would be an impossible task almost to protect the insect populations living within that SSSI.
Exactly as Professor Dicks has said, there is also the issue here of this difference between species and abundance. In over 100 years of nature conservation in this country, we have predominantly put the emphasis on species diversity. That is very important, but it is the really catastrophic loss of insect abundance, of many of our species, that makes a difference to ecosystem function. This thinning of the natural world is essentially why we are seeing the loss of nature being able to perform the job we need it to do.
Q112 Chair: Thank you. We are going to come to that in more detail. I will turn to my colleagues in a second. On the designation of SSSIs and other protected sites, is the ability or the frequency of designation for insect reasons sufficient? Or is there a problem with that relative to when people talk about charismatic species? If we think of bird reserves, and the RSPB is obviously a very important national charity, do insects get a fair look-in when it comes to designation?
Craig Bennett: No, they certainly do not. We would need to see many more sites designated for insects. Even then, it is much easier to designate them for the presence or absence of a species than to designate sites to help with restoring insect abundance. It is not to say that it is impossible, but that is much more about the wider state of the natural world.
At The Wildlife Trusts, one of the things we feel quite strongly about is that most of our designations are principally about trying to maintain things as they currently are. What we do not have at the moment in the UK at all is a designation that allows you to take currently severely degraded land and manage it for nature’s recovery, which, given we are already one of the most nature-depleted countries in the world, we need. We would propose a new designation that we could call wild belt, which allows you to take land that is currently in a very poor state for nature and manage it for nature’s recovery and in a way that would see quite dramatic change in nature on that site over time. That probably would play a very big role in helping restore the loss of abundance of, for example, insect species.
Q113 Chair: Similar to the built environment, councils conserve orders to cause derelict properties to be renovated. You are, in effect, proposing a similar thing for nature. Is that right?
Craig Bennett: Yes, absolutely. Remember, this will be, we feel, absolutely essential to deliver on our international commitments. It was only six and a half months ago at the UN Biodiversity (COP15) meeting in Montreal, which I was at, that the UK Government enthusiastically signed up to a target to get 30% of our land, inland waters and sea, in recovery by 2030, just six and a half years away. Most wildlife organisations estimate that roughly only 4% of our land is in a good state for nature in a way that would qualify for that. We have an enormous job to do in the next six and a half years to get 30% of our land in recovery for nature. We will clearly need many more designations of SSSI, of national nature reserves and new designations like wild belt at that time, as well as dramatically improving how we set the conditions to restore nature in the wider countryside, particularly the agricultural landscape.
Q114 Chair: Finally from me, given that our inquiry is about insect decline, is there a particular problem about insects not triggering designation? Is there a prejudice or lack of interest in insects relative to other species in other parts of the national environment? Professor Dicks.
Professor Dicks: Yes, there is, in the sense that we know a lot less about them. Insects are the majority of life on Earth in terms of species number. Most species are insects. There are a million or so described and, probably, five and a half million on Earth.
We have really good biodiversity data for things like risk of extinction in the IUCN Red List. Species get assessed for how threatened with extinction they are. The vertebrate groups, like birds and mammals, are very well covered—entirely covered in fact. Insects are extremely poorly covered. Most of the species are not assessed at all. If there are lots of species of insect threatened with extinction, we simply do not know about it because we have not assessed them.
There is one group of insects that has been entirely assessed for the whole world on the IUCN Red List. It is the Dragonflies and Damselflies—the Odonata. We can start to see what proportion of insects from that group are threatened with extinction, and it is about 10%. If we scale that up to all of the insects we think might be there, or even the ones we know and we have already described, that is a lot of insect species that are threatened with extinction. But we don’t know. They do not come through to the designations because they do not have these labels on and all this data around them. There is a lot of work to do.
Chair: Absolutely, that is very clear; thank you. I turn to my colleagues, starting with Chris Clarkson and then Graham Stringer.
Q115 Chris Clarkson: Thinking about the steps we have already taken to arrest insect decline, are there any particular synergies or conflicts with other environmental measures we are taking? For example, as regards efforts to improve water quality, to reach climate targets, do they have an impact on how we deal with insect decline, or do they enhance it or make it more difficult? I will start with Professor Dicks.
Professor Dicks: Thank you for the question. The really important message here to convey is that the water quality policy that has been in place for the last several decades is one of the few things that has been demonstrated to turn around the fortunes of invertebrates, including insects, in fresh water. We know this. If you look at the best global meta-analysis we have on what is happening to insects all around the world, it shows quite clearly that, in terrestrials and land environments, the numbers are declining over time either in total numbers of individuals or biomass, but in freshwater environments they are increasing over time. Most of those data come from North America and Europe, but we also have an analysis for the UK, from 1991 to 2018, which shows the same thing.
We have really good data because the Environment Agency has been monitoring freshwater invertebrates. Part of the reason for that is that the freshwater invertebrate community is used as an indicator of water quality. This means it gets monitored, but it is monitored less than it used to be. There is quite a big problem that I would recommend you look into with the amount of funding for the Environment Agency for this particular monitoring. We have a lot less now than we used to have 10 years or more ago.
Even so, what we can see is that freshwater insects are recovering. Many analyses have shown this. The recovery rate might have slowed in recent years, but there is still a long-term significant recovery compared with the early 1990s. This recent study, also published this year, showed that the number of species of macroinvertebrates, which are large invertebrates, some of which are insects living in fresh water, increased by 9%. That is equivalent to one and a half additional taxa, which is species per site over that period of time.
There is an increase and it is not just that the number of species is increasing; the communities are changing towards being more representative of cleaner waters. You have more pollution-sensitive species coming back, and that is happening especially in urban rivers and waterways.
There is a big synergy in tackling insect decline with the water framework directive and the policy that has been put in place to clean up water. It is really working for insects. We need to keep it up because it is slowing down that effect.
Q116 Chris Clarkson: Mr Bennett, is there anything you would like to add? Is there anything you think is working or is not working?
Craig Bennett: Broadly, there is not a conflict; in fact, quite the opposite. A lot of the things that we need to do to tackle climate change, particularly to try to manage our land in such a way that it absorbs carbon and puts carbon back into our soils, helps us mitigate climate change, but, in particular, the way in which we need to adapt to climate change, which is broadly about holding more water back in the landscape, restoring habitats and allowing species and wildlife to move. That will all be beneficial for insects as well.
Just on the point about water, holding water back in the landscape will be absolutely crucial. We must stop this practice that we have had for decades of trying to get rid of water from the land as fast as possible. It is exactly what we do not want for our food security or, indeed, restoring insects at the moment. There are so many good ways that we could be creating little wetlands on and around our farms—not least the reintroduction of beavers—to recreate some of the wetlands that we have lost. That will be good for our food security and it will also be good for insect species.
Of course, you could find some particular policies that some interest groups would hold up as climate solutions, such as biofuels, and say there is a conflict between growing biofuels through intensive agriculture, using lots of fossil fuel fertiliser, and insects. But I do not consider biofuels to be a good climate solution anyway; a lot of it depends on a matter of opinion. Broadly, good holistic solutions to mitigating climate change or adapting to climate change are very compatible with what we need to do to protect and restore the abundance of insects.
Chris Clarkson: Thank you.
Q117 Graham Stringer: If I can follow up on what you were saying, Craig, it is interesting about retaining water on the land. There was a huge row between the local MPs in Somerset and the Environment Agency and others, when the Somerset Levels flooded six or seven years ago—I cannot remember exactly. What would be your view? Was it a good thing that the Somerset Levels flooded or was it a bad thing?
Craig Bennett: When you see flooding in flood plains, the clue is in the name. That is what you expect to happen. The problem is when we put large developments in flood plains and are surprised when they flood. The water needs somewhere to go. Giving more space for water and learning how to live alongside water is the more effective option.
We do not have a choice with the climate changes expected in the future. Taking, for example, the Somerset Levels, if they end up too dry, what we see is a loss of soil literally being lost to the air as the lowland peat oxidises. It is the same in the fenlands in East Anglia, our most productive agricultural landscape, in one sense. But actually we are losing around 2 cm of soil every year from across the fens because they are too dry. That is losing a lot of soil, which deeply affects our long-term food security, and is taking carbon out of the soil and putting it in the atmosphere, which is exactly the last thing we should be doing at the moment.
I would say that we need a complete rethink about a lot of our approaches on agriculture that we have had over many decades, which are just not fit for the 21st century if we are going to mitigate climate change or, indeed, adapt to the climate that is already locked in.
Q118 Graham Stringer: You also said that a lot of our land is not in a good state. Is there any specific definition of what you mean by “a good state”?
Craig Bennett: I would start with nature in recovery rather than nature in decline and nature in freefall. We should bear in mind that the greatest threat to food security in the future in this country is the combination of climate change and ecological collapse. Those are the biggest single threats to food security. There is no such thing as food security if nature is in decline, because we depend, ultimately, entirely on nature for producing our food.
One thing I find extraordinary about this debate and how it has played out over the last few years is to suggest that somehow these are intentional. We have had decades of taxpayers’ money being used to fund very intensive farming in this country that has been wholly dependent on fossil fuel-based fertilisers. That got us to the place in 2021, after decades of doing that, at the start of the Ukraine war, where there were concerns raised about food security. If that is the situation we have after decades of funding fossil fuel-based industrial agriculture, that clearly has not worked.
The only solution we have going forward is to put an enormous amount of effort into regenerative agriculture, which restores nature and provides food security in the long term. If you step back from it, it is hard to imagine why you would want to have any form of agriculture that is not regenerative.
Q119 Graham Stringer: I understand that argument—I think. What I was asking was: do you have a definition that we could put into a report about what you mean precisely by “good state”?
Craig Bennett: It is an absolutely fair question. The point is that there is not a single definition that would work in every circumstance because it is very locally specific, habitat specific for different parts of the UK. For uplands, lowlands, there will be quite different requirements.
Broadly, land in a good state is land that is capturing carbon, as land should do, if it is managed well. It is land that is holding water back in the landscape and reducing flood risk by doing so. It is land where nature is increasing and the ecosystem services are being performed rather than nature is in decline. I am sure Professor Dicks might like to add to this.
Q120 Graham Stringer: I was just going to move on and ask Lynn. One of the difficulties—puzzles—about this inquiry is the information base about what is actually happening to insects here and in other countries. You talked about the studies of square metres of land. It is not the best base we have for estimating increase and declines in the insect population.
Professor Dicks: As to the datasets that give you probability of occupancy for insects, it depends how you define “best”. They are the best we have.
Q121 Graham Stringer: Most accurate would be a better way of putting it.
Professor Dicks: No, then they are not the most accurate; they are the most broad. You have information across a much wider range of taxa for many, many more species. We also have more accurate data on the numbers of individuals for butterflies, moths and bumblebees, and also wild bees and hoverflies, but over a much shorter timescale.
We fund national monitoring schemes, and the methods for those are systematic and standardised. The probability of occupancy data comes from records that are collected by what we call amateurs, but you have heard about them before. A lot of these people actually have extremely high levels of expertise, because they can identify species in a way that most people cannot at all. But those records are ad hoc.
The systematic monitoring schemes have standardised methods, so people go out and count individuals in a very fixed way. That means they are not biased. Some of them, not all of them, have a randomised sample of places. The wider countryside butterfly survey, for example, which matches the squares of the breeding bird survey, are randomly selected places. It is not like people are going to the places where they know there are lots of insects and counting them there. They are actually sent to a square that has been randomly selected and they do it in that place. These are very good-quality datasets from a scientific point of view. They give you a picture of what is happening for a small subset of all the insects.
Q122 Graham Stringer: You are experts and you obviously know the difference between insects and spiders and other creepy crawlies. One of our witnesses to this Committee said very politely that we really should be looking at invertebrates, not just insects. Would you agree with that?
Professor Dicks: It depends on exactly what you want to do. In principle, yes, because from a functional perspective, for example, pollinators are mostly insects—the ones that pollinate crops. But some of the natural enemies that do a lot of pest regulation services in agriculture, for example, are insects, but there are also a lot of spiders out there. We use small pitfall traps that are sunk into the ground to catch ground-dwelling invertebrates. Even in a very intensive field, such as out in the fens we have been surveying this summer, there were quite a lot of spiders and beetles running about. They are there because they can live there. They are there, and they are hunting and eating some pests. They are serving a very important function for that reason. Of course, earthworms also come under invertebrates. From things that are involved in making a productive landscape for food production, the kind of landscape Craig was just talking about, you need invertebrates and not just insects. There is even less information about what is going on with invertebrates than there is about insects and there are also a lot of them.
Q123 Graham Stringer: There has been a number of mentions of global warming, climate change. It is usually assumed that it will have a negative impact on wildlife. But there will be changes that some insects benefit from, presumably, in an increase in temperature. Could you give us a very quick run-through of the benefits and disbenefits for different populations of insects?
Professor Dicks: I can have a go. If you are an insect you are very small. Even the biggest ones are quite small. What matters from a climate change perspective is not so much the general average temperature but the extremes. From this country, it looks as if there are quite a lot of insect species expanding the northern edge of their range. They are moving into this country because of where we are. We have some species coming in and they are doing quite well—things like the Violet Carpenter Bee, for example, which is a purple-winged, beautiful, large, solitary bee species. That has arrived and it is doing quite well, and it did not used to be here when I was a child because it was not warm enough in the winter. There is quite a lot of that. Some of them at the southern edge of their range are also moving. It does not necessarily mean they are doing better overall; they are just moving and lots of insects are moving. This means we need to make it easy for them to move by making sure that the landscape is permeable and not hostile to them.
I was going to say at the start that the extremes of temperature of over 40° that we are now beginning to experience every summer—it is happening now and in some parts of Europe—have the potential to be very seriously adverse for insects. They do have critical temperature thresholds above which they cannot continue to live. For some bees, for instance, that is not very far above 40°.
If we are going to have extremes of temperature that last one or two days, for insects to survive, what really matters is that they need to be able to hide from that; they need to be able to find places they can go in the shade. Again, what you need is the wider countryside to have lots of what we call structural heterogeneity, which means bits of shade, bits of corners of field, bits of mess, bits of scrub all over the place, so that the tiny insect that finds itself too hot can reach a place within its range, which, if you are a very small bee, for example, might only be 200 metres or 300 metres, and can get to a place where it can hide from the heat.
Climate change often does not come up as one of the major drivers of insect decline because it is only just starting to kick in. If you start looking into the reasons why it is a problem for insects, it is quite uncomfortable reading for me as an entomologist.
Chair: Thank you very much.
Q124 Rebecca Long Bailey: Returning to agriculture, Craig, you mentioned that the only solution is regenerative agriculture. What are your views on the key principles and trade-offs associated with the “land sharing” and “land sparing” approaches in the context of insect conservation?
Craig Bennett: Broadly, particularly if what we are focused on is restoring the abundance of insects, as I said, that is absolutely essential if insects are going to play their role as the base of the food chain for other species and then for nature, more broadly. That means we want good abundance of insects everywhere. What we do not want is large parts of the country that have a far lower abundance of insects than in some parts of the country, say East Anglia, even if we might be happy that there is a restored abundance of insects in the uplands. At The Wildlife Trusts we think land sharing is the right way forward.
Q125 Chair: Mr Bennett, will you explain the difference, for people tuning in who may not know, between land sharing and land sparing?
Craig Bennett: Certainly. Broadly, there is one argument around land sparing. To promote land sparing, some advocates will say that we should have some parts of the country that are intensively managed for agriculture with a lot of inputs and that we grow a lot of food there. That will then spare other bits of the country where we do not have to have intensive agriculture and, therefore, in those bits of the country we can restore nature. It is very much about a bifurcated approach.
I do not think that that would work even from a nature point of view because, as I was saying, you need to restore the abundance of insects right across the country if you are going to have that base of the food chain. As Professor Dicks was just saying, if you want pollinators in East Anglia, for example, to pollinate our crops in the bread basket of the UK, then we need to restore insects in East Anglia as well as other parts of the country.
I would also say that there is a social element of this. I declare an interest as someone who lives in Cambridge and lives in East Anglia. I do not want to live in a green desert part of the country and have to travel many miles to go and explore good-quality nature. Everyone wants good-quality nature on their doorstep. That will be essential for food security and for climate mitigation and adaptation too.
Q126 Rebecca Long Bailey: Professor Dicks.
Professor Dicks: Thank you for asking the question. The land sparing and land sharing framework, which you have just explained really nicely, comes out of my department, as the department of zoology in Cambridge. It is an idea that has been put forward by Andrew Balmford and Rhys Green. You can make a very compelling case if you measure the densities of different species. It is mostly bird species but also some other groups for which the evidence has been presented. You can make a very compelling case that, if you want to save the most species or the highest densities of the most species, it is better to reduce the footprint of agriculture so that you farm the smallest possible area of land.
But in this country and in this part of the world there are some issues with that. One of them is that because we have a long history of agriculture here, we have a lot of species and some of them are the priority species that we really care about that actually depend on some kind of agricultural management. Some kind of grazing or hay-cutting or something like that is the habitat that they have become associated with and that is what they need. For instance, the Shrill Carder Bee or the Large Blue Butterfly require this low-yielding agriculture which is what we used to have.
From that perspective, the land sparing idea does not support those species. In fact, the one analysis that has been done by that group in England shows that for a good proportion of the species—actually it is almost half of the 83 bird species that they looked at—low-yielding agriculture is part of the best—the optimal—mix. It is either that you have a three-compartment model, where you have low-yielding agriculture and high-yielding and nature, or you have land sharing. So, you have nature and farming together and just a bit less of the nature that is purely nature.
When you look at it in this country, there is really strong evidence that land sparing is the best everywhere anyway. Also, I would go much further than that. This is similar to what Craig said. The small habitat features, like hedgerows, field margins and field corners—small patches of scrub—are not just important for insects; they are part of a productive landscape and they have to be part of the highly intensive, highly productive farmland that falls into the land sparing part of the framework. Without them, agriculture is unsustainable. You cannot take out all the hedgerows. Yet, in the land sparing literature at the moment people are equating those things like hedgerows and field margins with land sharing, saying they are not cost-effective and the evidence supports not including those in farmland.
I quite strongly disagree with that. There is evidence that shows that you can take up to 8%, and maybe more, of the land out of production into features like that without losing any yield, so it is part of an intensive productive landscape. The way that you do that is by planning them carefully and managing them well. The management of things like hedgerows and field margins is really important and it is very variable.
If you base your evidence on what is happening in the countryside at the moment, on the state of some of the hedgerows and field margins that we have now, they are not all the best they could be. It looks like they are not providing that productive element. You can increase the number of pollinators quite a lot just by improving the management of the hedgerow, for example.
Land sharing and land sparing is not a very helpful dichotomy here, particularly, although it is certainly important in the rest of the world.
Q127 Rebecca Long Bailey: As for the Government’s policy direction on this, if you could make demands of the Government today in promoting that land sharing-type of agenda that you have both spoken about, what would you like to ask the Government to do—whether it be land-use planning or trying to amend farming subsidies in some way to promote that? Are there key asks? You do not need to go into lots of detail or we will be here all day. Of all the Government’s asks, any specific key points will be helpful for the Committee.
Chair: Could the witnesses be brief because there are quite a few more questions to get through?
Craig Bennett: DEFRA needs to be much more ambitious with what it is trying to do with farming policy—in particular, SFI, the sustainable farming incentive. Curiously, DEFRA’s view over the last couple of years is that it has been very worried that there are not enough farmers going into the scheme. There was, at one point, a narrative that it did not want to make it too ambitious because it might put farmers off. I think it has done exactly the opposite. The more schemes you can put within SFI and offer generous payments to farmers to do them, the more farmers will uptake it. I speak to many farmers who say there are almost not enough standards within SFI to tempt them into it. So I think holding back on the ambition has been a problem.
The second thing is that what used to be called the local nature recovery tier of environmental land management schemes was replaced a year or so ago by Countryside Stewardship Plus. I can see the logic of that because it carried over the 50,000 farmers that were already in Countryside Stewardship. The one thing to make sure in that is that we build the connectivity because, historically, Countryside Stewardship schemes have worked on a farm-by-farm basis. If we, as taxpayers, are rightly going to fund farmers to put hedgerows back in the landscape, we need to make sure that the hedgerow in one farm connects to the hedgerow in the farm next door and across the wider landscape to build that nature recovery network that is so dearly needed.
Finally, I would say we have to move fast on creating new wetlands. One of the simplest ways we could do that is to allow the wild roaming beavers again. They do it for free. It has been rather odd, over the last couple of months, that we have seen DEFRA go cool on that idea.
Q128 Rebecca Long Bailey: Professor Dicks.
Professor Dicks: Farmed landscapes need to be very productive. They also need to have shot through them this network of small habitat patches, which is well designed and very well managed. What we must not do is reduce food production in this country overall because that offshores the biodiversity impact to imported food that is coming from places that are much more diverse, where the completely natural habitat is currently being converted into agriculture. The biodiversity impact of that is much higher. Productive landscapes still need to have some small habitats in them and we can get better at managing them with incentives for farmers that are well designed and audited.
Rebecca Long Bailey: Thank you.
Q129 Stephen Metcalfe: Good morning. Building on what Rebecca was saying, what are the main challenges between resolving the conflict that exists between high-yield farming and maintaining insect diversity? Can those be mitigated against? If so, are there any particular policy recommendations we should include in our report to do that?
Professor Dicks: One of the main challenges is that we have an agricultural system that is very productive but it is quite dependent on chemical inputs, which are unsustainable in many ways, especially the fertiliser use. There is a whole aspect, which is the food that we choose to eat; we eat too much meat, probably, and so we produce too much livestock. The mix is a bit wrong.
The whole agricultural system is locked into reliance on chemicals and crop varieties require it. Reducing that and moving away from it is complex, difficult and requires some risk, which, quite understandably, farmers are not particularly keen on, especially in the current environment. The way to reduce the use of pesticides, especially when it is unnecessary, which it sometimes is—sometimes it is more prophylactic than it ought to be—and reduce the use of synthetic fertilisers is to manage the system differently so that you have more of a circular approach and you are creating your own organic matter in the soil; you bring in some livestock into the system. These are all the aspects of regenerative agriculture.
What are the policies required to drive that? One really important thing is very good-quality agronomy advice, which is independent of the chemical companies. There is just not enough of that and people giving that advice, who really understand ecosystems—not just agriculture and agronomy but ecosystems and the way that the agricultural system is an ecosystem with soil and insects also involved.
Stephen Metcalfe: That is very helpful; thank you.
Craig Bennett: To add to this and build on what Professor Dicks said, unquestionably in the years ahead, one area of tension will be in the debate on pesticides. As the UK, we have just signed up at the UN Biodiversity (COP15) to the Kunming-Montreal Biodiversity Framework, which commits us to halving the harm from pesticides by 2030 in the next six and a half years. I think it is entirely possible to do that. Of course, there are occasions when pesticides need to be used. Even I would say that. Just as Professor Dicks was saying, the problem is that they have ended up being used on a routine basis and overapplied.
The huge opportunity we have over the next five to 10 years, using new technology, is to use pesticides much less. There has always been an understanding of things like integrated pest management and how you can have companion planting, planting crops next to each other, and different types, so that you can boost the abundance of, say, predator insects that eat pest insects; that would be a very good thing to do. I have also seen use of things like drones and remote sensing to get really good, high-quality data in the field to be able to identify when there is a spot outbreak of pests and use spot treatment of a pesticide, rather than applying it broadly. I have even seen use of small robots to do that, using artificial intelligence to kill pests on a plant-by-plant basis.
If we open our minds to it in the years ahead, the opportunities we have to see a dramatic reduction in the use of pesticides will make a huge difference to restoring insect abundance. It will also save money for farmers too and improve our food security. We have to seize that opportunity but it will require a change in mindset.
Q130 Stephen Metcalfe: Looking beyond agriculture so that we get the balance right between high-yield agriculture and maintaining insect diversity, we have areas of special protection. Is that enough, between our specially protected areas, between getting the balance right in agriculture, to address the insect decline that we are experiencing? If it is not, what else can we do? What can the Government do to create wider areas?
Chair: Very brief answers to this question, please, because we are running out of time.
Craig Bennett: Very briefly, we need to get the most out of our protected areas. We need new protected areas as well and we need to do a much better job at how we restore insect balance in the wider countryside. Also, do not forget that urban nature is very important as well. A lot of our insect populations do better in our towns and cities, and particularly our gardens, than in the wider countryside. If we do the right job on all of those, we will see a restoration of insect diversity and abundance.
Professor Dicks: I agree. If we get habitat management right, we do the nature recovery and we build the nature recovery network that we are now starting to build, it will prevent insect decline.
Q131 Stephen Metcalfe: Very quickly on that last point, bearing in mind that we have to make recommendations to Government, if you are saying the urban environment has a lot to offer in this area, what policy would deliver that?
Craig Bennett: Again, it is making sure that we have areas in the urban environment where you have good habitat. The beauty about talking about insects is that the habitat does not need to be very large. If you are an insect, a grass verge left to grow wild is the equivalent of having a rainforest right there. The potential is absolutely enormous.
There are also issues around air pollution and light pollution, which I know my colleague Matt Shardlow will be happy to talk about in the next session. He knows much more about it than I do. There are issues there to think about as well.
Broadly, on the potential, the lasting thought for you on this is that one of the easiest areas of wildlife conservation to fix if we put our mind to it is restoring the diversity and the abundance of insect species. Everything else depends on it, given that they are the base of the food chain. We really need to put effort into this in the next few years.
Stephen Metcalfe: Thank you very much.
Chair: On grass verges, Tracey has a question.
Q132 Tracey Crouch: I do indeed. I should declare that we are family members of the Kent Wildlife Trust so there is no conflict of interest. You will recall that Kent County Council mowed down one of The Wildlife Trusts’ roadside nature reserves with horrible, devastating effect.
How does The Wildlife Trusts work now with local authorities to make sure that they understand the importance and value of roadside nature reserves?
Craig Bennett: Right across The Wildlife Trusts, we put a huge amount of effort into working with local authorities on this issue. Many other organisations do as well.
Plantlife has been fantastic at promoting “No Mow May”, for example. What we are talking about is the need for a cultural shift. The good news is that, say, over the last decade, there has been a cultural shift in this country from a point where, even 10 years ago, if people saw a bit of grass that had been left to grow long they would think it is untidy. Now, most people understand that it is being left to grow long to produce wildlife habitat. Sadly, old habits die hard, and sometimes, particularly around local authorities, there might still be people who are there on a mower and they chop down the grass at a time when they shouldn’t. Again, this is rather bizarre because this is one of the ways in which local authorities can often save hundreds of thousands of pounds by mowing less. So there are a lot of opportunities here.
At The Wildlife Trusts, we are working with local authorities across the country to do this. I should add thank you for being a member of the Kent Wildlife Trust.
Q133 Tracey Crouch: On “No Mow May”, it is wonderful that so many local authorities are engaged in that. The problem is that you then get a mass massacre of wildlife areas come June. What are wildlife trusts doing to make people understand that it is wonderful to have “No Mow May”, but you can also keep them there most of the year round?
Craig Bennett: That is exactly right. We would urge local authorities and other landowners to leave grass to grow long. Normally, one cut a year in the autumn is enough for this. We have to get beyond the habit of thinking that we need to mow more regularly than that if what we are trying to do is promote this wildlife habitat. Of course, we should always mow to keep sight lines and so on to ensure safety for road traffic and so forth. Everyone understands that. Broadly, you really only need one mowing a year in autumn, and that is the optimum for restoring insects.
Q134 Chair: Is Tracey right that, if you have “No Mow May” and you have an abundance of insects that flourish, you slaughter them in June?
Tracey Crouch: Not Craig, in particular.
Chair: Not personally.
Professor Dicks: It is probably better for wildlife, in general, if you leave some unmown areas. There are also some species that quite like mown areas. There are some bees that nest in lawns that prefer either bare soil or quite close to it.
Q135 Chair: “No Mow May” is still the right thing to do.
Professor Dicks: It is wonderful. I was lucky enough to be at the Chelsea Flower Show on the Royal Entomological Society Garden a few weeks ago. I spoke to a lot of members of the public. A very surprising proportion of them knew about “No Mow May” and were quite excited about it. It generates a connection with nature, which I think we had lost, and it is starting to come back. People see the flowers; they see the insects; they start to appreciate that there is a different way to garden, which is wonderful.
Chair: Finally in this session, Chris Clarkson.
Q136 Chris Clarkson: Despite the Government’s commitment to work towards nature recovery networks, we have heard evidence saying that connectivity of landscape has been removed from the latest biodiversity metric. Is the Government doing enough to encourage nature corridors? If not, what recommendations would you suggest we make to them to improve them? I will go to Professor Dicks first.
Professor Dicks: Thank you for the question. The first thing to say is that connectivity is quite important for all nature, especially things that live at small scales. It does not have to be actual corridors; it is just a permeability of the landscape. It is whether there are small patches that are reachable from other small patches in a series of stepping stones, which, if you are a butterfly, can be quite small scale.
The current biodiversity metric, which is being used to score habitats for the biodiversity net gain policy, does not specifically have connectivity in it. It could have done, but it has other ways it could also be improved on from an insect perspective. It has an opportunity to add the points for having strategic significance, which links to the local nature recovery strategies, which are going on all over England.
It allows for the planning of nature recovery networks at quite local scale and then you can add to the points, if you are fitting into that scheme. Also, I would say about the biodiversity net gain metric that it gives scores to habitat types based on condition. There are definitely opportunities to improve that for insects. What is missing from a lot of the habitat condition scores is the floweriness—the number of flower resources that are required. The best example of that is that the ditch habitat condition does not say anything about the floweriness. There are lots of ditches in some landscapes which provide very important flower resources for a whole range of insects, including some quite rare ones. The species of flower they like actually reduce the condition of some of the habitats; things like hogweed and cow parsley can be quite important for insects.
There is some tweaking that you could do of the biodiversity metric itself that would make it much better at reflecting habitat quality for insects, which I have already said is really important. From a pollinator ecology perspective, it is the quality of the habitats rather than exactly how they are configured in the landscape that is more important. But you do need to have a network of small features that goes all the way through the landscape everywhere to reverse insect decline.
Craig Bennett: It is disappointing that DEFRA did not have better metrics for connectivity, so I agree with that. There is lots of thinking about how that could be done. It strikes me at the moment that there is one policy measure that would make a difference for so many different environmental concerns. That would be to make sure that we have really generous vegetation buffers around all our water courses. You could have a mandatory minimum, but, equally, you could then have generous payments to farmers and other landowners for 30-metre buffers, say, around our rivers. You could imagine a sliding scale. If it is a ditch, it might be a smaller buffer; if it is a major river, you could have a bit larger buffer.
That one policy measure would dramatically reduce the amount of pollution and agricultural run-off going into our rivers, which is a huge area of public concern at the moment. It would dramatically reduce soil erosion—stop soil going straight into the rivers. It would create the backbone of that nature recovery network because our rivers are a fantastic way of connecting wildlife habitats. As we have said in this evidence session, insects do particularly well where there is water. Actually doing that around our rivers would represent a real boost to insect populations. It would also enable species to move through that connectivity as the climate changes.
I find it hard to think of any other measure, other than massively reducing pesticides, that would be of such benefit to not only our insect populations but so many other of these environmental concerns as well.
Chris Clarkson: Thank you very much.
Chair: Thank you, Chris. Thank you to our witnesses in this first session, Professor Dicks and Mr Bennett.
Witnesses: Professor Griffiths and Mr Shardlow.
Q137 Chair: I am going to invite our next pair of witnesses to join us at the table. As they take their seats I will introduce them. Professor Alistair Griffiths is director of science and collections at the Royal Horticultural Society. He has a background in both horticulture and science—in botany. Prior to joining the RHS, he spent a decade as the head scientist at the Eden Project in Cornwall. Joining him to give evidence today is Matt Shardlow, chief executive of Buglife, a national charity. Indeed, we are told that it is the only organisation in Europe devoted to the conservation of all invertebrates, so it is germane to Graham Stringer’s question as to whether we should be broadening our scope beyond just insects. We are very grateful to both of you for joining us today.
Perhaps I can start with a question to Mr Shardlow. There was a Buglife citizen science survey. You asked people to report the number of insects squashed on car number plates. I think that proved quite significant in drawing attention to the subject under discussion. Would you very briefly describe the nature of that survey and how it is to be followed up?
Mr Shardlow: Ideally, we would want to know how many insects there are for each species in the countryside. That would be the best data we could have, but that is unrealistic. There is no way we can have that data. All the measures we have are proxies or indicators; they are subsets; they are samples that tell us something about what is happening to insect populations, but none of them tells us the whole story.
You have already heard that most of the data in the UK is based on distribution data; that is points on a map, not the numbers of things present in the environment. This is very important data; it is good, solid data, but it underestimates change. The reason it underestimates change is that, if you go to a field, you might have 1,000 bees. The next time you go back you might have one bee. On the distribution data that is still the same dot, but in abundance terms you have lost 99.9% of the bees in that field. So it is insensitive to change.
Most of the data we have had in the UK is based on distribution on points and not on actual abundance. What abundance data we have had has been very specific and that is on sites. People have gone out and looked at how many butterflies are flying on this transect; how many bumblebees are flying on this transect; how many moths are in my trap. That data is very good but has problems as well because it is very localised. Those localised data points are selected by people and are not random; they are not spread evenly across the countryside. There are problems with that sort of data because if people do not catch stuff they might stop looking. We wanted to come up with something that would give us a measure of abundance across the countryside, as well as something that was general and not down to individual sites that are selected by people.
The basic methodology is that you have an app on your phone. You clean your number plate and start your app and your journey; you get to the end and count the number of insects on your number plate. It is very simple. This gives us a whole wealth of data because we know what car is being driven; we know the type of vehicle; we know the route that is taken and when; we can put in information about the vegetation surrounding where people have driven, information about the weather and so on. In the future, we hope that, if we can get much more detail out of that, we could look, for instance, at pesticide use where they have driven and whether there is an effect that we can detect.
Q138 Chair: To pause there to ask a follow‑up question, the headline was quite striking. You found a 60% decline in 20 years of what were described as UK flying insects. In our inquiry we have heard evidence from the National Farmers Union that has been quite critical of the use of this, including the Committee’s citing of it. The NFU’s evidence to this Committee said: “It is a concern that such…research can be used to catalyse a parliamentary inquiry…when there are significant questions about the robustness of the methodology...This is not a good science and an evidence-based approach.” This is a public forum and it is perfectly reasonable for people to critique it. They say it does not allow for the increasing incidence of vehicles on roads, for example, and, quoting from the NFU’s evidence to us, it “also assumes the insects you find in the space a couple of feet above a road reflects all the insects you find in the wider countryside…”. What is your response to the National Farmers Union’s critique of your study?
Mr Shardlow: There are a couple of real strengths in this compared with some of the other surveys that we have. All the surveys add something to this data, so I would not point to any one and say you should just look at that; you have to look across the board because they all tell you slightly different things.
In terms of the strengths of our data, I do not know whether you are familiar with how pharmacological research works. You have to register your study before you do it and you have to present information and data at the end. Because you do the app at the beginning, it means that, even if you get a zero count at the end, you should register it. A common problem of these schemes is that zero counts get undercounted. Because you are registering on the app, you get the data at the end. Also, it does not require expertise. It is quite simple to count insects. Aaron Bell also raised a concern about whether people were self-selecting in the survey and, therefore, they might be submitting data that they thought we might want to hear about. I do not really see how that works. That would mean that in 2004, when people first did it, they would have had to put in high figures, and last year they would have had to put in low figures. As they do not know what a low and high figure is, that would be quite a hard feat for them. So we do not share some of those concerns. I have talked about site selection.
Turning specifically to the NFU’s concerns, we have information about car types, so we can look at questions like aerodynamics. We have questions about traffic density, so that enables us to look beyond the question of whether it is just that roads are busier now. That did not seem to be a very big factor, so we are fairly confident that that is not a concern. It is in the data and so we can control for it. If we can look in the data and find how that factor is influencing it, we can control for it and look across the years with an even hand.
The same goes for speed. We can look at speed and the number of impacts you get at different speeds, and the stickiness of number plates. I think we have covered most of those concerns. I mentioned the vegetation stuff as well. There is a clear correlation with the type of vegetation off the sides of the roads that you are driving through. It is not simply what is on the road that we are measuring.
Q139 Chair: I think you conducted a survey this year as well. I know you have not published the overall analysis yet, but I am sure you have been looking avidly at the results that have been coming in. Give us a flavour of what this year has shown.
Mr Shardlow: As you said, we found in 18 years a 64% decline, and that was 5% lower than the previous year. This is not a trend because we do not have enough data points to call this a trend yet, but this is a change or a decline over a period of time.
Q140 Chair: Just explain the comparison with last year. What is the change last year versus this year?
Mr Shardlow: The first year we did it was 2021 and we repeated the survey last year. Each year we have about 5,000 journeys and people taking part. It went down from 5% between the first two years across the UK. There is some variability within country.
Q141 Chair: It was 5% and then another 5%.
Mr Shardlow: It was 55% and then another 5%, or 57% and another 5%.
Q142 Chair: Fifty-seven per cent. was 20 years before, was it not?
Mr Shardlow: It is 18 years across the whole thing and 64% across the whole 18 years, but 5% of that was in the last year. We are only halfway through this year. Obviously, we do data cleaning where we do not have all the information, or we take data out and just do not use it, for instance, so this is very provisional, but I think I can say that this year it looks as if the same trajectory is continuing from the data we have. Certainly, at the start of the survey the numbers being reported were very low; it is the lowest we have had. It has picked up a little bit, but we still have another few weeks to run and so it is very provisional. The general developing trend that we are seeing seems consistent in terms of the rapid decline. A rate of 34% a decade compares with similar figures we have seen in other abundance surveys in Denmark, where they found 38.6%—
Chair: My colleagues have some other questions, Mr Shardlow, so we will go on to those. It is fair to say that I have asked you to give preliminary results of a survey. This is one point in time, and obviously there is variation from year to year depending on the climatic conditions at each point. Tracey wants to come in with a supplementary and then I will go to Aaron Bell.
Q143 Tracey Crouch: You mentioned variability in your answer. Professor Dicks also mentioned how we are seeing insects move north as we have climate change. Are you able to drill down on some of that in your own studies? Are you seeing insects moving north?
Mr Shardlow: This does not go down to species level, so you just get counts of numbers of insects. That is one of the limitations of our dataset. We cannot look at changes in that. What we can say is that in the north, in Scotland, the declines are not as dramatic as in the south east of England. That may be linked with some of the climate changes and the fact that the south is more fragmented and more likely to get damaged by the combination of fragmentation and climate change happening together.
Q144 Aaron Bell: Mr Shardlow, thank you for setting out the data. I do not want to continue on that point. I would like to talk about urban spaces and gardens and their role in biodiversity, particularly insect populations. If I may start with Professor Griffiths, perhaps you could set out what particular features or elements of urban spaces and gardens are especially beneficial for supporting insect biodiversity.
Professor Griffiths: I think insects and the wider invertebrate biodiversity are critically important here. The evidence is that they are vital, especially cultivated spaces. Gardens, allotments, parks and any green spaces, both cultivated and non-cultivated, all play a role. These cultivated landscapes have both native and non-native biodiversity. They are critically important refuges to help pollinators and invertebrates thrive, and importantly in connecting people with nature.
These cultivated landscapes, however, with circa 400,000 different types of plants are not recognised or really measured as being valuable to biodiversity in the UK, although that is increasing. Domestic gardens cover 720,000 hectares, with 25% to 30% of urban areas consisting of gardens. Forty nine per cent. of the UK’s population actively garden and have associated biodiversity in their gardens. It is essential to explore, especially with regard to climate change, climate resilience, adaptation and mitigation, how gardens and a nation of gardens and those that just have plants in cultivated landscapes can help biodiversity thrive.
Although I am pleased to say it is shifting, there has been for quite some time a misconception that cultivated garden plants are no good for biodiversity. What I want to do is give you a few examples of where studies have shown that.
Jennifer Owen, who authored a publication by the RHS, studied a single Leicester garden over a 30‑year period. Within that she found 2,673 species. That included 1,997 insects, 138 other invertebrates and 64 vertebrates. This includes one quarter of the UK’s wild bees, butterflies and ladybirds. For three years Jennifer also did a study on parasitic wasps. She found 533 species, of which seven species were new to Britain and four were new to science. This amazing work was published and linked to the RHS.
The next study was in Sheffield as part of the BUGS project between 1997 and 2007. This provided evidence for the magnitude and importance of gardens as habitat in urban areas and the higher biodiversity in gardens, which historically were considered as ecological deserts, and the features that make gardens good for wildlife and what people can do.
The RHS followed up in 2009 to 2019 with the Plants for Bugs work. Publications in the Journal of Ecology show that cultivated plants support a wide range of invertebrates, regardless of their origin and nativeness. It includes pollinators.
Just this year, research published by the British Trust for Ornithology on insect conservation and diversity found that half of the 22 species of butterfly considered saw a significant increase in their abundance in a study of gardens between 2007 and 2020. Although there was a corresponding increase in the abundance of butterfly populations across non-garden habitats, on average, increases seen in gardens were greater. That uses dedicated data. What is even more critical is evidence on pollinators. They did lots of research, which I will submit in written evidence, on the need for pollination and diversity and there being more nectar and food sources with a wider diversity of plants in those gardens. As I say, all green spaces are important. We just focused here on urban spaces.
Q145 Aaron Bell: Do you think the lack of value assigned to gardens in the past was simply a question of prejudice, that they were not seen as natural, or was it a lack of data?
Professor Griffiths: I still think there is data there, but there is no consistent long-term data on abundance. Like many other people who have spoken about this, there is a need to co‑ordinate that so that we can look at what interventions we make. I simply think it is a complete lack of understanding of what horticulture is and what cultivated plants are at all levels from the general public right the way up in defining what “cultivated” and “wild” mean. In particular, in regard to climate change, we will be looking at mosaics of mixed landscapes and, therefore, we need to look at how we best nurture those for both biodiversity and people.
Q146 Aaron Bell: The society’s evidence to the House of Lords Horticultural Sector Committee in April 2023 called for more improvements to the biodiversity metric 4.0. I note that this year it has already been changed to give greater weight to urban trees in particular. What further changes would you like to see?
Professor Griffiths: I certainly commend that. I was also really excited to see that under “habitat urban” we now have vegetated gardens and non‑vegetated gardens. For the first time, I think gardens are now being seen as habitats in the metric. However, there are still some things on which I would love to work with DEFRA. I have contacted them several times and would like to have conversations to see how we can provide support to make this metric better to improve wildlife. Specifically, I can give some examples—
Q147 Chair: I do not think we have time to go through examples.
Professor Griffiths: All right; I will put them in. Critically, vertically non-native hedges and non-native plants and others are still valued as lower—
Q148 Aaron Bell: They should be weighted higher.
Professor Griffiths: Condition and distinctiveness is not measured, but also we need to generate a new creation of environmental horticulturalists and ecology restoration people, because many of the people are not trained or do not have the skillset as yet. There should be certification for the skillset to use biodiversity metric 4.0. We need both ecologists and horticulturalists working together to get the best benefit for environmental horticulture.
Q149 Aaron Bell: Going back to Mr Shardlow, do you have any observations about the urban environment in particular, and also whether your datasets are able to detect any difference between insect abundance in urban environments and more rural environments from the work that you have done through Buglife?
Mr Shardlow: Yes. The Buglife data has vegetation. We have looked at it very simply at vegetation levels, and where there is more vegetation in surrounding fields you get more insects.
Q150 Aaron Bell: Is the decline more or less in those areas?
Mr Shardlow: I do not know that we have done that analysis yet. We know that urban areas can provide reservoirs for some groups like bumblebees, whereas, on the other hand, for butterflies there tend to be lower levels in urban areas. It is a bit of a mixed picture. We have to remember that sometimes in urban areas you might have really important sites, like old quarries or other things around those areas, which might be specifically important, and management of those areas can certainly boost or damage invertebrate populations. Urban areas tend to be less important for the rare, endangered and specialist species, but certainly they are important areas in maintaining habitat and continuity. We talked about connectivity. There are ways that we can improve connectivity around urban areas to allow bees and other pollinators to move through them more easily.
Q151 Dawn Butler: In regard to urban biodiversity, can you explain a little more about the Government’s responsibility and what you think the Government should be doing on this?
Mr Shardlow: If you are talking about government, we should think about local government as well as simply national Government. We have put out advice with Friends of the Earth on producing local pollinator plans that can look at questions like how they are managing open spaces, whether they are producing pollinator-friendly habitats, how they are managing roadside verges and whether they are using pesticides. There is a whole range of things that local authorities have within their ability to influence.
As for national policy, we look very much at the planning policy processes. There are some gaps there that could be better addressed. Probably the biggest one is light pollution. Quite a lot of pollination happens at night; there is increasing evidence that that is going on with reduced populations where there is light pollution. There are 50% reductions in moth populations, for instance, and pollination rates are down by as much as 60% where there is extensive light pollution. Managing the light infrastructure more effectively has multiple benefits in reducing carbon emissions, energy use and light pollution, which can impact not only wildlife very significantly but also human beings. That could be nationally led. We would want to see, potentially, a national target on that. There are some things that national Government can do, but there also things that local government can do here.
Q152 Dawn Butler: Listening to the evidence from the people before you, I was thinking about Grenfell. There has been a suggestion that Grenfell should be repurposed as a living memorial. This has happened in France and other countries where high-rise buildings have been replanted and added to the wildlife in urban areas. Do you think that would be a good idea? Would that help the UK achieve its 30% land recovery target?
Mr Shardlow: Potentially. One thing we have done a lot of work on is brown or green roofs where you put habitat on top of buildings. Again, it is a win, win, win, win, win, win, win situation because you can recycle materials; you can prevent water egress; you slow down the flow of water; you can use those roofs also to put solar panels on, which adds to their benefits, and you can have abundant wild flowers on there as well. On the tops of flat buildings you could certainly have a lot more wildlife up there. I do not know the technicalities of any particular building and how much one could take that sort of approach, but it is certainly something that could be looked at.
The other thing that occurs to me in terms of national Government policy, which perhaps I should have mentioned earlier, is the sale of pesticides in domestic circumstances. It is being banned in other countries in Europe at the moment. I do not think there is any sensible justification for the use of pesticides in gardens. It is not essential; it is not providing us with food. There are better ways to manage gardens other than spraying them with toxic chemicals, so banning the domestic sale of pesticides would be sensible for both wildlife and human health reasons.
Q153 Dawn Butler: Thank you. Professor Griffiths, is there anything you would like to say on that?
Professor Griffiths: There is certainly an opportunity for many ecosystem services very much linked to health and wellbeing and connecting people more with nature, if you think particularly about covid-19 and having balconies and small areas and spaces, bringing nature indoors and out. I know that the younger generation is very excited about nature indoors, so there is an opportunity to reconnect people through that. There are some very good examples in Singapore, Spain and Italy. They have in effect put the city in the garden—that is their philosophy—rather than have a garden city. I think there are opportunities there. There are challenges, which is why it is critical in policies to put the green into green infrastructure. At the moment, green infrastructure is all about renewable energy and wind turbines, and not about green skills in growing things and incorporating them alongside buildings for all sorts of benefits, including wildlife. My friend has a Royal Lavender on a high-rise flat and bees appear as if by magic. It amazes me that they can go that far without using the lift.
Dawn Butler: Thank you very much.
Q154 Chair: Professor Griffiths, perhaps you would comment on the point that Mr Shardlow made about the use of pesticides in gardens. If it is not necessary for food production, should pesticides be banned or voluntarily phased out?
Professor Griffiths: The RHS did a YouGov survey in 2022 and found that the majority, 62%, did not use chemicals for pest control. When we asked them whether they had bought a product that killed bugs, 89% said no. I think this indicates a reasonable level of public support for banning the sale of insecticides to the general public. However, there are circumstances within gardens and cultivated landscapes where their use may be required. There may be biodiversity net gain linked to some of the challenging species that might be specific, but that really needs to be underpinned by a very good evidence base about the specific species that may be invasive and how that is impacting on biodiversity.
Mr Shardlow: That can be done professionally with trained people.
Professor Griffiths: Exactly, yes.
Q155 Chair: Is the RHS doing any work on this? Is it coming to a view as to whether its advice to members or, indeed, to policymakers is to restrict the use of pesticides?
Professor Griffiths: In 2021, the RHS produced a sustainability strategy called Net Positive for Nature and People. Within that we had actions for gardeners. One of the actions was to look to reduce the use of, or not use, pesticides in their gardens. In the last couple of months we have removed all pesticides from all our garden centre operations; we no longer do that. We are looking to replace those with things that encourage wildlife and ecology within those gardens.
Q156 Chair: What about in your own gardens at Wisley?
Professor Griffiths: In our own gardens at Wisley we have reduced all our pesticides and are working towards reducing them 100%, except in the instances mentioned, for example, around some of the aquatic invasives or other invasive species.
Q157 Chair: Is there a deadline or target for the 100% reduction?
Professor Griffiths: I think we are looking to being biodiversity-positive by the end of 2025, but of course we are working hard. We also have PhDs. For example, I am working with Warwick University on a PhD that hopefully will remove the myths around companion planting and the benefits of companion planting in relation to the use of ecology in prevention rather than looking at control strategies. Last year we appointed our first ecologist and are starting to train elements of environmental horticulturalists. In particular, five years ago we appointed the only UK environmental horticultural team in the country. There are ones in the US which have a heavy focus on looking at this.
Q158 Chair: What about your shows? You have Chelsea and Hampton Court. I understand that one of the requirements of the show gardens at the Chelsea Flower Show is that they have to be reused somewhere; they cannot just be dismantled and thrown away. Could you impose a similar requirement—an analogous requirement—that no garden could be on show or could be selected for show if it used pesticides?
Professor Griffiths: I think we are working towards that. There are some challenges in relation to the whole supply chain. We have a large number of suppliers to the horticultural industry, both small and large businesses. There are challenges linked to that in relation to the supply chain and what people are using with regard to pesticides and traceability. We are, however, encouraging them. More growers have significantly reduced them and integrated pest management into their control strategies. We have also provided awards and rewards for those. For example, just this year we had a herb grower that was both pesticide-free and peat-free and we awarded them a gold medal. We are working towards encouraging those good practices.
It is not an excuse; it is a complex supply chain and, therefore, we have to work closely with our growers and encourage that behaviour around that.
Q159 Aaron Bell: I want to talk about the types of plants, following on from what we were discussing earlier, Professor Griffiths. Are the types of plants cultivated in urban areas the right ones, particularly in accommodating changes in insect species as we see the effects of climate change? If they are currently not the right ones, what is the RHS doing to encourage gardeners to change plant species accordingly?
Professor Griffiths: There are several things here. I mentioned the Plants for Bugs research that we looked at, but the RHS over a long number of years has created a list called the RHS Plants for Pollinators. That list of RHS Plants for Pollinators is a lot of research by the RHS, but it is the accumulation of research across the board by other organisations looking at both native and non-native in relation to their benefits. As to what happens with Plants for Pollinators, for example, you can go on our website and search for “Find a plant” and tick “Plants for Pollinators”, and you will be able to get that. There is also a logo in retail outlets across the country and on seed packets that identifies these plants as pollinators, which also increases the profitability because people want to buy plants to encourage wildlife, so there is both an economic and biodiversity gain.
Another area is a large project on which we are seeking funding called Plants for Purpose. There will be significant challenges in relation to climate change. A paper looked at over 500 cities and climate change across those areas. It suggests that in London the climate by 2050 will be equivalent to that of Barcelona. I can tell you that on 11 June London was hotter than Barcelona. Therefore, a lot of species, both native and non-native, will really struggle, so we are moving towards how we also look at mosaics of landscapes that can be both climate resilient and climate adaptable.
Q160 Aaron Bell: At the moment you prioritise or prefer native species, but is that something that might need to change?
Professor Griffiths: As to where we sit, the research we had from the Plants for Bugs is that it is a mixture and depends on the context of where it is. It is a mixture of native, non-native, near-native and exotic; it is a collective with different types of habitat and scrubs, which enable wider diversity within those gardens. In some instances it is far better, going back to the biodiversity metric of 4.0, to have a mixed garden of native and non-native than just a vegetated lawn.
Q161 Aaron Bell: The biodiversity metric 4.0 favours native species as well, does it not?
Professor Griffiths: Yes, particularly hedgerows. An OPAL study looked at hedgerows in urban and rural areas. It showed that those in urban areas had higher levels of certain species than others and similar levels for others. The logic is about where they are positioned, but the challenge is both climate change and recognising that perhaps, if you create a hedge that is planted for pollinators in a tricky environment, such as an urban one, it may have more biodiversity benefit than just a single batch of native species. It is about the place and how you do that to make sure you manage it carefully. Native and non-native are both equally important.
Mr Shardlow: I would have to disagree slightly with Professor Griffiths. Your own Plants for Bugs survey found that for the more species-rich groups, for instance hoverflies and solitary bees, the native plants were significantly better in the support they were providing. When you get down into the plants, there was also additional work done looking at what is living within the plant structure. As to that, there is a very clear preference for native biodiversity and native plants to thrive better. That is not surprising. Take moth species that are specialists for particular plant species. The Holly Blue will not suddenly go on to your chrysanthemums. Generally speaking, the native plants are better, but that does not mean that we need to get overly religious about this. As Professor Griffiths says, there is space in gardens for all sorts of things, but you will get a better result for biodiversity if you aim more towards the things that are native or at least close to us in Europe.
Professor Griffiths: That was not what I said. I said that all native, non‑native and exotic as a collection within gardens is all required. In particular, with the challenges of the changing climate we need to seriously relook at those things. There will be strengths and weaknesses in all of those. It should not be an either/or; we need to look across our 400,000, plus our 1,500 genetic resources. The economic risk assessment report by Global Economics says we are facing ecological collapse, and therefore we would be naive not to make sure that we are looking at what tools we have in relation to this. This needs more understanding, particularly around abundancy. I agree because we are on the same side; we are both for plants and bugs.
Aaron Bell: I do not think there is much disagreement here, so let us leave it there.
Q162 Tracey Crouch: I want to pick up on something Matt said about light pollution. Thank you for the work you do, Professor Griffiths, on removing pesticides from garden centres, but you cannot move in a garden centre for solar lights; yet we understand the impact they are having on pollinators and also bat behaviour, other birds and so on. What are you doing to raise awareness about the impact garden lighting can have on those small urban ecosystems in terms of insects and so on?
Professor Griffiths: Some of the things are about our information and advisory pages, so we are updating those, but there is a large number of pages and we need to work on that and talk about encouraging biodiversity. There will be gardening for wildlife, and within that we will talk about lighting and give information around that. That is really all we have done. I think we can do more. I have seen some of the evidence base at our visitor centre. The new Hilltop Home of Gardening Science is open for public engagement. We have a wildlife garden and we have minimised the lighting around that. We talk about that in relation to the rationale: “Why?” We can do more. As we learn and understand more, we can link that into our advice and inspire and encourage gardeners to help wildlife even more.
Q163 Stephen Metcalfe: I have a brief question on the importance of connectivity, which I think Mr Shardlow mentioned earlier. I am particularly interested in the connectivity between differing urban environments. How important is that connectivity to allow species to move around, particularly non-flying insects?
Mr Shardlow: As Professor Dicks said, some species are moving north but others are not. A study on bumblebees across the northern hemisphere showed that the southern margins were moving north due to climate shocks taking them out, but the northern margins were static. An important paper, to which I have given you the reference, Philip John Platts 2019, looked at many groups of invertebrates and showed that they were not keeping pace with climate change. They call it the climate envelope that the species lives in. They are not tracking it; they are falling behind. We have a problem with species not moving north enough, adequately, to keep pace with the rate of climate change. I am talking of averages, and obviously there are exceptions.
Within that, the problem is that you get to a point where you have fragmented habitats. You have to remember how artificially fragmented habitats are at the moment. There has never been a situation like this where woodlands or grasslands are separated from each other by a long way—sometimes they are kilometres apart where you have the right sort of habitats. For specialist species that have a particular plant that we talked about earlier or that sort of requirement, moving from one place to another is a real challenge. What happens is that they pass the tipping point. You mentioned flightless insects. Even if you have wings, there comes a point where moving out into the countryside, if you get hit by pesticides or the habitat is just too far away, that is no longer an evolutionary strategy that works. They have seen this in the fens with the decline in the fenland many years ago. The wings of Swallowtail butterflies got shorter, their flight muscles got less and they stopped dispersing.
Coming back to our Bugs Matter survey, it is worth noting—I give you a few caveats—that that is activity density. It is not simply abundance; it is also whether they are actually flying. In a more fragmented habitat you will get less flying because flying means you end up somewhere where you die. That is bad for your genes; it takes the genes out of the pool and you become less of a disperser. The solution to that is a project we have called B-Lines, which has been adopted by the EU as “buzz lines”. Every member state, other than Switzerland, England and Wales, has now adopted this as a national scheme. This will put stepping stones of wild flower habitats between the remaining areas to shorten those distances. That applies to urban areas as much as to the countryside. We have B-Lines in London. There is one going past here. The all-party parliamentary group on pollinators has been writing to the Speaker’s Office here about making this estate pollinator-friendly, because you are sitting right on one of these B-Lines. If we can get more wild flowers here, this estate will be contributing to urban biodiversity and the transferral of species from A to B to help them adapt to climate change, which currently is leaving them stranded.
Q164 Stephen Metcalfe: Do you want to add anything, Professor Griffiths?
Professor Griffiths: I think connecting urban green spaces and creating more green spaces in cities; I think everyone should have space to grow. There are some really exciting initiatives. The RHS is working in collaboration with the Natural History Museum and the Department for Education as part of the national education nature park. This is all about the schools estate and how we encourage the whole education estate to work on and improve biodiversity on their grounds, creating pollinator-friendly habitats whereby biodiversity can thrive, digging ponds and reconnecting both teachers and parents.
You may have heard of supporting initiatives like Pollinating London Together. It is created within a specific mission. It is about green spaces in central London. Its longer-term vision is to make sure that natural pollinators thrive. It has recently done a survey where 1,827 pollinators were observed across 26 survey sites. The most visited plant was Eurybia divaricata, which is a non-native plant, but there are also quite a number of non-native plants.
Another support is allotments. A lot of pollinators are linked to allotments. If you look at the natural capital urban report 2019, we have roughly 7,925 hectares of community gardens and allotments. There are 316,998 allotment plots and the total production of food from community gardens and allotments is 154,000 kg, which is equivalent to 294 million. All of these connectivities are helpful. These initiatives help, looking at estates and supporting them.
Q165 Chair: Professor Griffiths, it has been an interesting session with some different themes. In the natural environment there is a great preference for native species, and in fact the eradication of invasive non-native species is something that happens in heathland and forests across the country, whereas the horticultural tradition is founded on plantsmanship, which is going to the ends of the earth and bringing non-native species back to show them off, and to cultivate variants and new plants. Is there an essential tension there between the traditions of British horticulture and the emerging demands of people concerned with the natural environment, including insect decline?
Professor Griffiths: I think there is and we really need to work together to bridge those elements. A very good example of where we work together is the Royal Entomological Society RHS exhibit at the Chelsea Flower Show. We need to bring together those with the knowledge of ecology with those with the knowledge of horticulture to look at our estates and landscapes and make sure we bring their strengths together in order to deal with biodiversity and climate crisis. We have to work together on this. I think the knowledge we need to share can help unlock things to do what we want as the end goal, which is to help with climate resilience but also help with biodiversity in the name of adaptation and mitigation.
As a person who has dabbled in native and wild conservation and cultivated conservation, I truly believe that we need to look at the whole picture. The reality is that we use more different types of garden plants in the world than any other plant types. If you look outside, in many landscapes they will dominate both cultivated and native landscapes, so we already have them and we need to manage them better.
Q166 Chair: Very briefly, Mr Shardlow.
Mr Shardlow: On importing plants and invasive species issues, it is not just the plants themselves but the things that come with them. There is a direct threat to pollinators. Look at the Asian hornet, which is threatening our native pollinator populations if it becomes established. Soil is a really big issue. We have talked about whether we should expand it. In our written evidence I have stuck in a bit about earthworms. The earthworm population is under threat by imported flatworms that come in in soil. Soil is unchecked. It is a massive source of invasive species. We are not doing anything about it and it is really important that that is tackled. Because we are out of the EU, it has stopped us exporting soil to the EU, but we are still importing soil from the EU. There is a trade imbalance there, and it is also a biodiversity balance. We are putting our biodiversity at risk while Europe is protecting theirs.
Chair: On that note, we will draw this session to a conclusion. Our colleague Tracey Crouch tells me she is an allotment holder and shares your interest in worms for practical reasons as well as ecological ones. I thank Professor Griffiths and Mr Shardlow very much for their evidence today.
Witness: Chris Packham CBE.
Q167 Chair: I am going to invite our final witness to join us at the table, if he would, and I will introduce Chris Packham CBE, who is a very familiar face in these matters. Mr Packham is a long-term naturalist, conservationist and campaigner, but he is, of course, known for his television work, including “Springwatch” and its various seasonal offshoots, if I can put it that way.
Mr Packham, thank you very much indeed for joining us today. In one of the episodes of “Springwatch” this year—it might even have been the final one—you reflected very ruefully and perhaps even emotionally on what you remember of the insect diversity of your boyhood and how that compares to what you find today. For those who missed that piece to camera, perhaps you would just remind us and tell the Committee how you see the contrast and what made you interested in doing something about it.
Chris Packham: I have to point out that the observations that I make are subjective and personal, and they need to be twinned with the research that stands alongside them so that there is no ambiguity about the declines that I measure. What I spoke about more pertinently was how those declines reflect on my life, the quality of my life and the health of my life, and the community that I share my time with.
I, like many people, use insects—I live in a rural environment now, but I grew up in an urban environment—as an indicator of that community health, because they have high apparency and because, as we have heard, they support our gardens and diverse populations, enormous in the case of Jennifer Owen’s garden in Leicestershire, with more than 2,000 species. That allows many people, me as a child included, to engage with the natural world literally on our own doorstep.
When we see measured declines in that, whether they are recorded scientifically or things that we observe ourselves, it instigates an increasing level of what I might call eco-anxiety. They are the way that we as individuals keep our fingers on the pulse of life. If we see diminishing populations of butterflies, yes, we can lament those, and I think that that is important because there is an aspect here that goes outside the science; that is that it is impacting on our mental health and it is impacting more broadly on the way that the public need to become increasingly aware of their need to act with increased urgency when it comes to the biodiversity crisis.
Q168 Chair: Thank you. You reflected on your boyhood and the abundance and diversity that you experienced then. Was that important in the career path that you have taken since? Perhaps take us right back to the beginning. How did you get interested in this field, and what caused you to make a life’s work of it?
Chris Packham: Okay, I will tell you that first. I won’t test you. This is a six-spot ladybird. At some stage in 1964, I took one of these from a non-native plant in my neighbour’s garden and I put it on my finger, and it wound its way to the top of it, circled as they do, before it cracked open its crimson elytra, its wing cases, unfolded mysteriously a set of glistening orange wings and floated up into a blue sky. Whether it was that moment or another close to it, that was the spark that lit a passion that has led to a lifelong curiosity and fascination in the world that brings me here today.
The value of a single encounter with a commonplace but nevertheless beautiful insect was instrumental in seeding that interest. I do not imagine that there will be one person who has come to give evidence before you who has not had a similar experience.
Q169 Chair: I think the implication of what you said publicly, including on the TV, is that such experiences may be less available to the new generation than they were to yours. Is that a fair reflection?
Chris Packham: Indeed, of course. One of the parameters that I need to draw to your attention is something we call shifting baseline syndrome, and that is that we are all tempted to measure the health, and the abundance in this case, of insects by what we experience ourselves perhaps in our youth. What is of more pertinence due to the long-term monitoring that we have heard about goes beyond my youth, my father’s youth and my grandfather’s youth, if the data is available. It is something that we need to be aware of. We should not quantify and qualify how important these losses and declines are by our own personal experiences. That is why we need those long-term datasets.
What fuels our interest is our passion. Sometimes that is stimulated by nostalgia for days when there were clouds of butterflies and far more six-spot ladybirds on the bush of my neighbour’s garden. I do not think that we should underestimate the fuel there, but we have to stick to the science when it comes to the actual measured declines.
Chair: Good. The Science, Innovation and Technology Committee of Parliament is very keen to do that. I am going to turn to some of my colleagues for questions, starting with Tracey Crouch.
Q170 Tracey Crouch: I have a brief follow-on question. What made your monologue so interesting in “Springwatch” is that quite often the watches focus on bigger animals—birds, foxes and badgers—that many of us in urban communities do not get to see, whereas the insect can be and is prevalent throughout society. What do you see as your contribution in tackling insect decline? Why are the comments that you made so important when you have millions of people watching you?
Chris Packham: We are in the midst of a biodiversity crisis, and if we do not act urgently we are in deep trouble as a species and life on Earth is similarly imperilled. Life on Earth will continue to prosper without us, but if we care about ourselves we need to act a lot more urgently.
One of my roles is to instigate that same level of curiosity and fascination in a broader public as I managed to instil in myself. Part and parcel of that is that I need to act as a vector, or a science communicator, if you like. I need to take the evidence from the scientist and filter that to see what I can use to both engage an audience—perhaps that includes an entertainment aspect—and educate that audience. If the audience does not develop a similar affinity for the animals—in this case, insects—I and we will not be able to draw upon them when it comes to the crunch, and that is that we need to act to preserve them because they are in precipitous decline, broadly speaking. That is part of my role.
Within the body of a programme like “Springwatch”, I am always a champion of the underdog because I am trying to deliver a message to people that it is not about the cute and the cuddly; it is not survival of the cutest. It is actually about looking after ecosystems and making sure that those ecosystems remain functional. We need wasps. We need rats. We need pigeons, frankly, otherwise the peregrines nesting at the other end of this building go hungry.
I need to convey a slightly more sophisticated message using, in this case, insects, something that people frequently encounter and have that higher apparency in their lives. If we go back to most people living in urban areas, one would hope they are far more likely to see a butterfly than a golden eagle. The golden eagle might be a talisman and a symbolic thing that we can all yearn to spot, but the likelihood is that they will be encountering a different type of wildlife. Therefore, developing an affinity with that as a measure of the quantity and health of wildlife is really important.
Q171 Tracey Crouch: I know that other colleagues are going to ask about PR around the underdog. Do you think, therefore, that “Springwatch” and other conservation programmes and television programmes focus enough on urban wildlife?
Chris Packham: I think there are limitations within the media because we live in a time when we are obsessed with celebrity, and within the natural world those are the bigger, more exciting things. My job, again, is to look for exciting stories. Sometimes it is not about the species. That does not have to be glamorous. The story can be exciting.
I could tell you, for instance, that we have recently discovered that certain species of plants have the capacity to “hear” the buzz of bees and increase the flow of nectar for a short period of time after they have “heard” it, which is fascinating and that might get people to prick up their ears. Evening primroses and honey bees are probably not the world’s sexiest species when it comes to mainstream TV. It is a question of us coming up with those sorts of stories to instigate a more sophisticated interest.
This comes back to some points that we need to make about how we then use that affinity that we might generate through media in terms of the citizen science projects. Those projects that we have heard about and discussed can produce meaningful data, and sometimes they are criticised—one of the studies here has been criticised by the NFU—but there is another side to those, and they are all about engagement. They are getting people to go out and spend, in the case of butterfly conservation, 15 minutes.
The Big Butterfly Count begins this Friday. I hope you will all participate. It just needs 15 minutes of your time. It is about concentrating on just butterflies for 15 minutes. There are mental health benefits for that which we have come to recognise certainly in the wake of the lockdown when so many people took part in similar surveys or at least engaged with wildlife. It is also about generating that affinity. Good data is there, but it is not the sole purpose of those citizen science projects. There is another side to it as well.
Chair: Thank you very much indeed. I turn to other colleagues, starting with Graham Stringer and Rebecca Long Bailey.
Q172 Graham Stringer: You answered a number of questions that I was going to ask. Just looking at the personalities that people are attracted to in the insect world, there is no difficulty getting children and adults to like butterflies. They are pretty. Bees epitomise the work ethic or seem to epitomise the work ethic. There are lots of insects and invertebrates that are, to most people’s eyes, ugly, difficult and nuisances. In your programme how can you enthuse people about the whole range of the insect world?
Chris Packham: Again, we would use that through those sorts of scientific discoveries, and we may go sideways. Another story that I could tell you—I won’t in detail—is that we recently discovered that the fledging success of barn swallows, the swallows that we see that perhaps make our summer, is dependent on the amount of aquatic insects that they are able to harvest at that point when they are feeding their young. Those aquatic insects have certain components, nutrients, that are required by the young for fledging success. The entry point to getting people into aquatic insects may be barn swallows, which they think of very favourably.
I would also go back to the fact that many of these insects have extraordinary life histories. I could tell you—I won’t again because it is not my job at this point in time; you can wait until the next “Springwatch”—that cockroaches have the most incredible life histories and lifestyles. It is the way that we pitch it and tell it.
When you think about the history of the work that has been done by, say, the BBC’s NHU and our great mentor, David Attenborough, what has captured people’s attentions over the years is not always the sexiness of the species; it is the remarkable stories that he has told about them.
Q173 Graham Stringer: I agree with you about cockroaches. In a previous incarnation—not Kafkaesque—I had to know about the life cycle of cockroaches. The way they protect their eggs is quite extraordinary. I was trying to think while you were speaking what the most difficult insect to make attractive would be. I suppose getting people to enthuse about protecting midges in Scotland might be the most difficult project you could look at.
Chris Packham: We actually rose to that challenge in the last series of “Springwatch”, which is available on iPlayer. We chose the mosquito, which of course globally is potentially an extremely dangerous animal if it is a vector of malaria. Although we no longer have malaria, dengue or any of the other diseases associated with it in the UK, it is thought of unfavourably.
In that case, we took, you might argue, a slightly more superficial approach to it in that we showed its intrinsic beauty. The beauty included its extraordinary life cycle and the way it lays its eggs. We also integrated the fact that those eggs and the adult mosquitoes that emerge after the larval stage are implicitly important for those returning swallows when they get back from Africa. Again, we are drawing people’s attention to an animal that they may not like but they want to see because it is beautiful, and then we are trying to build a slightly more sophisticated understanding of why it is beautiful not just in a physical sense but in an ecological sense by explaining that its abundance is necessary to feed those returning swallows.
We try our very best—and it is not always easy—to build that increasing sophistication into our messaging. If I were to do that here today, I would say you are on an evolution yourselves. The name of your Committee’s inquiry when you started was pollinators. It has now moved to insects. It is clear from the other submissions that you have heard that we all think it should be invertebrates.
Very often, we begin with entry level, easy access built around familiarity or an admiration. You mentioned the honey bee. There is strong cultural affiliation with the honey bee. It is seen as a worker and all of that. We use them initially to draw people into an understanding of why pollinators were important. Unfortunately, I do not think we increased the sophistication of that method rapidly enough, because now we have a situation where some people think that honey bees are the be-all and end-all of pollinators, and what we have seen through that interest is an enormous uptake in beekeeping, where in some places it has definitely become detrimental to other pollinating species.
I would say, there, that we as the communicators should have used the entry level and immediately developed that slightly more quickly than we have, and not been left with a legacy whereby everyone thinks that the survival of the human species is dependent on the domesticated honey bee.
Q174 Graham Stringer: Citizen science projects enthuse people about the natural world. Is that the most important outcome of citizen science projects, or is it the data that they establish and collect?
Chris Packham: The data is important as well because it is empowering for the participants. It is good to think that you have contributed to something that is positive. Without that data, ultimately, we do not have the information that we require to effect the conservation that we so desperately need.
Are citizen science projects compatible with what we might call more formal science projects? I would argue that, yes, they are. We have an enormous number, albeit dwindling, of highly accomplished amateur naturalists in the UK. The only thing amateur about them is that they are not paid. They are our volunteer force. Without those, we would not have our finger so firmly on the pulse of our distributions and populations of insects in the UK.
What slightly worries me is the diminishing number of those naturalists. As you correctly pointed out, most young people have an intrinsic interest in life, and they certainly have an intrinsic interest in ladybirds that are going to crawl on their finger—benign things that they can encounter—but that tends to diminish. Some of the people who have been giving submissions have tangentially remarked on the fact that it is quite difficult to get students interested in insects. Therefore, there may be a handicap in that regard.
When it comes to our formal interest in natural history, whether that is through an educational facility or self-taught, we see fewer people now who have the naturalist’s capabilities of even people of my generation. We are an ageing group who have that capacity even to identify, let alone understand, some of the lesser-known insect groups. Unless we instigate that interest, we will not be rebuilding generations of potential scientists to come who will have the motivation to want to study insects.
People struggle at this point to get funding outside those main groups that you have discussed. It is more difficult to get funding. It is more difficult to find students who have the aptitude to participate in the sorts of studies we need to broaden our understanding of insect populations and their declines.
Graham Stringer: Thank you very much.
Q175 Rebecca Long Bailey: You mentioned the concept of eco-anxiety. Nowhere is that more acute than with younger people, who quite often see policymakers either not listening, refusing to listen, refusing to accept the science or trying to trade off tackling biodiversity issues and the climate crisis against other crises that they might have to deal with as policymakers.
As a storyteller, how do you think people, whether it is the public or policymakers, respond to emotional or reason-based appeals? How do you think we best get that on to policymakers’ agendas by developing our arguments more articulately and in a way that they can respond to more effectively than they are at the moment?
Chris Packham: I do not think that you as policymakers have a choice, because we have growing generations of people who are increasingly concerned about the environment, the biodiversity crisis and so on and so forth, and they will be your voters of today, if not tomorrow. Investing in them so that they engender a trust for you, or trust for policymaking, is implicitly important.
There are some very symbolistic things that we can do, but they need to be followed by more sophisticated outcomes. We mentioned Grenfell Tower. That would be a totemic thing if that were turned into a green tower and if it were qualified and quantified in terms of the biodiversity that it added to that community. That would give it credibility as well as an aesthetic or symbolic status.
At the same time, young people know that 70% of our UK land surface is farmed. They know that there is tremendous pushback from the farming lobbying groups and that certain policies that we know need to be rolled out now are being withheld, slowed up or stifled completely, and that is where mistrust begins to grow. You need to be more forthright.
When it comes down to it, when you are looking at countryside stewardship and landscape management, so many of those schemes are voluntary. If they are voluntary, they need three key ingredients: enthusiasm from the participant; time from the participant; and resources from the participant. If any one of those ingredients is missing from, say, that farmer, they are less likely to be rolled out. Maybe some of those things ought not to be voluntary; they ought to be mandatory. That may well be unpopular, but we are in a crisis.
We have just been through a covid crisis when mandatory regulation was implicitly important for all of our safety, so I would argue that when it comes to addressing climate change and biodiversity loss—here we are talking about insect biodiversity loss—some mandatory policies would probably be really helpful. They might be seen as policymakers taking a firmer standpoint and something that therefore younger generations, who are clearly impatient to secure their health and future and that of a healthy planet, would be attracted to.
Q176 Rebecca Long Bailey: Following on from that, one of the key difficulties for policymakers that many of us on this Committee, who are trying to articulate arguments to tackle the biodiversity crisis and climate crisis, face, is the lack of available data, particularly, as we have heard on this Committee, on insect decline, and part of the problem is because Governments have not provided enough research funding into those areas, so it is a constant problem over time.
As a presenter, how do you overcome those challenges and try to articulate that we are clearly seeing problems in terms of insect diversity and there not being data available to back that up scientifically?
Chris Packham: We have to be rational about how much data there is and how much more we need. Within just insects here in the UK, we choose, essentially, indicator species, and we choose those for which we are fortunate enough to already have long-term datasets so that we can be more robust when it comes to presenting our data. It would be impossible for us to look at every part of that insect taxa. We have to focus on some. It is only wise that we focus on some in which we can also involve public participation. They need to be those that are widely dispersed, commonplace, accessible, highly apparent and, to some extent, easy to identify, although in the survey that Matt spoke of you do not have to identify the insects; it is simpler than that. Is it so much the data, or is it what we are doing with that data and how urgently we are seeking change once we have got our hands on it? That is what would give me more concern.
Outside my role as a presenter and more in my guise as a campaigner, looking forward, I need to look at what are going to be the triggers that I can use to stimulate action when it comes to the public putting pressure on policymakers to instigate those mandatory changes that I and they might think are necessary. What are those triggers going to be? I worry about that. I have some unpublished work from Butterfly Conservation that is looking at its citizen science project, the Big Butterfly Count, and the numbers of participants are dropping quite significantly in a very short space of time. In the space of two years, it has almost halved. At one point, that was masked because there were fewer participants but they were doing more counts. It has now broken that down. The figures are compatible.
When it was at its peak and there were more than 100,000 participants, they were recording, on average, 16 butterflies or moths per dataset that they were offering. It has now dropped to 9.21 the year before last and 8.95 last year, and the number of participants has nearly halved. There seemed to be a tipping point. When it investigated this, albeit not with robust science yet—this was part of the investigation that was looking at something else but it came out—it got to the point where people thought it was not worth the trouble, or they would not take part because they simply had not seen enough butterflies so it was not going to be worth taking part, let alone submitting the data.
What is also interesting and a real handicap when it comes to citizen science, I have to say, is that negative datasets are very rare. I asked them, “How many people send in a return saying they saw no butterflies?” It is 0%, 1% or 2%, and that really skews the data, but in a way that should be even more scary, because without those we are still seeing those precipitous declines.
Another thing that worries me with that is that, if it gets to the point where the public are thinking, “Well, I love butterflies, but there’s not enough about that I can bother to count them and submit my data,” what about the people who are generating the surveys and what about the staff of the NGOs Buglife and The Wildlife Trusts? They are working in a state of constant eco-anxiety. As the Chair said, I expressed some of mine in the concluding moments of “Springwatch”.
What about the fact that they have to go to work in a world where the insect population is going through the floor in some places? What is going to motivate them to want to come up with those surveys and implement them? We have to recognise that these are equally important things, because, ultimately, at the end of the day, we are all human organisms, and we are not automatons here for science. We need that important fuel. If we feel the fuel is gone, that could be desperate.
Another repercussion from that is that, if people do not fulfil these things and they stop engaging, it means we have a future problem when it comes to young people moving into positions where they should be doing that science, because they will not have developed that affinity and it could become a very vicious circle.
I think the key thing that certainly this morning’s submissions have tangentially touched on but we need to keep at the forefront of our minds is the urgency to act on these issues. We do not know where the tipping points are. We are talking here about a human tipping point, a perceptual thing, an apparency thing, but what about the ecological tipping points for each of these species? We have not tested them.
It may well get to a point where, if not individual species, guilds of species go into a permanent collapse from which there will be no recovery. My point would be that there would be no cure for that, so the only option is prevention, and therefore we ought to be acting a lot more rapidly, hence my desire for more mandatory guidelines being given to people.
Rebecca Long Bailey: Thank you.
Q177 Dawn Butler: Thank you very much for the fascinating evidence. I have a couple of quick questions. The first chapter of my book is about cockroaches. I saw a cockroach fly in Jamaica, and when I came back to the UK the teacher called me a liar because cockroaches do not fly in the UK, but, anyway, that is another story.
I listened to an hour-long programme about mosquitoes that was completely fascinating. Could swallows not find something else to eat? Are mosquitoes the insects that the world could do without?
Chris Packham: The world cannot do without any insects. If anything exists, it exists because there is a job for it to do, and that would be the same in our communities. If there is a niche that is vacant and it is filled with a species or collection of species in terms of other niches, that is all about building community stability, ecological resilience, so we need all of those things. It is very perilous to think that we can remove any one of them.
We know that there are some species that would show greater sensitivity. They are what we call keystone species. It is a keystone because if you pull it out the arch falls down. Typically, we might think of those as being top-of-the-food-chain predators. In the UK, we do not have top-of-the-food- chain mammalian predators. There are no bears, no wolves, no lynxes. As a consequence, we have a burgeoning deer population that is in fact impacting very negatively on our insect populations because it is grazing and browsing out all of the ground floor in our woodlands, which is so important for so many of our insects. That is a very simplistic example of what happens if you start withdrawing individual species from an ecosystem. If it is there, it needs to stay there, basically. That is of critical importance.
As to our success when it comes to broadcasting, we can instigate an interest in wildlife. We can instigate an awe and an admiration for it. What we are struggling with and have done for some time is taking our audiences to that point of sophistication where they have a greater understanding of ecology.
I like deer. I like them very much. They are very beautiful animals, but there are too many of them. Without any other ability to control them—no native predators—they need management, and management means culling them. I need to say to my wildlife-loving audience that in order to maintain a rich mosaic of habitats where we can have proper abundances of woodland insects we need to manage deer. That means killing deer. That is a tough sell for me. Many people see that going against the principles of my and our whole raison d’être. We are generating a love for life, and then we are saying, “Hold on a moment. We love it, but we have to extinguish some of it to maintain that.”
In order to take people to that point of understanding, we need to be more sophisticated in our messaging. We need to go from pollinators, to insects, to invertebrates.
Q178 Dawn Butler: That is fascinating. Thank you. Thank you also for mentioning Grenfell. The more I listen to the evidence, the more I think it is a good idea to have Grenfell as a living memorial, so thank you very much for mentioning that.
Lastly, do you think that insect conservation and biodiversity in the round are respected enough and thought of enough by the Government? What else can we do to make sure that people prioritise it more?
Chris Packham: Switching into campaigning mode, I am going to say that no biodiversity is thought of well enough by the Government, but I am bound to say that, aren’t I?
We heard earlier a conversation about the role of protected areas such as SSSIs, SACs, SPAs and so on and so forth, but we have not been giving them enough money. The reason why so many of our SSSIs are in a parlous state—in fact, we do not even know what state they are in—is because funding to Natural England has been cut, cut, cut. I know it has had a little bit more money recently, but there was a period of time when it took a 40% cut in a very short space of time. You cannot expect that to motivate the staff of that statutory body and give them the capacity to go out and do their jobs.
On the outside, you have people like me complaining when they do not do their job properly, and that is part and parcel of our duty. We have to keep people on their toes. That is what we are there for. We are there to agitate for progressive, positive change, but at the same time, if you gave me a magic wand, I would go into the Treasury or wherever it is in this fine building and wave it and get some more money dumped into biodiversity. It certainly requires more significant funding and more strategic management. There is no doubt about that.
Dawn Butler: Thank you so much.
Q179 Aaron Bell: Thank you, Chris, for the evidence. I just wanted to follow on a little bit more from the answers you gave to Ms Long Bailey a moment ago about language and communication. We heard in our previous evidence session—I do not know if you caught that—about the apocalyptic language. You have used a little bit of that today.
First, do you think it is a situation that could be described as apocalyptic, and, secondly, do you think that is helpful in reaching the public? I drew the analogy in the previous evidence session with climate change. I am not saying that climate change is not happening, but people have been hit over the head with it for a very long time now saying, “We’ve only got two years,” or, “We’ve only got five years.” Does it not wear the public down to be told that everything is apocalyptic? Do we not need to have more reason-based approaches as well as the language?
Chris Packham: I think language is incredibly important, and we in the conservation fraternity abuse it. One of the frequent complaints that I have is that we talk about the loss of species. I know that you have heard it in these sessions. We have not lost them. We have not inadvertently left them behind the shed. We have destroyed their habitat or we have destroyed them directly, principally with pesticides. Again, we are lazy with our language. Language is indeed really important. We could all do with a brush-up on that one.
On that account, we frequently talk about a mass extinction event, which is dramatic and it is apocalyptic language, but is it an extinction event, or is it an extermination event, because we are the principal drivers of that extinction at this point in time?
I read the notes from the previous session. “Insectageddon” was the headline that came out of that. I think it is a clickbait headline. Does it serve any purpose? Well, we are talking about it. It is a bit like “Just Stop Oil”. Does it serve any purpose to throw glitter on the court at Wimbledon and powder on the pitch at Lords? At the moment, it offers us an opportunity to have a public discussion about that issue. Whatever you think about the methods, the outcome can be, if it is used correctly, a positive one.
I looked through the previous notes, and I thought, “If I were pitching stories here from what I had read, what would I do?” I came up with three. Basically, if I was looking for a clickbait headline to get immediate news to promote a conversation where I very rapidly had to turn it round and make sure that there was more detail in it to give it any real value, I would pick “insectageddon” and the NFU’s pushback. That would be a polarised spat, and we do seem to like polarised spats when it comes to news. So I could use that.
Then I would be thinking, “What else do I have there?” When it came to the science, what about AI monitoring? That could give us enormous and very rapid—and we need rapid—use of new technologies to partake in some of the surveys that we require to broaden our understanding of insect decline. That might be a thing I could pitch with a science angle like AI technology.
Lastly, I suppose I would be picking the fact that we have always said, “Honey bees are really important,” and now we are hearing, “Actually, in some places they are not.” So honey bees are the bad guys. There is another potential story there.
From my point of view, we need to move people on. It is not just about grabbing their attention with “insectageddon”. That is fine, but, unless you go through the process of explaining that in detail and equally empowering them to do something about it at the end, your point is valid, because, basically, you are just terrifying them and leaving them even further incapacitated with perhaps even more eco-anxiety.
Q180 Aaron Bell: Yes. I worry that that happens in schools in particular as well. You said earlier that this crisis is putting life on Earth in peril, and then you clarified it to mean that life finds a way, and it is actually about us as much as anything else. Do you think raising public awareness of the link between insect decline and our own food security—that is the full title of our inquiry—could actually assist and translate into people taking it more seriously and it ultimately getting more effective policy and conservation measures?
Chris Packham: I do. We have a problem with people not engaging with nature as much as they can and we would like, but we all engage with nature every time we put something in our mouth, because it has been produced by ecosystem services/Earth. It has either come out of the soil or we have harvested it from the sea. Using food to connect people to the health of our planet is absolutely perfect. I believe that certainly in a school situation we are making progress there at the moment, but we are not using that in the way that we could, because that is a very clear route to connecting people to nature.
We see and learn a lot about the cost of food, but what about the environmental cost of that food? That is something that is not frequently accessible to people. Food labelling in the UK is pretty appalling. It is very difficult for consumers to make a choice in a supermarket. They can make a choice about the cost, but it is very difficult for them to make a choice about the environmental cost of that food because that is hidden from them through very poor food labelling.
You are absolutely right. That is why this Committee, when it gets to invertebrates, is absolutely spot on. Food security, us eating, is reliant on our global ecological health. The scientists have all told you that insects are implicitly important when it comes to securing that global ecological health. There is no ambiguity about that at all.
Q181 Aaron Bell: Finally, talking about the next generation educating children, you very movingly gave us that picture of the six-spot ladybird and told us about your sense of wonder that came from that. You inspired probably a number of us on this Committee. I remember watching you in the ’80s—
Chris Packham: You are making me feel old.
Aaron Bell:—on “The Really Wild Show”. I worry a little bit that we are sending very young kids out with a message that the natural world is amazing but it is all doomed, and there is not a lot you can do about it other than turn the light off or recycle a bit more. Do you think we need to get more of a sense of wonder into our education? Obviously, we have to give people all sides of the story, particularly when they are older, but I think sometimes that kids are coming back from primary school in particular feeling that sense of strong anxiety about something they do not think they have any agency over.
Chris Packham: Yes, I think you are absolutely right. You need the fuel there to start with, otherwise who cares? I was at an education conference earlier this week and we talked about how young people are introduced to and engage with the natural world, and the limitations that the school system has to do that at this point in time. The point is that we have a plethora of means of overcoming those limitations.
I would say we go mandatory. If there is physical space available for the greening of the school environment, that ought to be encouraged. There are programmes that are being rolled out, as you might be aware, to do that, but they are not mandatory and they will rely on the enthusiasm, the time and the ability of staff, essentially, within schools to implement them. There could be changes there.
We have to allow those young people to encounter it. It has to be on the end of their finger. They have to get slimed, stung, bitten and scratched by it to really feel it. Therefore, we need to draw back from the idea that the natural world is in some ways a sort of dark and dangerous place. It is not. It is a place that is filled with wonder. I would argue that allowing people too much access to the internet is exposing them to something far darker and more dangerous than the natural world in their gardens, if they are fortunate to have one, or their school grounds, if they are lucky to have those. If they do not, we can bring nature to them.
In simple terms, we have recently learned that, although we can record scientifically, peer-reviewed and published, that being in green spaces is good for our mental health, reducing anxiety and so on and so forth, so is watching it on screens but not at quite the same level. One of my suggestions off the cuff, a parting shot to one of the panels I was on, was why not pipe birdsong into the school library? Why not pipe birdsong into the school canteen? Instead of having holding slides with your school name on, why not show wildlife there? There are wildlife cameras like the ones “Springwatch” runs for three weeks that are constantly available online now. Those could be adopted by schools. They could adopt the young in the nests of those. They are obviously available in the southern hemisphere, so that could run 365 days a year. We have to exercise our imagination when it comes to that.
Ultimately, we have to give young people the freedom to engage themselves, because it is only under their terms that I think they will develop that all-important sense of wonder that you talk about. You cannot force it on them. You can offer it to them, and then we have to let them have it. At the moment, there are probably too many restrictions in place sometimes that they cannot actually have it.
One of the key things just really simplistically—it is a horror story—is that I see young people in the natural environment and they are wearing high-vis jackets. I wear a high-vis jacket if I am in a dangerous place. What are we saying to those young people if they are wearing high-vis jackets and every time they touch a newt we squirt them with hand gel? As far as I am aware, no child has ever died of newt in the UK. Let us just back off and relax and let them engage with those sorts of things. The natural world has enough wonder to instil that fascination on its own. We just have to be the providers of that.
Aaron Bell: Thank you. Hear, hear.
Chair: Thank you. The final question is from Tracey Crouch.
Q182 Tracey Crouch: I just wanted to ask you a couple of questions about the farming community. Do you think that there can ever be harmony between farmers and conservationists?
Chris Packham: Polarisation is never going to help anything. If we could be in a more creative debate, that would be good. I fear, speaking as a campaigner, that at the moment we are not on an equal playing field. To cite an example, I would say that probably the NFU has—no, it is not probably. The NFU has a lot more access to DEFRA than The Wildlife Trusts, and therefore when it comes to driving progressive policy of the likes that we have heard Craig speaking about it is really difficult to do. We do not have access to those policymakers to tell them frequently enough or forthrightly enough that we have a good idea here. We have to understand that there are significant vested interests within those lobbying groups, and the lobbying groups do not represent all farmers.
To counterbalance that, I and all of the other panellists will go to farms and see remarkable work being done when it comes to conservation of wildlife and recovery and restoration of biodiversity, and they are still producing food and a profit, but these policies have not been rolled out rapidly enough and broadly enough, and that is why we find ourselves in one of the most nature-depleted sets of countries in the world. It is implicitly important that bridges are built there, but at the same time we are in a crisis.
I remember watching “Blue Peter” in the 1960s, with Valerie Singleton, John Noakes and Peter Purves. You will be too young for that because you have already made me feel old. The point is we were talking about hedgerow decline at that point. I still drive around the outskirts of the New Forest National Park and I look at hedgerows in a parlous state through poor management. There is no excuse for that any longer. It would actually be cost-effective to put in policies—hedgerows is just one instance—so that farming practices would change to maintain that one habitat. It would be really simple to do. The guidelines are really simple, and it would save most of the farming fraternity money, but it is still not done. Of course, that is going to drive people like me to distraction, because the answer is on the table—it has been there for a very long time—but it is still not being implemented.
Now, we are in the midst of a crisis, and we have heard about the declines in insects and hedgerows, which are really important for some insect populations. The fact that it is still not happening is building increasing resentment, and that is why we get the increasing polarisation, unfortunately. We want change. Some people want bad business as usual. At this point, we need to find a better balance. We need to throw a few carrots to the conservationists. Therefore, we need more urgent reform of some of those farming policies.
Q183 Tracey Crouch: I was going to ask you whether you think food producers can ever be profitable while increasing insect populations or implementing biodiversity initiatives. Jeremy Clarkson has views. Presumably, your view is, “Yes, you can.” If so, by the way, I think the Committee would really welcome some examples of best practice.
Chris Packham: On his behalf—he is not here, but I trust that he would extend the invitation—I would say you should all come to Cholderton, which is a farm in Hampshire run by a guy called Henry Edmunds. I have been visiting Henry’s farm for many years. Every time I leave his farm, I feel euphoric. It is a farmed landscape. It is not a pristine wilderness. It is not rewilded. It is a functional farm producing a profit in a modern world, and yet its biodiversity is better than the SSSI next door.
Henry is an accomplished naturalist and a brilliant conservationist, but he is a farmer, and he proves that those things can go hand in hand. If you were to go there and look at—in his case—organic regenerative farming, you would see that the farmed landscape can be changed. We have a portfolio of techniques and abilities to transform that so that we can work alongside the hope of a resilient, stable, healthy, natural community where we can still produce food for all of us and where there is a healthy landscape for farming. That includes all aspects of farming—economic and even farming’s mental health, where there are all sorts of crises, as you know.
Q184 Tracey Crouch: Absolutely. I just wanted to say please don’t ever underestimate your power and influence in terms of inspiring the next generation through “Springwatch” and other activities that you are doing. I once got told off for accidentally killing an earwig in the process of removing it from a camper van and I was going to be reported to Chris Packham by my seven-year-old.
Chris Packham: I sentence you now.
Q185 Tracey Crouch: Just on the next generation, you will be aware that there is going to be a GCSE in natural history that is looking at some of the issues that have been raised as part of this inquiry, but it is not going to come in until 2025, which is something that campaigners are very frustrated about.
In your role as campaigner and conservationist, are you being asked to give advice on how educators can implement that GCSE, because it sounds like—forgive me if I am misinterpreting your comments—you think that it should not just be in the classroom but it should be out there being touched, felt, experienced and everything else?
Chris Packham: I suppose that comes down to broader educational needs. For very obvious reasons, if you are going to have a GCSE in natural history, I hope that it will contain some flexibility within its bit of the curriculum, because it will never be on tap. There will be a certain amount of classroom learning, which is great because that is implicitly important, but one would also hope that it included some contact with nature, whether that is virtual or real.
We need to empower the people who are going to implement that GCSE—essentially, the teachers and their assistants—with the discretion to use their imagination in how they use that and to be able to respond to it perfectly. It is a bit like the roll-out of some of the farming policies. I speak to a lot of farmers, and they complain about the fact that there is a policy that is set nationally and it might work for someone in north Wales, but it does not work for them in Kent. It is not a one size fits all. There needs to be flexibility within that GCSE.
If you have an inner-city school, potentially, within the live part of that, you will have a very different set of abilities and things that you might be able to access than if you are in a rural school. We need to think about empowering those people who are impassioned and who will run those courses to allow for that flexibility to engage those young people. I, like you, would like to see that rolled out a lot more quickly. One of the problems that we face and one of the things that is building the divisions that are so harmful when it comes to these sorts of conversations is the time span, basically. But, having said all of that—
Tracey Crouch: I want to clarify that the Government are making some huge progress on green prescribing, which was talking about your wellbeing aspect. I understand that we are expecting some future announcements on that quite soon, which I will think will be helpful for everyone.
Q186 Chair: Indeed. We need to draw proceedings to a close. Can I thank Mr Packham for an hour’s worth of compelling evidence to the Committee? Can I thank all our witnesses this morning?
Mr Packham mentioned the Big Butterfly Count that takes place this Friday. I think that is right. How can people observing this session participate?
Chris Packham: It is bigbutterflycount.butterfly-conservation.org. Download the app. You do not have to be an expert of any kind. Other charities and citizen science projects are available too.
Chair: I am very grateful to all the witnesses this morning. That concludes this meeting of the Committee.