Relief for England’s wildlife as nature-friendly farming funding announced

On Wednesday 11 June, Chancellor Rachel Reeves delivered the Comprehensive Spending Review, sharing how much funding would be allocated to each of the UK Government’s departments for the next three years. In recent months, we’ve asked you to call on the Chancellor to protect and grow England’s nature-friendly farming budget ahead of this critical moment for nature.

Over 100,000 of you signed our petition and together we stood shoulder to shoulder with farmers to make the case for the nature-friendly farming budget. Thanks to you, our pleas to safeguard spending were impossible to ignore.

The Chancellor has committed to spending £2 billion a year on nature-friendly farming, and £400 million to plant trees and restore peatlands over the next three years. This is the biggest ever annual nature-friendly farming budget. It's a win for nature, for farmers, and for all of us.

Rachel Reeves called this Comprehensive Spending Review an opportunity to ‘fix the foundations’ of the UK economy. No foundation is more vital – or more at risk – than nature. It underpins our health, our economy, and our food security.  Good news for the nature-friendly farming budget comes alongside a significant budget cut for the Department of Environment and Rural Affairs (Defra) – one of the largest across all government departments. At a time when nature needs the Government to act fast to tackle the joint nature and climate emergency, increased investment is essential.

Nature is the air we breathe, the fresh food we grow. It’s the healthy soils, the clean rivers and streams. With 70% of the UK farmed, working with farmers is the best chance we have of seeing our wildlife numbers recover.

Many incredible farmers are already sowing the seeds for a future that will leave our farmland, our wildlife and our food system in a better state than they found it. They’re proving you can have productive, successful farms alive with the sounds of Curlews, Skylarks and Yellowhammers. This week’s announcement is a relief, but now we need nature-friendly farming to happen at scale, creating vital pockets of habitat for our wildlife across much more of our farmland. The only way to do this is if governments support our farmers every step of the way, and that needs to happen across the UK, too. The Scale of Need report, research commissioned by the RSPB, National Trust and The Wildlife Trust, estimates that £3.1 billion per year needs to be invested in nature-friendly farming alone in England to meet these goals.

Over 100,000 of you signed our petition calling on Rachel Reeves to protect the nature-friendly farming budget. Together, we’ve shown the UK Government that there is a huge groundswell of support for a food and farming system that works for wildlife, farmers and all of us. Farmers, conservationists, landowners, RSPB members, supporters, campaigners and many more from all walks of life have come together to back nature-friendly farming.

Thousands of people will be heading to Westminster on 9 July 2025, to call on their MP to create a future where nature and people can thrive together. We'd love you to come along! This is an opportunity to talk about the nature and climate issues you care about, like nature-friendly farming. You’ll also get the chance to meet other like-minded nature lovers who are speaking up for nature.