England has too many environmental regulators and no one in charge
The system is too complex, too slow, and too costly to get things done
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By Professor Baroness Kathy Willis & Sebastian Leape
A few years ago, inspectors found a fault in the draw-off tower at Brent Reservoir in north-west London.
The Canal & River Trust are required by law to keep the dam safe, so began a £3.5 million project to draw the reservoir down and repair the damage. The Environment Agency wanted a flood permit for slow discharge into the River Brent. Natural England only allowed a short window on the permit to protect nesting birds in the river. The inevitable result of competing regulators? The reservoir works were not completed in the permitted time window, further disruptive drawdowns are now needed – a worse result for the taxpayer, local safety and for nature.
The reservoir is a small instance of a larger failing system. The rules for environmental protection and restoration are enforced by a crowd of agencies: Defra alone sponsors thirty-four bodies, twelve of them regulators. Nobody has overall oversight, and nobody can say yes quickly and make it stick. The result is a system that is too complex, too slow, and too costly to navigate for those trying to get things done.
Time to rethink
Most politicians acknowledge that Britain needs to build to upgrade its grey infrastructure. We need to build new water infrastructure to stop sewage flowing into our rivers. We need to build new transmission networks to unlock our net zero targets. We need to build better public transport to increase productivity across the country. We also need to build decent, affordable homes for our families.
But alongside all of these, Britain also needs to build better natural infrastructure. The Environment Act 2021 and the Environment Improvement Plan 2023 set out legally binding targets to increase woodland cover, restore or create more than 500,000 hectares of wildlife-rich habitat, and reduce agricultural water pollution by 40%. Currently, we are failing on the vast majority of these targets.
The stakes for this failing system have recently gone up. On 31 July the Cabinet promised to ‘Rewire the State’, shifting powers and tax revenue out to mayors and redrawing police forces, fire services and Integrated Care Boards onto the same map as strategic authorities. Environmental regulation was not part of that redrawing.
So a mayor handed control of housing, transport and local energy will still have to take every scheme through up to twelve national regulators, none of which reports to her, none of which shares her boundaries, and any one of which may stop her. Nor can she decide what good looks like for her rivers and her landscape.
The answer to this failing system is to consolidate the majority of England’s environmental regulators into a single Environmental Regulator, bringing the Environment Agency, Natural England, the Forestry Commission, the Joint Nature Conservation Committee, and the Marine Management Organisation under one organisational roof.
The purpose of the new body would be to deliver England’s statutory environmental targets and to enable sustainable growth through use of land, sea and natural resources. In doing so it would prevent and remedy environmental harm, conserve and restore nature, reconcile competing demands on land and sea, sustain natural resources, secure public access to the natural environment, and maintain the evidence and monitoring on which its decisions depend.
The case to consolidate
A single body would likely cost less to run. Many of these agencies currently maintain their own habitat regulations team, its own biodiversity net gain team, its own permitting, monitoring, legal and data functions.
The same scheme can be assessed twice, on the same evidence, by two bodies that reach different conclusions. The UK has a track record of delivering savings through consolidation - Ofcom reduced staff costs by 8% in 2004/5, following their merger of five regulators.
The environmental return is even more significant. Money for nature currently arrives through a plethora of different pots: water company environmental programmes, biodiversity net gain contributions, transport strategy environment funding, the Nature for Climate Fund, and the Nature Restoration Fund to name but a few.
A single regulator accountable for delivering environmental outcomes rather than site-level compliance could optimise for these resources to deliver England’s statutory environmental targets at a landscape scale, in line with the priorities of Mayoral Combined Authorities across the country.
The economic growth case from integration is also critical. A major project would face one conversation, one front door, rather than a sequence of overlapping ones. This new regulator would face short mandatory deadlines at every decision stage of its permitting responsibilities. Predictability is worth as much as speed to those looking to get things done, and this would deliver both.
And finally, there is a question of fairness. Fragmentation is regressive as only the largest developers can afford consultants to navigate twelve regulators. And a single large regulator is a more formidable counterparty to a polluter than four smaller ones who can be played off each other.
Making trade-offs
The Independent Water Commission has effectively conceded this principle already. Asked to review the Water sector, it found a regulatory landscape that was fragmented and overlapping, and recommended a single integrated regulator merging Ofwat, the Drinking Water Inspectorate and the water functions of the Environment Agency and Natural England. The government accepted within hours. The logic is that economic, environmental and drinking-water objectives cannot be separated. That reasoning does not stop at the water’s edge.
Consolidation on this scale needs primary legislation and will take years. The government should not spend them waiting. In the interim, it should appoint a single lead regulator, with a named contact, for every major multi-regulator project, empowered to make trade-off decisions within a tiered priority framework set by government and bound by the same deadlines. It requires no legislation and it could be live across major projects within six months.
Do nothing and we fail on nature recovery, we fail on net zero, we fail to build the homes families need, and we fail to get sewage out of our rivers. A single decision-maker would not end hard trade-offs, but it would give them an owner, an evaluation framework, and a deadline. It is the difference between a system that decides and one that delays.
Professor Baroness Kathy Willis is the Principal of St Edmund Hall at the University of Oxford and Professor of Biodiversity in the university’s Department of Biology. She is also a Crossbench Peer in the House of Lords. She previously held roles as Director of Science at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, and a member of the UK Government’s Natural Capital Committee.
Sebastian Leape is CEO of Natcap, a leading nature intelligence provider. He has worked as an Associate Partner at McKinsey, helping businesses and governments define and embed climate and nature strategies into their operations. He has also been a policy advisor and speechwriter to Gordon Brown.
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