Our Roadmap to 2030After a fifteen month delay, the government’s new Environmental Improvement Plan had been published. Shaped by a rapid review, the spending review and a ministerial reshuffle, exposing the vulnerability of environmental policymaking. The publish in 2025 brings relief, preventing further delays to action and hold up a pipeline of key environmental policies.
The government’s Environmental Improvement Plan (EIP25) was published in 2025 after a fifteen month delay, following a rapid review of the previous plan, the spending review and a summer ministerial reshuffle. The draw out process exposed how vulnerable environmental policymakers can be greater political and financial pressures. Eventual publishing was welcomed, easing fears that further delay would stall action and hold up other long awaited policies, including the land use framework, the 25 year farming roadmap and the circular economy growth plan.
EIP25 brings together a ride range of environmental commitments and is presented clearer and easier to navigate. A key change is the publication of 13 accompanying delivery plans, designed to improve accountability and transparency, providing more detail on how the government intends to deliver environments improvements to areas including water quality, habitat creations and woodland cover.
The plan includes several popular and long standing policy commitments, such as an access to nature green paper, renewed promises to ban the sale of peat and peat-containing products, and increased focus on pollution. Encouraging steps to include stronger ambition on particulate matter pollution, a new plan on forever chemicals, and proposals to bring intensive dairy and beef farming into the environmental permitting regime to reduce ammonia emissions.
However, funding remains a significant area of uncertainty. unlike the previous plan, EIP25 does not restate a pledge to mobilise £1 billion private finance for nature by 2030. While the government has committed £500 million to the Landscape Recovery scheme which is spread over 20 years. And it is unclear whether additional resources will follow to meet the scale of nature reassertion needed.
EIP25 runs until 2030, with many targets pushing back to align with critical biodiversity deadlines. With the government already off track to meet the legal environmental commitments and shunted from 2018 to 2030. Leaving us to see whether EIP25 can pout nature on a path to recovery will depend on delivery at pace, sustained funding and strong political leadership across the government. As 90% of its commitments fall on the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and their agencies, the context in which these will be delivered matters.
