Kitty Thompson is the Senior Nature Programme Manager at the Conservative Environment Network.
“Keep your filthy hands off Tory beavers” ran a hilarious recent headline that splashed across the Daily Star.
As much as I loved the headline – so-much-so I bought my first-ever copy of the paper – I ultimately disagreed with the sentiment. If Labour wants to protect communities from flooding and restore nature to these isles, they should grab these native creatures right by the fur and release them into rivers across the country, regardless of which party touched them first.
But instead, this government is rumoured to be ditching plans to reintroduce native species to the UK, and undermining much-needed flood defences in the process, in the name of party politics.
To understand why the blue mist descends on Number 10 when they think about beavers, you need to cast your mind back to 2021. Swept up in that post-lockdown sense of freedom, beaver fever swept through the Conservative Party as rapidly as the annual conference cold. And then-PM Boris Johnson cemented the support by making his “build back beaver” speech.
However, not long after, the Russian invasion of Ukraine sparked deadly serious conversations about UK food security and attention inevitably turned away from flooding. As a result, beavers were pushed down the political agenda and eventually officially deprioritised by DEFRA.
Three years later flooding is dominating the headlines and beavers are once more finding allies within the Conservative Party who see the reintroduction of native beavers as an obvious solution to the flooding problem. Beaver fever is contagious yet again.
Scared of being infected by it, Number 10 is rumoured to be blocking the long-awaited plans to reintroduce wild beavers in England because they are a “Tory legacy”. We have, frustratingly, already lost the introduction of the new Natural History GCSE on the same grounds.
Environmentalists are up in arms over the Government’s decision to prioritise party politics over much-needed nature policy. And rightly so. Beavers are not a political football to be kicked. They are ecosystem engineers who should be put to work tackling our growing flooding problem.
Using wood, mud, and vegetation, beaver dams slow the flow of water downstream during heavy rainfall. The network of natural ponds and wetlands that spring up in their wake can also retain a huge amount of water. This, in turn, improves water quality by filtering sediment and reducing the likelihood of silting in the river. Together, beavers and their dams also boost biodiversity by attracting other plants and animals to the new surrounding habitats.
This industrious dam-building behaviour is as useful as it is cheap. The UK spends billions of pounds of taxpayer money on fighting flooding, deploying manmade, concrete solutions. Our willingness to adopt innovative flood management solutions, however, is much smaller.
Nature-based solutions (NBS) make up a tiny fraction of our spending (less than 1 per cent of the overall flood budget in the case of the Environment Agency). With a legally-binding target to halt biodiversity loss by 2030, the additional benefits that NBS provide to the environment, through habitat creation and pollution filtration for example, should not be overlooked or undervalued.
Our current unwillingness to invest in NBS is even more frustrating when you bear in mind that nature loss has been a factor behind our increased flood risk. Illegally-released wild beavers have already been shown to reduce flood flows by up to 60 per cent in the British landscape.
But we should not be in a situation where illegal animal releases are the only reason we have beavers in our landscape. The recent case of lynx in Scotland has proved how reckless this can be. We need the Government to acknowledge that we need more beavers and enable wild releases to take place legally. It can do this by introducing a long-awaited and highly necessary licensing regime, underpinned by a species reintroduction strategy.
While some people would like a total free-for-all all, a licensing system enables action to be taken if things do not go as planned. A beaver’s ability to move along the watercourse, for example, makes them fantastic at adapting to flooding patterns (unlike hard-engineered solutions), but it does mean that a land owner upstream could wake up to find a new neighbour has moved into the area and the edge of his field covered with water.
Farmers clearly need support if they are to be expected to put up with the consequences of having beavers on their land. While the necessary reintroduction paperwork should be as streamlined as possible, the applicants should be required to put management plans in place to mitigate any negative impacts of wild beaver reintroductions.
Equally, it is wrong to frame the presence of beavers on farmland as something to be compensated for, when the entire landscape will be benefiting from their flood-fighting dams. Instead, farmers should be rewarded through our post-Brexit farm payments system for hosting this species and its habitat on their land.
This complements existing payments that support farmers to create habitats that would enable beavers to thrive, such as establishing riparian buffer zones and ‘rewiggling’ rivers. A beaver-specific payment is just an extension of existing efforts to improve soil health and resilience to climate change impacts, like flooding.
Beavers have a lot to offer the UK. We should embrace the prospect of them roaming in our landscape, safe in the knowledge that, if something goes awry, a plan is already in place to deal with them humanely. Yet, despite the mounting evidence in beavers’ favour, Labour appears to be more concerned that they are too Tory to touch.
