The National Pollinator Strategy sets out actions taken across the country to support pollinators, underpinned by partnership delivery at the local level. Grow Wild at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, are working on a range of projects re-creating habitats across the Midlands.

Natural England are working with conservation organisations and landowners on the Back from the Brink programme, a £7.7m partnership funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund and others to put over 100 priority species on the road to recovery by 2020. Two Back from the Brink projects are supporting pollinators in the Midlands.

On 28 June, Butterfly Conservation, the project lead, announced that reintroduction work through the ‘Roots of Rockingham’ project in Rockingham Forest, Northamptonshire, has seen the Chequered Skipper become the first previously extinct butterfly to have bred successfully in an English woodland for more than 40 years.

Butterfly Conservation also lead Back from the Brink’s ‘Limestone’s Living Legacies’ project, working with landowners from the Cotswolds to Warmington in the West Midlands to restore and manage a network of limestone grassland sites which will provide suitable habitat to many species of pollinators.

The Government is also supporting the development and testing of pollinator habitat mapping to help voluntary bodies and land managers to create pollinator-friendly landscapes. This includes funding to support Buglife’s ‘B-Lines’ mapping project in the Midlands and other regions.

In 2018, our Bees’ Needs Champions Awards recognised a number of councils and community groups from across the Midlands for their own exemplary work to support pollinators.

Highways England recognise the critical role of pollinators and support the National Pollinator Strategy through their Biodiversity Plan. Highways England’s delivery of 3500 hectares of wildflower rich grassland is in progress and will support a wide range of pollinating insects.

Further details of how Highways England will support the National Pollinator Strategy are available on:

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/441300/N150146_-_Highways_England_Biodiversity_Plan3lo.pdf

Network Rail has been working on a range of initiatives across the country aimed at protecting pollinators, such as the Green Transport Corridors Project in Cumbria and South Yorkshire, where locations were identified for pollinator habitat creation and enhancement.

No assessment of the potential effect of the roll out of the 5G network on wildlife and pollinators has been made.

Electromagnetic radiation (EMR) has the potential to impact the movement of insects and some species of animals, but there is currently no evidence that human-made EMR, at realistic field levels, has population level impacts on (a) plants, (b) animals or (c) insects.

For all pesticides, the Government carries out a thorough assessment of the scientific evidence, drawing on advice from experts in the Health and Safety Executive and the UK Expert Committee on Pesticides. The current evidence shows that glyphosate pesticides do not carry unacceptable risks to pollinators and can therefore be authorised. Ministers have acted where the evidence shows an unacceptable impact on bees – for example, with respect to neonicotinoids.

Any highly effective means of removing flowering weeds can reduce the food and shelter available to pollinators. We are taking action to provide wildflower-rich habitat through the National Pollinator Strategy, including supporting partnerships of landowners and conservationists on large-scale habitat management projects. In 2015, we introduced new and simple agri-environment ‘packages’ to make it easier for farmers to put flowers back into fields. We are also raising awareness to help everyone support pollinators through action in their gardens and public spaces, through the ‘Bees’ Needs’ campaign.

The Government’s 25 Year Environment Plan puts Integrated Pest Management (IPM) at the heart of its approach. This means developing and implementing policies that encourage and support sustainable crop protection with the use of pesticides and their impact kept to a minimum.

Protecting pollinators is a priority for this Government. The Government supports two major events to raise awareness of the importance of bees and other pollinators and encourage people to take action.

Firstly, our ‘Bees’ Needs’ campaign, which we run with a number of partners. In July 2018, with the generous support of our hosts, Shaftesbury PLC, we put on a week long event in Carnaby Street (renamed ‘Carnabee’ Street for the week) to raise awareness of the steps we can all take to protect pollinators. With immense gratitude to our hosts Shaftesbury PLC, this event will be repeated this year from 8 to 14 July.

Defra also organises, in partnership with the Green Flag Awards, an annual Bees’ Needs Champions Awards to recognise and celebrate examples of exemplary initiatives undertaken by schools, local authorities, universities, community groups and bee farmers to support pollinators.

The Government is taking a range of other steps to protect pollinator species. In 2014 we published a ten year National Pollinator Strategy, setting out how the Government, conservation groups, farmers, beekeepers and researchers can work together to improve the status of the 1,500 or so pollinating insect species in England.

We are also creating habitat for pollinators. In 2015, we introduced new and simple wildlife ‘packages’ within Countryside Stewardship to make it easier for farmers to provide flower rich margins or pollen and nectar plots on fields to support wild pollinators.

The Government also recently announced £60,000 to develop pollinator habitat mapping and is supporting largescale projects to bring landowners and conservationists together to provide habitat in Devon and Hampshire. Natural England, our statutory nature conservation adviser, continues to work with a range of landowning and NGO partners to support the recovery of threatened species such as the barberry carpet moth, shorthaired bumblebee and chequered skipper butterfly.

We are supporting monitoring work. In collaboration with research institutes and volunteer organisations, we have established a pollinator monitoring and research partnership to gather further data and improve our understanding of the status of pollinators and pollination services in the UK.

We are taking steps to reduce pressures on pollinators. We have implemented science led restrictions on neonicotinoids based on scientific evidence that they carry risks to pollinators. We continue to tackle threats from invasive species, such as the Asian hornet, and protect honey bees from pests and diseases through the National Bee Unit’s nationwide team of bee inspectors.

We are safeguarding honey bee health. Collaboration has been a central tenet of the work by the Government and Bee Inspectors to protect honey bee health. Along with beekeeping associations, the Government has carried out a decade of work under the Healthy Bees Plan, drafted in 2009 as a means of sustaining our honey bee population. We will be reviewing this work this year and using valuable lessons from this to develop our future strategy.

The Government has worked closely with the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology (CEH) over a number of years on the development of the UK indicator of pollinator trends, which we publish annually.

This indicator uses much of the same data as in the CEH paper and shows similar trends. It shows many bee and hoverfly species have become less widespread since 1980, leading to an overall, long-term decline, although some species have become more prevalent. It also shows that this overall decline has slowed, but not ceased, since the 1990s; and that since 2011, overall trends appear to have stabilised, although a number of individual species continue to decline.

The Government acknowledges these long-term range contractions for many species and the changes in distribution amongst different types of pollinators. In response to the overall reductions we developed a National Pollinator Strategy (NPS) for England, a 10-year plan published in 2014. A core commitment of the NPS is to strengthen the evidence base so that we can better meet pollinators’ needs. We will continue to work with CEH and other research partners, and to understand better the CEH paper’s analysis of trends in upland areas and in southern Britain, and their impact across the UK.

As part of ongoing work to improve the evidence base, CEH coordinates the UK-wide Pollinator Monitoring Scheme, which is part-funded by Government. It is the only scheme in the world generating systematic data on the abundance of bees, hoverflies and other flower-visiting insects at a national level. Furthermore, in March 2019, Defra published up-to-date evidence statements on UK pollinators and pollination services, to which CEH and other leading institutions contributed.

We know that pollinators add substantial economic value to crop production through improving crop quality and quantity. Pollination’s economic benefit to UK crop production is approximately half a billion GBP annually, through increased yields of oilseed rape, fruit and vegetables. These crops are especially vulnerable to pollinator declines. There is no clear evidence, however, that UK crop pollination is being impacted, although a study has identified sub-optimal pollination in gala apples for example.

We are also working with researchers to understand better such potential risks of pollinator declines to food production and biodiversity, and to better inform land management approaches. For example, the University of Reading is leading a three-year Research Council-funded project on mapping and managing risks to pollinators across the UK, to help support sustainable and resilient crop production and maintain sufficient pollination services.

The NPS also commits us to provide habitat for pollinators. Certainly, we have seen success when landowners, farmers, conservation groups and Government collaborate to create new habitats and support reintroductions of lost species such as the barberry carpet moth, short-haired bumblebee and chequered skipper butterfly. We will continue to work in partnership with scientists and with practitioners to build on such successes and to see many more of our wonderful, vital insects thrive.