Dear
I am writing as your constituent to ask you to support the creation of a National Nature Service, to recover nature and to help unemployed people.
As someone who loves nature, and has come to value it even more over lockdown, I am extremely concerned by its ongoing decline. Two fifths of British species having declined since 1970, and this decline will continue until we make space for nature to recover in.
I am also very worried about the unemployment that Covid-19 leaves in its wake, particularly the impact on young people shut out from employment at a critical point in their lives.
The National Nature Service is a proposal, developed by environmental charities and civil society, that could help tackle both the decline of nature, and the high unemployment we now face. The service would employ 20,000 people to create spaces for nature to recover in, planting trees, creating new urban parks and restoring wetlands. At the end of their placement, NNS employees would graduate as ‘Rangers’, equipped with green skills that will be in high demand over the coming years, especially with the pipeline of green work created by the current Environment and Agriculture Bills.
A National Nature Service will therefore bring employment to people who need it now, provide the workforce needed to create spaces for nature to recover in and equip people for the green jobs of the future.
The Government has an opportunity to put the National Nature Service at the heart of green recovery from Covid-19 this autumn, by funding it through the expected Comprehensive Spending Review. I would be very grateful if you could write to the Treasury, to express your support for the National Nature Service and the benefits it will deliver for nature and people.
More information about the National Nature Service, including the details of how it would work and the full list of organisation backing it, can be found here. If you wish, you can also sign and tweet a declaration in support of the National Nature Service, which can be found here.
Thank you for your consideration of this request.
Yours sincerely,