Question to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs:

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what recent steps his Department has taken in the Midlands to support pollinators.

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.