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

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what steps he is taking to help restore peatland in Mid Bedfordshire constituency.

The Government recognises the importance of England’s peatlands, and in our manifesto, we committed to expanding nature-rich habitats such as wetlands and peat bogs. This will contribute to ensuring nature’s recovery, one of Defra’s five priorities. We have ambitions to restore hundreds of thousands of hectares of peatlands across the country, and we are working to ensure that we have the most effective mechanisms in place to go further than we have before.

In the Mid Bedfordshire constituency, Defra is currently funding a Lowland Agricultural Peat Water Discovery Pilot project in the Flit Valley. It is one of a series of projects supporting local partnerships to gain understanding of how water can be better managed to rewet and preserve peat soils in these landscapes and collaborate to develop costed water plans. The project is due to complete in March 2026.