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

To ask Her Majesty's Government what assessment they have made of the health of the UK butterfly population.

The UK Butterfly Monitoring Scheme is organised and funded by Butterfly Conservation, the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, the British Trust for Ornithology and the UK Government’s nature conservation adviser, the Joint Nature Conservation Committee. Records are collected by volunteers and provide an invaluable dataset for planning and monitoring action for insect conservation. The scheme’s data is published annually and incorporated into the Government’s UK and England Biodiversity Indicators.

The UK indicator of butterfly abundance shows long term declines since 1976 but has shown no overall trend since 2012, despite increases for some species and decreases for others. We have seen real conservation success stories, often where farmers, landowners, voluntary bodies - such as Butterfly Conservation - and Government have worked together to put the right management in the right place. For example, the high brown fritillary, one of Britain’s most threatened butterflies, having lost 85 per cent of its population since the 1970s, has been the focus of conservation efforts and has seen numbers increase by 271 per cent over the last 10 years.

Short-term increases in numbers across species were also seen in 2018 when the Monitoring Scheme’s most recent data was published in April 2019. More than two- thirds of UK butterfly species were seen in higher numbers than the previous year, with two of the UK’s rarest, the large blue and black hairstreak, recording their best years since records began. The Government knows, however, that butterfly numbers fluctuate from year to year in response to weather conditions. The Government must closely monitor the underlying trends and keep conservation actions under review to build on progress and ensure that efforts continue to be targeted effectively.