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EU Nature Directive
Thank you for contacting me about the EU Nature Directives.
As you might be aware, the European Commission has been carrying out a ‘fitness check’ for the EU Birds and Habitats Directives, together known as the Nature Directives. Its objective is to find out whether the Directives are suitable for the purposes for which they were intended.
Part of this process involves automatically consulting certain interest groups in each EU member state. Here in the UK these are the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, the Department for Energy and Climate Change and the RSPB. The European Commission also ran a public consultation on its website, which closed in July 2015. I hope you were able to contribute to this part of the process.
The Nature Directives have an important role to play and the last Coalition Government reviewed the way these Directives are implemented in England. It found that generally they are working well but identified 28 measures that would make compliance simpler. The bulk of these measures have been introduced already and the remainder are currently being implemented. Further detail on these measures is available online here.
I hope you will find this information helpful. Thank you again for taking the time to contact me about this important issue.
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