Chris Churchman explores the industry’s future reflective of the year so far
Chris Churchman looks back on the first half of 2025 and considers the potential implications for the industry’s future.
At the start of 2025 I set myself the task of tracking events, political, geopolitical, natural, to see how these might play out in terms of the landscape industry. This, my third piece, written in mid-August, but you won’t be reading it till September, so some of what I write may already be old news.
Financial Adjustments
When I started in January, Labour were in full swing, we had witnessed the November 2024 budget of doom, and the dropping of National Insurance (NI) thresholds, pulling many more lower paid workers into the NI Net; no doubt those of you in delivery are feeling the pain.
While not directly related to the horticultural industry the removal of Inheritance Tax Relief for those in agriculture will have affected people you know, and the reigning in of Business Asset Disposal Relief will have made it more difficult for some of you to dispose of the businesses that your labours have built up. The effects of these changes are still, no doubt, filtering through.
In June we had the government spending review and although significant cuts to the green budgets were avoided there were, nevertheless, real term cuts, meaning less investment and cash coming into the industry, although the government firmly believes that private investment will deliver transformation, not state intervention.
The real challenge was still yet to come and with Labour supposedly needing to fill a £50m black hole, it is almost inevitable that this autumn’s budget will bring heartache for most, if not all of us, with horticulture unlikely to be spared.
Action Rooted in Nature
It’s not all bad news, Labour came in with a big plan, to deal with at least some of the financial shortfall they had inherited through growth, growth and more growth. Anyone associated with the construction industry, and that means anyone raising, installing and maintaining planting, was going to be the beneficiary.
The imposition of biodiversity net gain (BNG), delivered under the Tories, means that all new building developments are going to have to invest more heavily in greenery and nature. So, from the policy perspective the future should be rosy.
While unfortunately, Labour’s commitment to build 1.5m homes in the life of this parliament looks like a pipe dream, any C grade maths GSCE student can work out that that would mean 300k new homes need building every year. Whilst there has been an uptick on previous years the numbers are still woefully short of the target. As I drive around the country, I simply don’t see the wave of new developments that was promised. What we will see is a roll out of huge solar farms as we move to 100% renewable energy (currently just over 50%), but they won’t deliver anything for the horticultural sector.
Unfortunately, BNG may turn out not to be the golden ticket we all expected. There is a growing school of thought that BNG uplift delivered on-site, which a majority currently is, does not deliver a good enough return, neither for nature nor the economically. There are growing calls for BNG uplifts to be delivered off-site through nature banks, but that is likely to be delivered by farmers and not from those in the landscaping industry.
Ground-Baking Summer
If the summer of 2025 is going to be remembered for anything, apart from the Lionesses retention of the UEFA European Women’s Championship 2025, it will be the lack of rain. Whilst some parts of the country have seen some precipitation, the eastern half has seen virtually zero rainfall, for months – I only need to look at my neighbour’s straw-coloured lawn to know how bad it’s been.
Planting anything in this weather, is likely to have been a fruitless exercise. No doubt countless thousands of sapling trees will have been planted this spring and will now be dead twigs.
The fact is we are living through changing times; our unpredictable English weather is probably going to get even more unreliable. If that is indeed the case, should we just continue to install the same old schemes, accepting that a high proportion of plants will simply fail?
One of the last things I did as a landscape architect was to encourage a major developer to at least trial some areas of drought tolerant, nutrient depleted, crushed aggregate based plantings. To its credit LendLease gave it a go at Silvertown, and it seems to be establishing well, and looking good.
Surely, we need to learn new techniques if we are to adapt to a new world, but this will require different skills and different contracts, failure and liability for replacements are very different with a planting scheme based on seed and plugs.