England spent £764 million planting trees and restoring peatland. The National Audit Office published its assessment in March 2026 and reached a conclusion that should have stopped the press release in its tracks: it cannot assess the value for money of the programme because the outcome data does not exist.

Defra, for its part, ‘expects the Programme to deliver very high value for money.’

If the outcome data does not exist, the expectation is not a finding. It is an assumption dressed as a performance statement.

The programme and its gaps

The Nature for Climate Fund ran from 2020-21 to 2024-25. Its headline targets were 7,500 hectares of annual tree planting across England and 35,000 hectares of peatland restoration over the full period. Against those targets, the programme directly funded 15,268 hectares of tree planting (53 per cent of target) and 23,526 hectares of peatland restoration (67 per cent of target). Taking in all planting and restoration across England, not just what the Fund directly funded, the figures rise to 74 per cent and 76 per cent respectively. Still short.

The NAO characterises the shortfall charitably. The targets were, in Defra’s framing, ‘intentionally ambitious’. If the targets were intentionally ambitious, the miss was foreseeable. It was also paid for. ‘Intentionally ambitious’ is a pre-emptive explanation of underperformance dressed as design philosophy.

The more fundamental problem is not the shortfall. It is what the programme was measuring in the first place.

Hectares are not carbon

A hectare of trees planted is an activity measure. It tells you work was done. It does not tell you whether that work achieved anything in climate terms. A tree planted in the wrong location counts the same as a tree planted correctly. A tree planted and then neglected counts the same as one that survives and sequesters carbon for fifty years. A hectare of peatland ‘restored’ that dries out within three years counts the same as one that forms functioning peat and stores carbon reliably for decades. The programme counted activity. It did not measure effect.

The NAO is explicit: ‘It will be important for Defra to make further progress in measuring the beneficial outcomes that tree planting and peatland restoration are achieving.’ The programme’s benefit estimates ‘do not yet cover the full range of outcomes or the whole five-year period.’ A final evaluation is expected later in 2026, five years after the programme started and after the money has been spent.

That sequencing is the commissioning failure. You build the measurement framework before you commission the activity, not after. The data needed to evaluate whether £764 million worked cannot be retrofitted onto a completed programme. If survival rates, species composition, and carbon sequestration were not tracked from the start, they are not recoverable. You are left with hectares and an expectation.

The category error inside the output measure

There is a structural problem buried inside the headline figure. The NAO notes that future tree planting ‘may require clearer prioritisation between carbon sequestration and timber production, for which conifer planting is most effective, and wider environmental and societal benefits, for which broadleaf planting is most effective.’

Read that carefully. The Nature for Climate Fund funded both conifer and broadleaf planting. Both count toward the hectare target. The headline output figure treats a commercial forestry investment and a carbon sequestration investment as the same thing. For a programme justified on climate grounds, this is not a reporting gap. It is a category error built into the programme design. The output metric conflates two activities with fundamentally different climate relevance, then reports the combined total as evidence of climate progress.

When the NAO says clearer prioritisation ‘may’ be required in future, the implication is that it was not required in this programme. Five years and £764 million later, nobody can tell Parliament how much of the tree planting was climate work and how much was timber production support.

What adequate commissioning would have looked like

A climate commissioning framework would have specified carbon sequestration as the primary outcome metric from the outset. Grant conditions would have required species composition data at planting and survival monitoring at three and ten years. Peatland restoration grants would have included hydrological assessment to distinguish functioning peat recovery from vegetation change on drained land. Carbon benefit would have been modelled from actual planting data, not from assumptions about what happens after trees go in the ground, and the model would have been audited against measured outcomes at regular intervals.

None of this is technically demanding. Carbon accounting methodology for land use exists. The Woodland Carbon Code and the Peatland Code both provide frameworks for exactly this kind of measurement. The question is not whether the tools were available. It is whether Defra required them as conditions of funding. The NAO’s findings suggest the answer is: not consistently.

What the press release obscures

The NAO press release headline reads: ‘Tree planting and peatland restoration schemes show progress, but step-change needed to ensure success.’ That framing positions the measurement gap as a future improvement opportunity. It is not. The step-change was needed before the programme started. The decisions that determined whether this money achieved anything were made in 2020 when the commissioning framework was designed. By 2026, those decisions are history. The evaluation will document what they produced. It cannot change them.

England’s tree cover sits at 14.9 per cent of land area, one of the lowest in Europe. The peatland target exists because 80 per cent of England’s peatland remains in a dry or degraded state. These are real problems. The government committed real money to address them. Whether that money moved the underlying numbers meaningfully, whether the trees that were planted are alive, whether the carbon claimed will actually be sequestered: none of it is known. More precisely, it was not designed to be known. That is the finding the press release should have led with.

Source: National Audit Office, The Nature for Climate Fund, March 2026, https://www.nao.org.uk/reports/the-nature-for-climate-fund/