Secretaries of state visit Hinksey Heights Fen
14th July 2025
Freshwater Habitats Trust welcomed Steve Reed, Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, and Ed Miliband, Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, to Hinksey Heights Fen in Oxford on Friday 11th July.
The visit took place ahead of the first ever state of nature and climate address, which Ed Miliband gave to Parliament on Monday 14th July.
Freshwater Habitats Trust CEO Professor Jeremy Biggs, Senior Project Officer Adam Bows, and Project Officer Siân Vincent, gave the Ministers a tour of the fen and explained how restoration work is bringing back rare species to one of Britain’s most endangered and vulnerable freshwater habitats.
The work at Hinksey Heights Fen exemplifies the charity’s implementation of the Freshwater Network and shows how working with small freshwater and wetland habitats rapidly and cost-effectively brings about recovery of freshwater biodiversity.
- Ed Miliband (Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change), Jeremy Biggs (Freshwater Habitats Trust), Steve Reed (Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs at Hinksey Heights fen.
Since 2018, Freshwater Habitats Trust has been working with the landowner, local ecologists and volunteers to restore the fen. The focus has been on reducing trees and cutting the dense reeds that had invaded the fen, shading and outcompeting the special plant and animal communities supported by the fen. This work has increased the number of wetland plant species by 700%, with numbers of wetland plant species increasing from nine to 75 in the restoration area. At the same time, threatened plants such as Common Valerian, Parsley Water-dropwort and Marsh Arrowgrass are now thriving at the site.
Oxfordshire has an internationally important concentration of alkaline fens, but many are degraded or have been lost altogether. These small wetlands are vital for biodiversity – supporting many rare and threatened species of plants and animals.
- Volunteers at Hinksey Heights. Photo: Tim Bearder.
In the briefing to the Ministers, Professor Jeremy Biggs said: “The restoration of Hinksey Heights Fen is part of our national programme to build the Freshwater Network, which takes a new approach to protecting and restoring freshwater biodiversity.
“The Freshwater Network takes account of the whole water environment and pays special attention to the smaller waterbodies and wetlands – like Hinksey Heights Fen – which are largely overlooked in water policy.”
Professor Biggs also explained that, as well as being a haven for wildlife and local people, the fen is a carbon sink. Its 18,000 m3 of peat stores roughly 900 tonnes of organic carbon. Re-wetting the fen means it continues to act as a carbon sink. Carbon is safely locked up in the peat and the fen constantly sequesters more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Thanks to the restoration work, more water is also stored on the site, helping to protect the local area from droughts and floods.
- L-R Ed Miliband (Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change), Jeremy Biggs (Freshwater Habitats Trust), Steve Reed (Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs), Adam Bows (Freshwater Habitats Trust), Edel McGurk (Natural England), Siân Vincent (Freshwater Habitats Trust) at Hinksey Heights fen.
The visit was arranged by Natural England through the Nature Returns programme, which funded and worked in partnership Freshwater Habitats Trust to deliver the Oxfordshire-Buckinghamshire Freshwater Network project.
The charity worked with landowners throughout Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire to restore or create wetland habitats, with a focus on the role of smaller, peat-dominated wetlands, floodplains, wet grasslands and small waters in sequestering carbon.
Through the project, the charity has created 14.5 hectares of new floodplain wetland mosaics and ponds and restored 11 hectares of alkaline fen and 16 hectares of floodplain grassland.
Nature Returns is a £15 million programme first established in 2021 to research and test Nature-based Solutions for climate change at the landscape scale, utilising cross governmental collaboration and a ‘learning by doing’ approach.
It is led by Natural England, working in partnership with RBG Kew, Environment Agency, Forestry Commission together with Defra and the Department for Energy and Net Zero (DESNZ), previously funded by HM Treasury’s Shared Outcomes Fund. Using pioneering techniques, the programme is improving the evidence base around how nature recovery can combat biodiversity loss whilst also capturing and storing carbon, and helping us to adapt to the impacts of climate change.