A former acting permanent secretary at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs has returned from a decade-long hiatus from the civil service to become deputy chair of Natural England.
Peter Unwin, who left Defra in 2015, took up his new role on 1 April and will stay in the post until 31 December, the non-departmental public body has announced. He has been a board member at Natural England since 2020.
Unwin joined the civil service in 1976 through the statistical Fast Stream and worked at the Inland Revenue, Cabinet Office and Ministry of Defence before moving to the then-Department of Environment in 1983.
He has since worked on a range of policy areas including the natural environment, climate change, agriculture, local government and planning.
His long-running civil service career includes DG positions at the then-Department for Communities and Local Government and the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister under John Prescott.
He had a three-month stint as Defra’s acting perm sec in 2011 – the same year he was awarded a CB for services to the environment. He then spent eight years as a director general in the department, first in the environmental and rural group and then in policy delivery.
After leaving the civil service, Unwin spent four years as chief executive of the Whitehall and Industry Group, a not-for-profit membership organisation that promotes closer ties between government and the private sector.
Speaking to CSW in 2019, Unwin said his proudest achievement was leading the official delegation to the 1997 Kyoto Conference – Cop3 – and the subsequent Kyoto climate change agreement.
He said it was a “stroke of luck” that he ended up leading the negotiations for the whole of the EU after Luxembourg dropped out of the presidency, and that the conference reached what was, “at the time, a massively important agreement”.
He also said he was proud of “helping to introduce a new approach to the way we talked about the environment” in his last role at Defra.
“From the perspective of other departments I’d worked in, I thought Defra came across far too much as a ‘green’ department doing things simply because they were ‘good’,” he said.
“I had a strong view that you have to see the environment as an economic issue – human capital, financial capital, and as a country we need natural capital as well: water and soil and so on. So when I went for the job at Defra that was my pitch – seeing environment as an economic issue – and I think we achieved quite a bit on that.”