An ambitious scheme to restore England’s nature over coming decades has been undermined after the government inserted a clause allowing it to terminate contracts with only a year’s notice, conservationists have said.

The project was designed to fund landscape-scale restoration over thousands of hectares, whether on large estates or across farms and nature reserves. The idea was to create huge reserves for rare species to thrive – projects promoted as decades-long commitments to securing habitat for wildlife well into the future.

Conservationists have warned these changes, as well as underfunding, will lead to low take-up and less land protected for nature. They say allowing contracts to be ripped up after a year is unworkable, as it would leave landowners with rewilded land they can no longer farm and too little time to reconvert it.