Nature Conservation

And then, suddenly, all was sunshine again. New Labour had made a manifesto commitment to increase the protection of wildlife. It also lent a more friendly ear to the voluntary bodies, especially those with upwards of a hundred thousand members. English Nature’s first chairman, the cautious and politically acute Lord Cranbrook, reached the end of his term and was replaced by the leftish-inclined late head of RSPB, Barbara Young, who also held a government job in the House of Lords. Council included more credible members. Parliament, investigating the work of English Nature and inviting voluntary bodies to participate as witnesses, kindly concluded that any lack of zealotry on the part of EN must have been due to insufficient money, and so increased its budget.

Thorne Moors SSSI was a bone of contention in the 1990s between English Nature, which sought a compromise deal with the developers, and campaigners who wanted to stop peat extraction altogether. (Peter Roworth/English Nature)

A fresh breeze. Barbara Young (Baroness Young of Old Scone), chairman of English Nature 1998-2000. (English Nature/ Paul Lacey)

A friendlier minister and a more supportive social climate seem to have increased English Nature’s confidence. Opposing harmful developments is back on the agenda. It dared to criticise the Government line on Genetically Modified Organisms. One particular case summed up the change in attitude. In 1999 EN prevented a proposal to tip ball-clay waste at Brocks Farm SSSI in Devon, having turned down the owner’s offer to ‘translocate’ the grassland habitat. ‘The first prerequisite for protecting an SSSI is to leave it as it is,’ said EN’s spokesman. Both the crispness of the language and the conviction behind it seemed a world away from the rather hapless appearance English Nature had created a few years earlier.

Scottish Natural Heritage (SNH)

Headquarters: 12 Hope Terrace, Edinburgh EH9 2AS

Mission: ‘Working with Scotland’s people to care for our natural heritage’.

In 1992, Malcolm Rifkind, Secretary of State for Scotland, told his newly established natural heritage body that if it was not ‘a thorn in his flesh from time to time’ then it would not be doing its job properly. It was expected, however, to ‘work with Scotland’s people’ more successfully than its predecessor, which meant not running too far ahead of public opinion. Scottish Natural Heritage was set up by Act of Parliament in 1992. It combined the functions of the old NCC in Scotland and the Countryside Commission for Scotland, a disproportionately small body compared with England’s Countryside Commission (for Scotland had no National Parks), responsible for footpaths and non-statutory ‘National Scenic Areas’. ‘SNH’ was given a generous first-year budget of £34.6 million and inherited a combined staff of about 530. Its chairman, the television personality Magnus Magnusson, was an unashamed populist and ‘aggressive moderate’, professing to dislike ‘the harsh voice of single-minded pressure groups’ quite as much as ‘the honeyed tones of the developer’. The new chief executive, Roger Crofts, came fresh from the Scottish Office, as did two of his senior directors.

Although the nature conservation responsibilities of SNH were similar to its predecessor – new legislation had not changed the statutory instruments in Scotland, which were still SSSIs – the ground rules were different. SNH’s founding statute emphasised the magic word ‘sustainable’ for the first time in British law, although exactly what was meant by the duty of ‘having regard to the desirability of securing that anything done, whether by SNH or any other person (sic) in relation to the natural heritage of Scotland, is undertaken in a manner which is sustainable’ – is open to interpretation! It was plainly ridiculous to make sustainability a duty of a minor government agency but not of the Government itself (‘like giving a wee boy a man’s job’). SNH put on record its view that sustainable development in Scotland required serious changes in government policy and the way public money was spent. But it, like English Nature, also espoused a corporate ethos that sought consensus and partnership, which inevitably means doing things more slowly. Confrontation was the policy of the bad old days.

Des Thompson, SNH’s senior ornithologist, surveying Flow Country patterned bogs by the Thurso River in Caithness. (Derek Ratcliffe)

The second ground rule was accountability. To give at least the semblance of bringing SNH ‘closer to its constituents’, it was organised into four local boards, each with its own budget, work programme, and salaried board members, and responsible for three or more area ‘teams’. Predictably enough, the regional boards proved expensive to run, sowed wasteful bureaucracy and duplication of effort, and set one local ‘power base’ against another. They were abandoned in 1997, and replaced by a new structure with 11 ‘areas’ overseen by three ‘Area Boards’. This was SNH’s third administrative upheaval in five years.

Another significant change was what the former NCC’s Scottish director Morton Boyd called ‘the fall of science’. The minister in charge of environmental affairs at the Scottish Office was Sir Hector Monro (now Lord Monro of Langholm). He had served on the NCC’s Council ‘and had grown to dislike scientists’ (Boyd 1999). The role of science must be advisory, he insisted, and should not be used as the basis of policy. Hence SNH’s top scientist, Michael B. Usher, was not the ‘Chief Scientist’, as before, but the ‘Chief Scientific Adviser’, and he was eventually excluded from SNH’s main management team. Nor were SNH’s local boards particularly rich in scientific experience. The scientists sat on a separate research board under Professor George Dunnet, later named the Scientific Advisory Committee. It was rich in IQs but poor in influence, and, fed up with being repeatedly ignored, Dunnet resigned in 1995. As Boyd commented, the standing of scientists is not what it once was. Not only were they held responsible for the disputes that had made the NCC unpopular in Scotland, scientists were also seen as an unacceptable ‘élite’. The new approach had to be ‘people-led’.

Humility? The NCC’s scientific advisory committee dwarfed by the great beeches of the New Forest. (Derek Ratcliffe)

With the Scottish Office breathing down its neck, landowners asserting themselves and voluntary bodies inclined to be publicly critical, SNH was obliged to tiptoe over eggshells. Crofts kept in close touch with his minister and senior civil servants, and some saw SNH’s new relationship with Government as one of servant and master. Rifkind’s words, it seemed, were more to be honoured in the breach than the observance. When SNH tried to introduce notions of sustainability into transport policy, for instance, it was firmly put in its place by his successor, Ian Lang. The only thorns he would be prepared to tolerate, it seemed, were rubber ones.

All the same, SNH’s reports give the impression of substantial progress in uncontroversial matters, with various initiatives carefully ticked off against Scottish Office targets. It has, for example, played a useful role in helping walkers and landowners to find common ground through an Access Forum. This has worked because landowners saw voluntary agreements on access as a way of staving off legislation, while the ramblers saw it as a means of ‘trapping them into compromise on a matter of rights’ (Smout 2000). The result was a grandly named ‘Concordat on Access to Scotland’s hills and mountains’. Though legislation is coming anyway, the talks have at least defused the situation by liberalising entrenched attitudes, and access is not now the contentious issue in Scotland that it became in England.

In terms of wildlife protection, SNH has kept a lower profile than the NCC, although it has experienced much the same problems. SNH’s approach has been more tactful, and it has tried as far as possible to build bridges with bodies like the Crofter’s Association, and with local communities. Local accountability was impressed upon it even more strongly by the new Scottish Parliament. In the early days, SNH inherited several outrageous claims for compensation by the owners of large SSSIs. It also had to cope with a statutory appeals system for SSSIs imposed on SNH by a group of landowners in the House of Lords led by Lord Pearson of Rannoch. Although in practice the appeals board was given little work to do, its existence tended to make the SNH cautious about notifying new SSSIs, and conservative about recommending Euro-sites. National Nature Reserves were also reviewed; those with weak agreements and no immediate prospect of stronger ones were struck off, or ‘de-declared’ (see Chapter 5). SNH was similarly cautious about acquiring land or helping others to acquire it. For example, SNH smiled benignly at the new owners of Glen Feshie, part of the Cairngorms National Nature Reserve, despite knowing nothing about them, and was not allowed to contribute so much as a penny towards the purchase price of Mar Lodge (only to its subsequent management). Like English Nature, it has stepped back from direct management into a more advisory role.

SNH are probably right that the future of Scotland’s wildlife will benefit more from changing attitudes and shifting subsidies than from putting up barricades around special sites. While about 10 per cent of Scotland (and Wales) is SSSI, compared with 7 per cent in England, nearly three-quarters of the land is subject to the Common Agricultural Policy, while the equally profligate Common Fisheries Policy presides over Scottish inshore waters. Hence the Scottish Office’s 1998 White Paper People and Nature, while voicing doubts about basing conservation policy on SSSIs, does at least contain a ray of hope by underlining the legitimate claims of ‘the wider community’ on the way land is managed; on what Smout has called ‘the public nature of private property’. The forthcoming National Park at Loch Lomondside and The Trossachs may come to symbolise a new ‘covenant’ between land and people. SNH has also won plaudits for determinedly tackling wildlife crime, and for its leadership in trying to resolve the age-old conflict of raptors and game management. The Scottish Executive recently showed its appreciation of SNH, and the challenging nature of its work, by increasing its budget. It is difficult for outsiders to know to what extent SNH has helped to change hearts and minds in Scotland, but it can surely be given some of the credit.

Countryside Council for Wales (CCW)

Headquarters: Plas Penrhos, Ffordd Penrhos, Bangor, Gwynedd LL57 2LQ Vision: under review (May 2001)

The Countryside Council for Wales was formed in 1991 by merging the Countryside Commission and the NCC within the Principality. Unlike Scottish Natural Heritage, ‘CCW’ had no custom-made legislation, just a ragbag of texts from Acts dating back to 1949. Unlike English Nature, it started with a serious staff imbalance. While over 100 staff from NCC took new jobs (or continued their old ones) in CCW, only four from the smaller Countryside Commission decided to stay on. And so CCW had to start with a recruitment drive. Having evolved in different ways, the NCC and the Commission were chalk and cheese, and welding them together was no easy task. The NCC had statutory powers, and enforced them. The Countryside Commission was more of a clap-happy, grant-aid body. Sir Derek Barber compared them with monks and gypsies, all right in their own way, but not natural partners.

CCW was warned to be ‘mindful of the culture and economy of rural Wales’. It would have to build on the Welsh NCC’s relatively strong links with farmers and Welsh institutions. CCW inherited the NCC’s headquarters at Bangor, and decided against a move to Cardiff. Apparently this was only because the minister responsible wanted the CCW and its job opportunities to lie in his own constituency, but to outsiders it seemed to signal CCW’s affiliation with the rural, Welsh-speaking heartland rather than the industrial south. Small, culturally homogeneous countries have advantages denied to larger ones. People know one another; there is a lot of cross-participation and a pervading sense of identity. It is important to ‘belong’, and to be seen to be ‘people-centred’. CCW might have been straining a little too hard in describing its goal as ‘a beautiful land washed by clean seas and streams, under a clear sky; supporting its full diversity of life, including our own, each species in its proper abundance, for the enjoyment of everybody and the contented work of its rural and sea-faring people’. But behind this embarrassing guff there was an open-faced willingness to start afresh, and in a spirit of community.

CCW is much the smallest of the three country agencies, and began life with a relatively miserly budget of £14.5 million. With that it has to administer over 1,000 SSSIs covering about 10 per cent of the land surface of Wales, attend to all matters of rural access and carry out government policy on environment-sensitive farming. Its governing council was, like the others, well stuffed with farmers, businessmen and ‘portfolio collectors’, but scarcely anyone whom a conservationist would regard as a conservationist. Presumably CCW relied on their worldly wisdom more than their knowledge of the natural world. CCW’s chairman for the first ten years, Michael Griffith, was a Welsh establishment figure with farming interests and, it is said, a gift for getting on with ministers of all hues and opinions. The present chairman is another prominent farmer, a former chairman of the NFU in Wales. CCW’s first two chief executives both had a professional background in countryside planning rather than nature conservation, Ian Mercer in local government and National Parks, Paul Loveluck in the Welsh Office and the Welsh Tourist Board. Inevitably, therefore, it was the ‘holistic’ view of things that prevailed (‘I work for the rural communities of Wales, not for wildlife,’ was a phrase often heard on CCW corridors, perhaps to annoy the ‘Victorian naturalists’ from the former NCC). Senior posts were found for people with no background in nature conservation. People who ran processes were more highly valued than those who worked on the product. Some believed that core wildlife activities were being neglected at the expense of access work that overlapped with the remit of local authorities. Any blurring of functional boundaries held political dangers for a small, newly established body.

CCW went through much the same time-consuming reorganisations as its big sisters in Scotland and England. It organised its staff into Area Teams and Policy Groups, and delegated authority downwards while reserving all important decisions (and, it is said, many trivial ones also) to headquarters. Like English Nature, CCW was keener on mitigation than confrontation, especially where jobs were at stake. For example, it bent over backwards to accommodate the development of the ‘Lucky Goldstar’ electronics factory on part of the Gwent Levels SSSI. On the other hand a series of high-profile cases gave CCW a chance to make itself useful, such as the proposed orimulsion plant in Pembrokeshire, which it successfully opposed, and the wreck of the Sea Empress, from which it drew worthwhile lessons. CCW’s bilingual reports generally seem more down-to-earth and better written than the grammatically strained productions of English Nature and Scottish Natural Heritage, perhaps because they are concerned more with events and issues than with internal administration.

John Lloyd Jones, chairman of CCW. (CCW)

Among CCW’s most distinctive policies are its championing of environment-friendly schemes such as Coed Cymru, introduced in 1985 to regenerate Wales’ scattered natural woodlands, and its administration of Tir Cymen (now renamed Tir Gofal), Wales’ integrated agri-environmental scheme. Judging by the desire of the Welsh Office, and later the Welsh Assembly, to take over Tir Cymen, it has been a success. Like SNH,

CCW has also done its best to promote the Welsh countryside as ‘a leisure resource’, producing a stream of colourful publications, and devoting loving attention to matters like footpaths and signs. Some grumble that in its determined wooing of ‘customers’ and ‘partners’, CCW has been neglecting its statutory role of protecting wildlife. Possible signs of weakness are CCW’s failure to publish comprehensive data on the condition of SSSIs (although it admits that most of the National Nature Reserves in its care are in unfavourable condition), and its slow progress on Biodiversity Action compared with its sister agencies, earning it a black mark in the review, Biodiversity Counts. It has had to struggle hard to retain its authority, and seems much less firmly entrenched in Welsh affairs than its English and Scottish sisters.

The relationship of CCW with the turbulent political climate of Wales in the 1990s is a story in itself, which I continue on p. 54.

Joint Nature Conservation Committee (JNCC)

Headquarters: Monkstone House, City Road, Peterborough PE1 1JY Mission: it is not allowed to have one.

The JNCC is the forum through which the three country nature conservation agencies deliver their statutory responsibilities for Great Britain as a whole, and internationally. These are primarily the drawing up of ‘Euro-sites’ for the Natura 2000 network (SPAs, SACs), the setting of common standards, and advising government on Great Britain-related nature conservation matters. Its committee, chaired by Sir Angus Stirling, formerly the National Trust’s director, consists of three independent members, along with two representatives from each of the country agencies, and one each from the Countryside Agency and the ‘Council for Nature Conservation and the Countryside’ (CNCC) in Northern Ireland. The JNCC is based in Peterborough, with a small sub office in Aberdeen, specialising in seabirds and cetaceans. All members of its staff are assigned from one of the three country agencies. In 2000, it had 84 staff and a budget of £4,735,000. Among the Committee’s projects were some grand-scale surveys inherited from the NCC, especially the Marine Nature Conservation Review, the Geological Conservation Review and the Seabirds at Sea project. JNCC also runs the National Biodiversity Network and publishes British Red Data Books, as well as a stream of scientific reports. Its most important task was co-ordinating the UK proposals for Special Areas of Conservation (SACs), based on submissions by the four country agencies (including Northern Ireland). Denied any real corporate identity, the JNCC is nonetheless the principal centre of scientific know-how in British nature conservation.

The JNCC has a problem: it lacks an independent budget and its own staff. Its annual grant has to be ‘ring-fenced’ from the three agencies, who, along with their control of the purse strings, also dominate its committee. Their influence has not been benign. From the start, the JNCC was seen as a refuge for reactionaries from the old NCC who refused to move with the times. Senior refugees from the NCC’s scientific team quickly discovered how much they had lost influence. People with international reputations found themselves pitched into low status jobs, or dispensed with altogether once a Treasury review, brought at the request of English Nature, had scrapped half of the JNCC’s senior posts and humiliatingly downgraded its director’s post. The JNCC’s first chairman, Sir Fred Holliday, a former NCC chairman, resigned after five months, complaining that he had been kept in the dark over the Scottish SSSI appeals procedure. In 1996, its new chairman, Lord Selborne, traded a leaner structure – downsizing its staff from 104 to 66 – for more autonomy within its core responsibilities. Even so, the JNCC was visibly struggling against the devolution tide. The four country agencies often failed to reach a consensus view, or indeed take much interest in matters of UK concern. As this book went to press, a government review body has recommended that the JNCC became a separate body within the newly organised government department, DEFRA (the Department of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs).

Sir Angus Stirling, chairman of the JNCC. (JNCC)

The whip hand: the agencies and their budgets

As the smallest of the country agencies, the Countryside Council for Wales might have expected a struggle to make its mark. It also had the bad luck to receive a right-wing ideologue as Secretary of State in the person of John Redwood. Towards the end of 1994, Redwood took a hard look at the role of CCW. It is said that he was outraged to notice that a third of CCW’s budget went on staff salaries. In fact this was normal for a nature conservation agency, or, indeed, any government agency, but others had been cleverer at disguising it. As far as Redwood was concerned, CCW was both overmanned and overstretched. It should be ‘encouraged to concentrate on its core functions’. In May 1995, the Welsh Office produced an ‘Action Plan for CCW’ which proposed to reduce its running costs over the next two years by handing over supposedly peripheral activities, such as the funding of Country Parks, to local authorities. It also proposed to ‘privatise’ some National Nature Reserves and hand over CCW’s flagship Tir Cymen scheme to the Welsh Office. Furthermore, CCW was ordered to cut down its travelling and stay in more, with the help of computer technology. To encourage it in all these things, CCW’s budget was cut by a third.

Redwood’s attack was badly received, not just in nature conservation circles but also, much to his surprise, by parts of the Welsh establishment and the media. This was linked to a related matter, Redwood’s refusal to implement new, more environment-friendly planning guidelines, thus creating an undesirable divergence of approach on planning matters between England and Wales. John Redwood failed to find much empathy with the Welsh; as John Major expressed it in his memoirs, Redwood did not take to the Welsh people, ‘nor they to him’.

Ironically, the Redwood fracas helped to put CCW on the map and sparked a good deal of favourable publicity for its work. When Redwood resigned in order to challenge John Major as Conservative Party leader, William Hague, his more politically astute successor, demonstrated a change of tack by visiting some of CCW’s offices, and talking to staff in a friendly spirit. There is a story that, on his visit to Snowdon, the fit young Hague simply tore up the mountain, leaving CCW’s warden, a heavy smoker, trailing far behind. CCW was able to stave off corporate starvation by negotiating an EU Life fund to supplement its budget, thus pioneering a rich and, until then, surprisingly neglected alternative source of income. An ostentatious display of good housekeeping was rewarded in 1996 by a 20 per cent increase in grant-in-aid, bringing things more or less back to normal. But that was not the end of CCW’s financial tribulations. Its funding body passed from the Welsh Office to the Welsh Assembly in 1999. The architect of the Welsh Assembly, Ron Davies, had been a strong supporter of wildlife conservation in Wales, and his ‘moment of madness’ in Brixton was also a misfortune for CCW. Its Corporate Plan was rejected by the Assembly with the warning that the agency might have to muddle along for a while without a pay rise. Other warning signs were First Secretary Alun Michael’s dismissal of CCW’s request for the Assembly to debate its new ‘vision’, A Living Environment for Wales. There was talk about restructuring environmental activity in Wales, for example, by merging CCW with the Environment Agency, and having another look at the possibility of hiving off some of its functions to local authorities.