This article first appeared in Shooting Times
By Andrew Gilruth, Chief Executive, Moorland Association
Passions were running high at the farmers protest in London a few months ago. As we moved into Whitehall you might have thought one or two of the Defra staff might have popped out to hear what was being said on the stage. Perhaps a few did. Clearly nobody from the Defra social media team had time to grab their coats and listen or they would have known their repeated dismissal of farmers concerns were proving entirely counterproductive. Perhaps that was intentional.
Two weeks earlier something similar happened when the Secretary of State, Steve Reed, told the Guardian newspaper that farmers and conservationists will have to “learn to do more with less”. Following derision from the farming community, his office was forced to rush out as statement explaining that across government, and so not just farmers, all would need to do more with less. I feel the striking thing about both these incidents is that the conservation industry remained silent.
The environmental groups appear to have decided to ignore the “learn to do more with less” message. For conservation organisations its easy. If the government reduces funding, it does less. If wildlife numbers go down, the declines become a stick to beat the government with and funding goes up. As a result, there is no motive to do more with less in the conservation industry. This beautifully illustrated by the conservation regulator Natural England.
The agency has an obligation to inspect Sites of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI) every six years. You might assume that since this task would involve less than 2% of its 3,000 staff visiting just one SSSI a month, all would be well. You would be wrong. Less than half have been checked. The blame is put on the dramatic budget cuts enforced by the coalition government. Few mention that Natural England’s budget is 21% above those cuts and it has 30% more staff than it did four years ago. So much for doing more with less.
When it comes to budgets, the conservation industry rushes to defend Natural England a little too quickly. Freedom of Information requests reveal they spent £32,000,000 buying land over the last few years. This is a new thing. It may be good news for those wanting to sell a bit of land, but it’s not a statutory duty. Ironically it may not be good news for wildlife either.
Of the National Nature Reserves that Natural England directly manages itself, 49% of its SSSIs are in unfavourable condition. So the government's advisor on the environment, the one that decides what favourable condition is, can’t achieve that standard on half the land it manages. It may have the legal authority to come onto your land and dictate how you must manage it, but it has no moral authority to do so.
I have visited some of the Natural England managed sites that it has decided are ‘declining’. The reason given is often that the land is no longer being cropped and managed as it was when it was first designated a SSSI. It is easy to forget that farmers and gamekeepers are conservationists. They were doing it long before the modern conservation industry was established. The vast majority of the nation’s wildlife lives on farm and moorland, not nature reserves.
Our wildlife thrives alongside people making a living from, what is in effect, a giant open-air shopfloor. Each year those managing land must make hundreds of decisions a week that ultimately decide if their bank balance will be up or down by the end of the year. So, if the nation wants to do more with less it needs to work even more closely with gamekeepers and farmers.
The alternative is to just spend more and get less. During a recent Defra led meeting on upland conservation the environmental organisations repeatedly told the Minister that the budget was utterly inadequate. Asking for more money is always easier than working with those that currently manage and retain our wildlife.