Читать книгу Nature Conservation - Peter Marren - Страница 16

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.

English Nature nurtured more constructive relations with its paymasters. In 1992 it was given an extra million pounds for restoring peatlands and to speed up the designation of EU Special Protection Areas for birds. The National Audit Office in 1994, and the Commons Public Accounts Committee in 1995, made critical comments about some aspects of its business, but on the whole supported EN’s strategic approach to its tasks and wholehearted use of business language. EN endured a lean year in 1996, but fought off a further cut the year after. The incoming Labour Government’s Comprehensive Spending Review increased EN’s grant-in-aid by 16 per cent to £44.6 million, followed by another generous increase in 1998, coinciding with the appointment of Barbara Young as chairman.

Scottish Natural Heritage has had to tread carefully. The generous settlement it received in 1992 was tempered by an awareness that its every move was being shadowed by the Scottish Office, which expected SNH to be a ‘people-friendly’ body and avoid the controversies of the recent past. That it was as vulnerable as CCW to hostile trimming measures became clear in 1995, when the Scottish Secretary Ian Lang decided to carry out the dreaded ‘high level review’. He was purportedly concerned about SNH’s involvement in wider issues like agriculture and transport, and looked down his nose at the £800,000 it had spent fighting the proposed super-quarry at Lingerbay on Harris. His successor, Michael Forsyth, was similarly put out when he learned that SNH had spent £1.8 million buying out the peat-cutting rights at Flanders Moss, which, to make matters worse, lay in his own constituency (in his view, that sort of public money should be spent on schools and hospitals). Like Redwood, Lang wanted SNH to concentrate on its core activities and to trim what he saw as peripheral matters, such as public access to the countryside. But even if it had, the savings would have been insignificant. At the end of 1996, in which its budget had been cut by 10 per cent, SNH published its answer in Natural Priorities. This was a fairly defiant restatement of SNH’s responsibilities over a broad range of heritage issues, and even hinted that it could do with a bit more co-operation from the all-powerful Scottish Office’s environment, agriculture and fisheries departments. But the net was tightening. In 1998, chief executive Roger Crofts estimated that SNH’s spending power had fallen by nearly a third since its establishment in 1992.

The publication of the Scottish Executive’s 2001 policy statement, The Nature of Scotland, made it clear that Government intends to involve itself directly in the detail as well as the broad thrust of nature conservation north of the border. Increasingly, SNH and its sisters in England and Wales are becoming processing instruments, responsible for implementing legislation and as a conduit for government grants, but of diminishing importance as policy makers. By 2001, the dynamic of nature conservation was definitely moving from the state to the voluntary sector. In all the major recent events in nature conservation – biodiversity, the ‘CROW’ bill, SAC designation, devolution – the agencies have been either bystanders or supine instruments of government policy. This, some would say, is what comes of replacing scientists with bureaucrats. All the same, I think the agencies could win back some of the respect and influence that their predecessor, the NCC, enjoyed, if they showed more leadership, concentrated on outcomes rather than outputs, and spoke up fearlessly for the natural world. Or maybe I am just misreading the runes, and that it is the fate of the nature conservation world to complete the circle, back to the charities and pressure groups that nurtured it.