Until the nineteenth century, it was largely the will of individuals – earls, abbots, peat cutters, small farmers, traders – that shaped Broadland and its natural history. Gradually these were joined by small organisations – the Sea Breach Commissioners, the Mayors and Aldermen of Yarmouth and Norwich and then bigger ones – County Councils – in the nineteenth century, backed by an expanding government bureaucracy in London. By the latter half of the twentieth century, organisations became the deciding factors. Individual farmers and estate owners still persist, but increasingly have to operate in a framework created by organisations, both local and national. It is these organisations that determine the present, and will determine the future, of Broadland.
Historians, especially natural historians, thrive on detail, and the number of organisations that have been created then changed, gained and lost influence, been replaced or even extinguished in the recent history of Broadland is legion. A blow-by-blow account of the last 50 years might satisfy the pedantic, but would throw little light on the processes at work. For it is the process that is most important and revealed perhaps by a different sort of approach.
Human organisations have many parallels with individual species. Species emerge into a continually changing environment, survive for a time, evolve a little by adjustment of their gene content. They do not cope indefinitely, however, but ultimately are overcome by changes too rapid to match and are out-competed by new species. Organisations are much the same. Some account of how modern ecologists view the biological world is thus a very useful background for interpreting the roles of navigation, conservation, drainage, planning and all the other bodies that have been part of the natural history of Broadland.
One of the most important ecologists of the last century was George Evelyn Hutchinson, an Englishman and limnologist, who did most of his best work from an office at Yale University in the United States, following extensive field experience in Tibet, South Africa and Connecticut. Hutchinson created the concept of the environmental theatre and the evolutionary play. It is a revealing analogy for how living organisms evolve and the meaning of their ecology. The environmental theatre is the planet Earth and its stages the mosaic of conditions created by rocks and climate, ocean and air. Not only are the stages constantly changing, but so also the theatre is being steadily remodelled.
There are some steady and predictable changes – day and night, the seasons – but many that are quite unpredictable. Some are short term – the day-to-day weather, for example. Some are long term – the drift of the continents on the plates that make up the Earth’s crust and the development of ice ages and other long-term climatic cycles. Others are disruptive and quite unexpected – earthquakes and volcanic eruption on a local scale, and on a wider one the impact of collision with meteorites and the evolution of organisms with quite unexpected properties. The emergence of the blue-green algae in the Precambrian period was the first of two such events. It resulted in the release of an extremely poisonous gas, oxygen, into a world that had been oxygen-free for three billion years and colonised only by anaerobic bacteria. The second was the emergence of our species of human, a million or so years ago.
Evolution is the way that the living system – a complex biochemistry, most features of which are common to every living organism from bacteria to ourselves – copes by manifesting itself in different forms as the environment changes. Some biologists see particular genes as the characters in the evolutionary play, others the individual organisms in which these genes are contained. Either way the characters are competing for a place on the stage and for enough material resources – energy, food, mates – to persist. At any given time some combinations of genes are better able than others to persist and reproduce. They become more common whilst other combinations become steadily less frequent and eventually disappear. Individuals are selected, for or against, by the nature of the environment at the time.
In a predictable environment, an unchanging stage, a steady specialisation takes place. Existing forms multiply, taking advantage of the near constant conditions to shine in a particular role or in occupying a particular patch of stage. At every generation they change a little, those that have been most successful in garnering resources tending to reproduce most abundantly, passing on their particular combinations of genes to meet the coming conditions. This adjustment is necessary, for even if the physical environment is relatively steady, the biological one is not.
But if, in these relatively steady conditions, organisms become very specialised and dependent entirely on a particular narrow set of circumstances, even a small change of scene – a period of wetter weather, or a series of droughts – may be disastrous. And if the stage changes a lot – prolonged unpredictable weather – there may be widespread destruction and only flexible generalists able to cope with a variety of conditions will survive. They may not have been present locally, but move in from less predictable environments elsewhere, where they have thrived. If the change is very great there may be extinction even of many of these, often in a largely random manner. And then, from the survivors, as conditions steady once more for a time, the specialisation, the fine dividing up of the resources, will begin again with a new set of species manifestations of the living system.
The play is thus about survival, which means being able to obtain sufficient resources to persist in the face of others who are also competing for these resources, whilst also coping with continuous small change until such time as the change is overpowering and survival impossible. There has only ever been a temporary, a quasi-stability. There is no balance of nature, where everything lives happily ever after. There is always disruption.
The strategies for surviving changes are many. Some organisms rely on comparative simplicity. Like the bacteria, they are small, reproduce frequently, expending few resources on maintenance, most on new production in the form of offspring, with the advantage that through sexual processes, new combinations of genes are produced every few hours or days to meet a changing environment. If some catastrophe engulfs the planet, it will be bacteria, if anything, that survive. The down side is that any individual bacterium has a very short life; it is the concept of the bacterium that persists, not the individual.
Other organisms take an opposite approach, investing resources in a more complex, bigger structure that is individually resilient to degrees of change short of the catastrophic. They may thus invest in structural tissues to hold leaves above those of their competitors for light, or mechanisms of temperature control or of water storage to cope with climate fluctuations. They have fewer resources spare for new production – new offspring – so their chances, as a species, of surviving a severe change are much reduced. Elephants are much less abundant than mice and far more vulnerable to extinction. And mice look very precarious in comparison with bacteria.
In the course of biological evolution a huge range of species has evolved, for the theatre is very complex and the stages many. Most are now extinct, for they did not survive the frequent changes. The current cast is not permanent; the environment still changes and will continue to do so. A range of strategies for survival co-exists. Each has its advantages and disadvantages, from the single-celled, prolific bacterium, individually vulnerable but collectively invincible, to the large mammal, individually able to cope with moderate environmental change, but facing collective and complete extinction when circumstances change just a little too much.
Human organisations and individuals are subject to much the same fates. The theatre in which they play is the same, but with an added set of unpredictable circumstances when new law, policy decisions, granting of funds or removal of them is imposed by their own activities, often with thought mostly for the present and not for the future.
Individual landowners were the former principals on the stage and determined the nature of Broadland for centuries. Their individual influence was small and local, but, subject to the same changes in the natural environment, and availability of markets for their produce, they tended to act similarly. They were beholden to little in the way of imposed authority; they survived or lost according to their individual skills and were replaced by others. Like the bacteria they are still around, and collectively they determine most of the action, but not directly so. Like the microorganisms that were the sole denizens of the Precambrian, they are no longer in the forefront, though ultimately they underlie the key processes. Like multicellular organisms, human organisations now apparently dominate. The great change occurred in the nineteenth century when the evolution of organisations accelerated. There is now layer upon layer from the local to the national and the supranational with the establishment of the European Union and transnational companies of the late twentieth century.
The earliest Broadland organisations were specialist species, developed to carry through a highly specific role without reference to any other demands. They did it efficiently in general, until the point was reached where their activities began to impinge on others. As specialists they were then unable to cope and their decline began. Their focus was too narrow, they tended to be defensive of their interests, established under a different environment and no longer adaptive to a new one. They could adjust by acquiring new individuals as members, just as individual species acquire new combinations of genes when they reproduce. Their tendency, however, was to acquire more of the same, the safe, the committed, the trusted, and thus they could not easily evolve in their attitudes to meet the changing political environment.
Specialisation is no longer a good bet for longevity. The political environment has become increasingly unpredictable; the stage is changing much more now after centuries of comparative stability. Only generalist organisations can survive these changes and they must behave in a particular way if they are to survive. They must meet many contrasting, often mutually incompatible demands and therefore must compromise continually. They cannot therefore fulfil any one role as single-mindedly and as well as a specialist organisation, but if they fail to satisfy the demand in any one area, they too will not survive. They must be bigger, and like the elephant, as opposed to the mouse, spend more energy on their own maintenance, less on new production. Since there are inevitably several of them, they struggle to some extent for a place on the stage.
Sometimes they might secure it by amalgamation into an even more wide-reaching organisation, sometimes by acquiring less conservative members or employees who cope with continuing change by adjusting the organisation for a time. In general they will be wary, however, of departing too far from the familiar and the safe; in the end they will fail to cope and the political environment, in its wayward changes, will ensure their replacement by some new organisation. The perception of our individual short lives is often that organisations have always been there; indeed, the publicity they all put out on behalf of their own survival will give this impression. But they are all temporary and continually succeed one another, in a supposed progression, but really mostly a wayward random evolution, reacting to unpredictable circumstances.
Navigation was the first use of Broadland that demanded organisation. The big problem was the mouth of the main estuary at Yarmouth. It opened out to the sea at the end of a long channel to the inside of and paralleling the sand bar, and it tended to shallow unpredictably and become partly blocked with sand. The town made several attempts to shorten the channel and make its entrance closer to the town, by creating breaches across the bar to the sea, in 1347, 1375, 1393, 1408, 1549 and 1558, but they tended to refill with sand. Finally, in 1555–1567, stout wooden piling was installed to make the flanges of the opening resistant to erosion. This made the town, which was heavily dependent on trading and comparatively wealthy, more vulnerable to invasion, so further cost was incurred to erect a removable boom across the river and man it. As the port developed, the town council, through an Act of Parliament, established the first navigation authority, the Yarmouth Pier and Haven Commissioners, in 1670.
It regulated the harbour and could levy charges on imports and exports to maintain the facilities. This included dredging the harbour. In an early example of protection of specific interests, the Yarmouth hegemony was not keen to dredge the channel through Breydon Water lest it ease the passage of ships to Norwich and undermine Yarmouth’s trade. Eventually, in 1864, it was dredged and a low wall was constructed close to the confluence of the Yare and Waveney to deflect the current and scour out a notorious shallows. The Commissioners were responsible for the rivers up to particular limits – Hardley Cross, for example, on the Yare where the Corporation of Norwich took over responsibility – but their main concern was the haven at Yarmouth. Nonetheless, trade on the rivers was potentially lucrative and, in 1866, the Great Yarmouth Port and Haven Act set up separate sub-committees of river commissioners for the Yare, Bure and Waveney, each levying separate tolls, and for the Haven with Breydon Water. This arrangement persisted until 1989, when the long-term self-protectiveness and intractability of the Commissioners led to enforced change.
Over most of the twentieth century, the Port and Haven Commissioners saw immense changes in the Broadland navigation. Set up to ensure free physical passage for trading boats, at a time when natural movements of sediment and succession of water plants at the edges threatened to block the navigation, their clientele steadily shifted to hire boat and recreational boat owners. The steadily increasing activities of these stopped plant encroachment in the rivers through erosion, increased the wear on the banks and readily widened the navigation. This gave concern to the drainage authorities, who feared a breach and flooding of the grazing marshes, but any curbing of boat activity, beyond a modest speed limit, was resisted by the Commissioners. A major report, The Broadland Study and Plan was produced in 1971 by a collection of public bodies, including the Navigation Commissioners, in response to the perception that Broadland was suffering severe problems. One prominent concern was severe boat damage, but it was the Port and Haven Commissioners who dissented from attempts to control boating activity, producing a minority view, a sad little booklet tucked inside the covers of a folio-sized report.
The Commissioners responded to some of the changes. They set the first speed limits (between Wroxham and Horning) in 1931, dredged the channels and reinforced moorings with wooden piling. Boat styles changed over the years with broader beams developing so as to give greater comfort to hirers. Passing boats created wash that eroded river banks and several studies were instigated, though not by the Commissioners, to investigate the factors determining the amount of wash. These included beam, power, weight distribution within the boat, underwater profile, angle of the propeller shaft, distance from the bank and speed. Speed was particularly important, with an index of wash damage being halved for a 1-mph reduction in speed. Upper speed limits of 7 mph set in 1979 were reduced to 6 mph, but any attempt to regulate the number of boats has been resisted. It would be illegal under present legislation, but not inconceivable under new legislation had the will been there. The Commissioners required speed governors to be fitted to the engines of hire boats in 1980, but made no provision for private boat owners.
Until the 1950s the Commissioners were primarily interested in the Yarmouth Haven, their main source of revenue, but as the traffic on the rivers increased, they formed, in 1971, a powerful Rivers Committee. It had eight members drawn from local authorities, two from private yacht owners and two from hire boat owners. Boats had been regarded as a major problem in Broadland for many years, sometimes fairly, sometimes not, but by failing to recognise the concerns of others, the Commissioners, from 1984 onwards, trod a path to their own extinction and replacement. In that year the number of local authority members on the Rivers Committee was reduced to five from a previous eight, thus increasing the influence of specifically boating interests. Suggestions that parts of the waterway should be closed off to allow repair and recovery were always refused in the fear that these might be the thin ends of wedges of permanent closure. Eventually, the Commissioners had become so single-minded that they could not survive in an environment that was having to accommodate greater needs for the use of Broadland than the historic baggage of river trading.
The Norfolk and Suffolk Broads Act of 1988 transferred responsibility for navigation in the rivers to the Broads Authority and confined the original body to responsibility only for the haven as a Port Authority. Extinction is a more complex concept than usually realised, however. Many genes of a species may be transferred to new populations before extirpation. The new navigation committee of the Broads Authority inevitably embraces some of the thinking of the original Commissioners and for its survival also depends on a degree of single-mindedness in looking after the interests of boat users, which become its own interests. As the number of hire boats has declined with changes in the holiday aspirations of the public to warmer places, pressures from the private boat owners and of the 14 yacht and sailing clubs affiliated in the Norfolk and Suffolk Yachting Association have increased.
Hard on the heels of the need to regulate navigation through a dedicated organisation, was the need to prevent flooding, and the Sea Breach Commissioners, finally made permanent in 1861, was the first of an evolutionary line of bodies that took over a widening range of responsibilities. Land drainage, at first promoted in the grazing marshes by owners and occupiers, became formalised into the Internal Drainage Boards in the 1930s, and these came under the control of the Ministry of Agriculture and a succession of bodies concerned with the quantity and quality of the river waters. The first was the East Norfolk Rivers Catchment Board, with responsibilities for bank protection along the rivers. The Catchment Board’s successor, the East Suffolk and Norfolk Rivers Board, acquired responsibility also for fisheries and monitored water quality from this respect. Responsibility for water supply for domestic consumption was in the hands of local authorities and small private companies, whilst the disposal of sewage was left to local authorities who maintained an increasing plethora of small sewage treatment works, sometimes in a not very efficient way.
The boundaries, on the ground, of these various bodies, were set by the jumble of history. Political boundaries still are. But the passing of the Water Act in 1973 could have represented a significant long-term improvement. The Act took control of sewage disposal, water supply, fisheries, land drainage and sea defence from the large number of small bodies previously responsible, and gave it to ten huge Water Authorities, each based on the catchment area of one or a few large river systems. Broadland was a tiny part of the area covered by the Anglian Water Authority.
The Water Authorities were very much the children of their predecessors – the gene transfer effect again. They were run for the most part by engineers. Chemists had considerable influence, but biologists comparatively little. Solutions to problems were seen very much in terms of concrete and of processes. Two main issues were to ensure adequate domestic water supply and to dispose of sewage so that it did not cause the problems of disease and gross organic pollution that had bedevilled Victorian rivers. Other main issues were to prevent sea encroachment and to maintain the river floodbanks so as to support agriculture. Engineers understood the need for production and their professional reputation was geared to new works and installations. The brass plaque commemorating Authority, engineer and local mayor on some new sewage works wall, bridge parapet or dam was the public manifestation of an inner esteem.
Ecological issues had been raised by the old Rivers Boards, especially in connection with the maintenance of fisheries, and a number of systems had been developed to assess river quality from the community of invertebrates on the bottom. But the lesser importance accorded to ecological quality, that had been no great problem when the Broadland waters still maintained high diversity and interest, was anachronistic as they deteriorated in the 1970s. The Water Authorities were poorly constituted to cope with the need for an approach subtler than that provided by concrete and pipes. There was appreciation of the problems that pesticides, heavy metals and nitrate might cause for human health, but little of what these substances might do to the natural communities.
Sewage effluent was assessed, as it had been since 1910, by its capacity to deoxygenate; its biological oxygen demand. The idea that phosphates, ammonium and nitrates, the conventional end-products of sewage treatment, might also be damaging, was anathema. This was despite a growing realisation of this problem in mainland Europe and the United States, and indeed a great deal of action there to deal with it in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The British Water Authorities were large and lumbering, too big to be able to see the detail of problems at local level, too monolithic and entrenched to be open to new ideas. And government guidance to the Authorities placed priorities on them that did not even mention conservation or ecological quality.
Large organisations, like large organisms, need to spend much energy on self-maintenance. This left little to support radical new initiatives. To contemplate additional processes at sewage treatment works to improve effluents, beyond the standards set conventionally, would have entailed expense that was not welcome. In the 1970s, local opinion held that boats were the bugbear of the Broads. The Anglian Water Authority was happy to leave it at that and it was not for several years that it was officially persuaded that eutrophication problems existed and it moved to do something about them – though only on an experimental basis.
The Anglian Water Authority became Anglian Water in 1984 following yet another Water Act. This restricted membership of the Authority to those appointed by the Government. The Authority, now no longer so-called, became more authoritarian. In a smaller, less powerful body without close government interest, these changes would have been fatal. Nonetheless the new authority was among the first to propose standards of water chemistry appropriate to particular uses – drinking water, irrigation, industrial, conservation and amenity – and these were innovative.
The legislation under which the Water Authorities operated to control water quality, however, was far from comprehensive. They had control over the discharges that came from discrete sources – factories, sewage treatment works – and could take legal action over discrete spills of pollutants, such as pesticides, silage effluent or cattle slurry, into a river. They had no control over the diffuse leachings from the fields or urban areas, which can be equally damaging. Under the Control of Pollution Act of 1983, any operation that was deemed by the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food as good agricultural practice was (and still is) exempt from prosecution, no matter what the consequences. A river might be turbid throughout the winter with the eroded silt of autumn ploughing, have very high concentrations of nitrate and more than trace concentrations of a shelf-full of pesticides and herbicides, but there was nothing the Water Authority could do. The similar cultures of engineers and agriculturalists, where production was the central theme, meant that the Authorities in general saw no problems with this arrangement.
The proposals for standards of water quality for particular uses were a step forward, and recognised conservation as a use. But before much could be done, more change was afoot. The Water Authorities were both gamekeeper and poacher. They were responsible for setting the standards of effluents that might be discharged to the rivers by industry, but also those discharged by themselves from the sewage treatment and waterworks that they also managed. Because of the poor state of many of the sewage treatment works, they were frequently in breach of their own conditions, but found it more difficult to prosecute themselves than they might an external organisation.
There was a culture of secrecy also, though this was not confined to the Authorities; government bodies in Britain have always felt it best not to be too informative, it is part of the investment in self-protection that any organisation makes in order to perpetuate itself in a changing world. The Control of Pollution Act made provision for data collected by the Authorities to be made available to the public, but arrangements were not put in place to ensure this for ten years after the passing of the Act. Indeed, it is still cumbersome to obtain them. The Authorities, driven by central government, also failed to make appropriate use of legislation available in European Directives that could have widely improved the water quality of Britain as a whole and particularly of Broadland. In the early 1970s the European Union had passed two Directives (on Urban Waste Water Treatment and on Nitrates), which have as yet only been used in the UK to a minimal extent, far short of the spirit of this legislation and its enactment in some other member states of the Union.
The Urban Waste Water Treatment Directive intends that waste water (sewage) treatment works beyond a certain size should have processes installed to remove nitrogen and phosphorus from their effluents, especially where the receiving rivers and lakes are at risk from eutrophication. Because eutrophication is the increase in supply of nutrients to a waterway, the logical position, taken by states such as Germany and the Netherlands, is that all of the territory is potentially vulnerable. In the UK, the Government chose to define such areas as those already seriously enriched with nutrients and designated a derisory number of such areas. Only very recently has the list climbed modestly. Many very vulnerable areas are unprotected.
On many counts the Water Authorities were becoming anachronisms even as they were still building themselves. They were lacking in their appreciation of environmental needs in a world becoming environmentally more and more degraded and in which an increasingly well-informed public was acquiring different aspirations. They had certain advantages, not least a catchment-based approach, and would probably have persisted longer than the 15 years that they did were it not for one of the unpredictable changes in their operating environment that can be as fatal to organisations as a volcano can be to a forest. In the 1980s successive governments convinced themselves of the odd notion that public services would be better run if they were done so for private profit.
Experience has shown that this by no means automatically follows. The services fluctuate in quality no less than previously whilst the charges made for them increase and are passed on as profit to the shareholders. However, in 1989, the Water Authorities were divided into those parts that supplied drinking water and treated domestic and industrial waste and those parts responsible for regulation of water resources and water quality. The poacher was separated from the gamekeeper and the reservoirs, treatment works and pipe systems were sold to private companies, which are now often part of multinational consortia, and the regulatory function passed to a new government organisation, the National Rivers Authority. The separation was wise, the privatisation perhaps not. The National Rivers Authority was not unlike the old River Boards in concept, but it was national and internally organised on the same catchment basis as the Water Authorities had been.
With regulation as its sole function and without the problems of having to prosecute itself for pollution incidents that the Water Authorities had had, it was potentially more powerful. It benefited also from new legislation, which gave greater emphasis to furthering nature conservation and amenity in carrying out its duties. It was welcomed and started to take a much broader view of the environment than any of its predecessors, though its activities were closely controlled by a central government more influenced by industrial and agricultural lobbies than by the wider views of its electorate. Just before the National Rivers Authority had been established, there had been a very warm summer. In the still conditions of one of the large reservoirs of lowland England, Rutland Water, in Leicestershire, growths of blue-green algae, usually well distributed in the water by mixing, accumulated at the surface, and washed up in the gentle breeze on the shoreline. Many blue-green algae produce quite potent toxins that affect the nerves and liver of mammals and can be fatal. Several sheep and dogs, drinking the water at the edge of the reservoir, were killed. At another reservoir, Rudyard Lake in Staffordshire, army cadets on training exercises also drank water with heavy blue-green algal growths in it (albeit unintentionally when their canoes capsized), and were hospitalised.
There was nothing new about these blooms. They had been frequent in eutrophicated British waters for at least 20 years, but had simply not been perceived as a problem worthy of consideration. Coinciding with the formation of the new National Rivers Authority, and with the British penchant for the welfare of pet animals as a spur, the 1988 blooms widened the agenda for the new organisation. It set about matching national thinking with that of environmentally more advanced countries in the EU and elsewhere. The legislation it had been given was not significantly more potent; there was still little control over agricultural operations; but it could be more stringent about consents to discharge from discrete sources. It retained responsibilities for sea defence and flood control and thus was required to work closely in the defence of agricultural interests. Its approach to the management of fisheries perhaps owed more to the lobbying of anglers than to what might have been more appropriate to the wise management of fresh waters, but creation of the Authority was a very positive step forward. But it, too, quickly fell foul of the random nuances of national politics.
In 1996 it was merged with a body responsible particularly for air pollution from factories, the Pollution Inspectorate, and with the Local Authority departments responsible for the disposal of municipal and industrial solid waste, and became the Environment Agency. Ostensibly this was another positive step forward, for air pollution and the leachates from poorly sealed waste tips are closely connected with water pollution, and the catchment organisation was retained. The Government’s motives in taking this step were interesting and not necessarily laudable. The National Rivers Authority had been carrying out its role of regulation diligently, perhaps too diligently for a government concerned to support industry and the exploitation of resources for private profit and tax revenue. The new Environment Agency was trumpeted as the most powerful environmental regulatory organisation in Europe, but the legislation that set it up offered little that was new. Indeed, its responsibilities towards conservation and amenity were weakened by the wording of the Act, and its ability to regulate was progressively diminished by decreased budgets, compared with those enjoyed collectively by its previous constituent organisations. There is a general perception that its policies are more closely controlled by central government than before.
Responsibility for the waters of Broadland has been that of readily identifiable organisations. Responsibility for the land surfaces of the catchments has been a more complex matter. Just as species of living organisms in a community can be grouped together as guilds of those having similar functions, we can group these organisations into those concerned with agriculture, with nature conservation and with general planning. The Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food has always been a major influence on Broadland though its local presence has not been nearly so obvious as that of other organisations.
Since the Agriculture Act of 1947, however, and with a myriad of its own schemes for grant-aiding farming and those it has administered on behalf of the European Union, the Ministry has effectively determined the major change in the face of the Broadland catchment that has taken place since the Second World War. No doubt some of these changes would have occurred anyway, but not on the scale that they have with Ministry help. The huge, windy, hedge-less and monotonous expanses of the arable fields that occupy the plateaux only a few metres above the floodplains are one manifestation, the precarious position of the grazing marshes another. Operation of many grant schemes has favoured the already large farm, the ostensibly more profitable machine-orientated approach, and the conversion of a countryside with a small grain of detail to one much more uniform and uninteresting to most eyes.
Change was slow for the Ministry, but it created an increasing number of schemes to support less aggressive agriculture in particular areas. It was a large and lumbering beast, enjoying a more steady environment, in London, than any of the local organisations. Government ministries are well-organised machines, carrying out the policies of government efficiently and well. The snags are that those policies can rarely be appropriate everywhere and therefore are rarely sensitive to local needs, and that the consequences of the policies, when they are detrimental, are rarely perceived or admitted very quickly.
Ministries really are the super-elephants of organisations. Moving through the administrative landscape they reduce trees to pulp then pass on ruminating about what they have done in retrospect, but unable to stop the process until some even larger organisation for super-elephant control confronts them. The Ministry of Agriculture in 2001, facing a crisis of foot-and-mouth disease in cattle and sheep, was unable to change its policies rapidly enough to cope with increasing use of the countryside for tourism. After the General Election of 2001, it found itself subsumed into a new Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, and its future may be very different.
Apparently not nearly as important as the Government in the ultimate management of the land are the landowners. Their scope for operation is largely determined by grants and markets, the extent of which is determined in London, Brussels and elsewhere. The organisations of farmers and landowners, the National Farmers Union and the Country Landowners Association, however, have influence beyond being rallying points for their members to organise opposition when change is threatened. They have many contacts among government officials and ministers. As one junior environment minister, Lord Caithness, said in the House of Lords in 1993, when arguing against a new survey of the state of the countryside: ‘We don’t need all this money on research – I’ll just ring up one of my chums in the Country Landowners Association’. Ultimately, landowner and tenant organisations can be particularly important in influencing the local attitudes of farmers and landowners towards other bodies, such as those involved in conservation.
Conservation-management of the land and waterscape for its intrinsic value and that of its non-human denizens is a comparatively recent concept compared with that of exploitation of the resources they can provide for human societies.
The earliest organisations concerned with conservation in Britain were set up by concerned individuals to ensure that the provisions of the Wild Birds Protection Acts, passed in 1880, 1894 and 1899 were carried out, at least in places such as Breydon Water, where the birds were prolific, but had been shot for food or feathers for centuries. The Breydon Wild Birds Protection Society employed a watcher, whose evidence led to prosecutions. Amendments to the Acts over the years led to special protection of the Hickling Broad area and the Trinity Broads in 1895 and to increasing restrictions in general. The law attempted to protect particular species but not others, which might be shot for the pot, and contained complex provisions in which, for example, it was an offence to take birds’ eggs, but not to be in possession of them. The Acts were thus difficult to enforce until much more comprehensive provision was made in the Protection of Bird Acts of 1954 and 1967.
Two local organisations became concerned about conservation in Broadland in the early period – the Norfolk and Norwich Naturalists Society (founded as a small learned society in 1869) and the Norfolk Naturalists Trust founded in 1926. Many of the same individuals became involved with both and though the former now has little influence in the management of the area, the Trust (now the Norfolk Wildlife Trust) is a substantial landowner. Realisation that conservation could only be substantially guaranteed by ownership of the land led to the formation of the Society for the Promotion of Nature Reserves and the drawing up in 1915, by Charles Rothschild, of a list of sites in Britain worthy of preservation. He listed land around Horning, Barton Broad, Hickling Broad and Upton and these sites have figured prominently in the agendas of successive organisations ever since.
The Society for the Promotion of Nature Reserves spawned the county naturalists trusts, of which Norfolk was the first, and organised a conference in 1941 that set up the Nature Reserves Investigation Committee, which drew up a longer list of desirable sites in Broadland. Meanwhile the Norfolk Naturalists Trust was acquiring, through the subscriptions of its members and legacies, a number of small sites, the first at Starch Grass near Martham in 1926 and then Alderfen Broad in 1930. Other sites were in the hands of landowners with strong aspirations to conservation, especially at Hickling and Horsey. Hickling Broad and much of the land around it was bought by the Trust in 1945, Barton Broad in 1946, and areas at Ranworth and Cockshoot were acquired in 1949 and Surlingham in 1952. The Trust expanded its holdings a great deal in the 1960s and by 1986 owned a total of 1,155 hectares at 11 sites in Broadland. Its smaller sister, now the Suffolk Wildlife Trust, also acquired a few sites, notably Carlton marshes on the south bank of the River Waveney, close to Oulton Broad. Finally, among these private organisations, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds gained a reserve at Strumpshaw in 1975 and 147 hectares of the grazing marshes near the Berney Arms Mill in 1985/6.
The Norfolk Wildlife Trust was, for many years, a rather exclusive organisation, founded largely by the gentry so that they might continue to have access to attractive habitats for their hobbies of entomology, bird-watching and botanising. Its attitudes and management owed much to those of the land agents who managed the big farming estates and education for environmental awareness was not high on its agenda. It was a small, specialist species that functioned very well in the moderately stable conditions between the Wars when the social changes that were to come were being effectively resisted by the Establishment. It fitted comfortably onto the shooting sticks of the hospitality tent of the Country Landowners Association at the local agricultural show, and would have been reduced to a quaint museum piece had it not, in the 1980s, done what all such specialist species must do if they are not to suffer summary extinction. It acquired a few new and progressive genes in the form of young employees and council members steeped in a culture that was recognising the necessity to adjust to new ideas. Nature conservation was not going to survive by being exclusive and humble.
The Trust made all its reserves freely open to the public, rather than just to its subscribers, and moved into areas of education with visitor centres at Ranworth and, in the 1990s, at Hickling. To be sure, the displays were far from radical in a situation where the damage to Broadland has been considerable. They pandered still to an establishment which sees Broadland as a diversion from the real business of production and profit, and cast Broadland in an anodyne rosy glow, but the organisation has shown that it can evolve as its environment changes. The same is true of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, now the largest nature conservation organisation in the country. Since its foundation as the Society for the Protection of Birds in 1889, and its acquisition of Royal patronage in 1904, the RSPB has become an organisation that has embraced a very broad membership. This has given it a large capacity to adjust so that its views are taken seriously and are backed by a very great deal of informed expertise.
Just as the farming community has been influenced by the Ministry of Agriculture, the private conservation organisations are also manipulated by government. The influence is through small project grants or funds to acquire land, given by the statutory conservation body, English Nature. There is, however, no comparison between the Ministry of Agriculture and English Nature. The latter is small, the latest manifestation of a series of conservation organisations originally set up in 1949 and progressively weakened since, and, from the evidence of State papers, never a favourite of successive Secretaries of State. Matters began in a promising way. The influence of the Society for the Promotion of Nature Reserves and pressures for access to the countryside following the First World War led to the National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act in 1949, of which more will be said later (p.276). Protecting a representative range of the country’s natural and semi-natural habitats was the lesser of the thrusts of this Act, which set up the Nature Conservancy. Its role was to identify suitable sites and promote understanding of their functioning through research and management.
The Conservancy was strongly dominated by scientists with considerable expertise and was able to acquire land for National Nature Reserves, or negotiate management agreements with other landowners for paid management of their estates to retain the conservation interest. The central mechanism for nature conservation was the designation of Sites of Special Scientific Interest (of which the National Nature Reserves were the highest grade), but the Act gave no influence over the wider countryside outside, and rather few funds to do very much to protect even these. One consequence is that freshwater sites cannot be adequately protected because their water is usually drawn from catchments outside the boundaries of the protected site. The Conservancy had to be consulted about any development proposed within a Site it had designated, but not about adjacent land or water, even though such development might, through water quality, boat yard development, agriculture, drainage or river engineering, impinge severely upon the value of the Site. In 1965 the Nature Conservancy began a major survey to review the nature conservation quality of the UK and this was published in 1977. There were seven Grade 1 sites in the Broadland floodplains, three of international importance among a total of 24. The scope for damage was thus considerable.
The Conservancy was a gentlemanly body, maintaining research stations to further its work, as well as actively managing sites it owned or leased and giving advice about others. It was strongly dominated by ecologists and geographers and indeed came under the aegis of the Natural Environment Research Council. It was the epitome of a specialist organisation and continued to be so after 1973 when it was decided to transfer its research functions to institutes of the Natural Environment Research Council and rename it the Nature Conservancy Council (NCC). This body was to be responsible for designation and management of reserves and sites and for provision of nature conservation advice throughout the UK. The NCC had a budget for the promotion of research and was the instigator, in the 1970s, of major research projects in Broadland designed to discover the reasons for the major changes that were occurring in the rivers and Broads.
For nearly 20 years the Nature Conservancy Council survived, as effective as it could be, under the weak legislation within which it had to manage. Great hopes for strengthening it under the Wildlife and Countryside Act of 1981 were dashed when legislation that was to have given much greater powers to protect sites was undermined by largely agricultural and landowning lobbies in Parliament. Many sites in the UK were being damaged, indeed still are, but the legislation merely introduced the notorious three-month rule that landowners wishing to develop a Site of Special Scientific Interest must stay their hands for three months after notifying the Council.
The Council then had to compensate the landowners for not carrying out the development, if it could not persuade them to abandon their plans. Few funds were made available for such compensation and the Act also required the Council to re-notify all the several thousand sites on its list, including contact with every landowner. This was a vast and unnecessary bureaucratic task, which might be seen as an attempt by government to clip the wings of its own new Council. Part of the task was also to draw up a list of ‘potentially damaging operations’ for each site, which was the basis of negotiations with the landowners when development was proposed.
There was much emphasis on the ‘voluntary principle’ rather than coercion by law to further nature conservation interests. Although in principle this is the way one might wish society to function, the sad fact is that at the present rate of damage, the entire array of Sites of Special Scientific Interest in the UK has about a 40-year life span before every site will have suffered significant damage. At the present rate of removal of sites from the list, because of irreparable damage, the projected longevity of the system is finite and about 300 years.
Nature conservation has never been a favourite child of government, which has been much more concerned with exploitation and development. The child was further abused in 1991, when, having overcome the obstacles put in its way by the Wildlife and Countryside Act, it was dealt a cynical blow. It was an open-minded organisation, receptive to new ideas produced by the research it funded and strengthened by the knowledgeableness of its staff, and was widely respected by other professionals concerned with ecology and conservation. It began to point out that the wildlife resources in Scotland, in particular, were under-protected and increasingly threatened. This enraged the major landowning interests of Scotland, who were starting to benefit from developments as diverse as conifer afforestation on unique blanket bog sites and ski resorts on fragile mountain-scapes. The Government, sensitive to its own political difficulties in a country that was showing strong nationalistic tendencies to become independent, whilst also providing substantial revenue to the UK through offshore oil, destroyed the Nature Conservancy Council. There had been lesser but similar difficulties in England also, particularly about scheduling of the Somerset levels as Sites of Special Scientific Interest against powerful drainage interests.
From 1991, there emerged a divide-and-rule policy, with separate statutory conservation organisations for Scotland, England and Wales and a small rump in the form of the Joint Nature Conservation Committee, which was supposed to give advice of a general nature and look after the Government’s international commitments to wildlife conservation. English Nature, the English scion, has been a very different organisation from its predecessors. It has had a much smaller budget and is unable to support research projects of more than very local substance. It has been run increasingly by administrators who have not had the scientific standing that was formerly the great strength of conservation in Britain. It has seemed to be more concerned with the image it presents to government rather than to pursue as strong an offensive for conservation as other interests pursue for development.
Whereas the council members of the former Nature Conservancy were the intellectual giants of ecology of the time, councils of English Nature have fallen far short of this, with a prominence of business and management interests. As its publications have become ever more glossy, a plethora of magazines and newsletters, its influence in furthering conservation in any significant sense has become puny. In the community of organisations it is now a minor species, specialist and hanging on in a small niche where the resources it commands are too small for the competition to bother. It is like the fen orchid, a Broadland rarity, once much more abundant, now reduced to a few plants, carefully nurtured as icons, but barely influencing the functioning of the fen system. Its extinction cannot be far off unless the political environment changes greatly in its favour. If Broadland now has around 30 Sites of Special Scientific Interest, covering over 5,000 hectares, this is a monument to earlier organisations and not to recent government proposals, one of which, fortunately dropped, was to sell to private ownership even those lands that the Nature Conservancy and Nature Conservancy Council had acquired as their own.
Broadland was recognised, even before the Second World War, as interesting, attractive and worthy of some sort of protection against unsympathetic development. Local government exerted most of its influence through the novelty of planning controls. These had originated only in the 1930s following the Town Planning Act of 1925 and the Local Government Act of 1929, which set up several separate planning committees covering Broadland. They were to draw up planning schemes, for building development largely, but were supposed also to safeguard natural characteristics and amenity and distinguished between towns and villages (development zones) and agricultural zones. The War intervened, however, and the planning committees had negligible influence.
The ravages of past development had led nationally to the founding of the Commons Preservation Society in 1865, the National Trust in 1893 and the Society for the Promotion of Nature Reserves in 1912. There was also a movement, originating in the north of England, for great swathes of upland to be made available by their owners for walking and quiet recreation, which had led to a mass trespass of the Kinder Scout moorlands in Derbyshire in 1932. In the United States, establishment of the system of National Parks had begun in 1872 and the National Park Service was founded in 1912. It was not until 1931, however, that a National Park system for Britain was openly discussed, in which the Broads were included in a list of potential areas.
A committee chaired by Lord Justice Scott in 1941 had been particularly concerned about a feared invasion of the countryside by unthinking townspeople and ways to allow access without damage. In a spectacular misunderstanding of the future, the Scott Report illustrated just how wrong the great and the good can be: ‘…a radical alteration of the types of farming is not probable and no striking change in the pattern of the open countryside is to be expected…’. The key issue, however, was that the committee saw a separation between the needs of countryside recreation and nature conservation and the probable necessity for provision of separate areas for each. Thus was born the borghetto of the countryside, the concept of fortress conservation where selected areas are specially protected and the remainder of the landscape is left to be developed ad libitum. The key document came four years later with John Dower’s report on the provision of national parks.
Dower’s key criteria were that for selected areas, characteristic features should be preserved, access provided, wildlife and traditional buildings protected and farming maintained. The Broads were included on a list dominated by the upland areas most desired by walkers. Dower had doubts about the suitability of this lowland area, already developing problems of boat congestion, disfigured banks, inappropriate chalet development and drainage, because of the complications these would bring. Nonetheless a further committee reporting in 1947, under the chairmanship of Arthur Hobhouse, was enthusiastic about the Broads as a National Park, despite an even greater list of problems, now including vegetation encroachment, organic pollution (from boat lavatories) and the need for new holiday centres.
Locally there were also moves to consider the area more as a whole. There were two County Councils involved (Norfolk and Suffolk), two County Boroughs (Norwich and Great Yarmouth) and several Rural District Councils as well as the East Suffolk and Norfolk River Board and the Great Yarmouth Port and Haven Commissioners. The Norfolk County Council set up a committee of all these bodies that saw the key problems of Broadland as pollution by sewage from boats, litter on the banks, increase in the number of boats, bungalow development, dumping of dredging spoil on the banks, invasion of the open water by vegetation, overgrowth of trees which impeded sailing, and the decay of the drainage mills and other characteristic buildings. It thought that a single executive authority was needed, but was deterred by the realisation that this would require a special Act of Parliament.
A conference in 1947 proposed a Broads Committee, to strengthen the powers of the River Board, the Port and Haven Commissioners and the planning authorities, and that the committee would be more than just consultative. The conference was discordant, however, and nothing significant was done; meanwhile the Government dropped the issue of the Broads as a National Park. It was too difficult a problem. In 1949 yet another committee, the Broads Joint Advisory Planning Committee, was founded by the County Councils. It did little, whilst conflicts between the navigation interests and the River Board increased because the Port and Haven Commissioners refused to support repair of banks eroded by the boats from which they drew tolls. But the issues took on a low profile. The various organisations perhaps really did not want more than cosmetic change, for anything more fundamental would have removed some of their individual powers and hence their importance. The community of organisations settled down into an uneasy co-habitation, each defending its niche and its own survival.
Ten years on and the pressures continued to build. There were skirmishes when the East Suffolk and Norfolk River Board claimed it was the best authority to take over the navigation responsibilities, because of its responsibilities for the floodbanks. The National Parks Commission reconsidered the Broads, but the idea of a National Park was finally dismissed by the Government in 1961. There were no regrets from local government, who did not favour a rival body which a National Park Board would mean, from the boat hire industry, which was flourishing nicely and feared any major regulation, and from the River Board and the Port and Haven Commissioners, whose existence might be to tally jeopardised. There was little public support for a National Park. Norfolk has always prided itself on an independence of attitude, however imaginary, that might be the tradition, or burden, of its isolation from the Roman to the modern period.
The reasons that had been given by the Government for excluding the Broads from the list of National Parks, in the National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act of 1949, were that the Broads would be too costly to manage, because of the need to remove encroaching vegetation and sediment, and that they were bedevilled by too strong commercial pressures and a multiplicity of authorities. There was now also a doubt as to whether the grazing marshes, which constitute the greater proportion of the area of the floodplains, were really of national scenic significance. All were apparently rational reasons, but underlying them was the competition between the relatively weak environmental bodies of central government, whose wholehearted support they did not have, and the increasingly entrenched local bodies. This was a community very resistant to the invasions of new species that were delicate, if not shrinking, violets.
But there was change in the air. The 1960s saw international concern about the environment, specifically Rachel Carson’s exposé of the influence of agricultural chemicals, and this heightened concerns in general. The Nature Conservancy was finding its feet. The Conservancy was particularly concerned for the future of its Sites of Special Scientific Interest in Broadland and fully realised that their protection was not possible without consideration for the area as a whole, which, of course, it was alone powerless to ensure. It managed to bring together a number of interested groups and produced its Report on Broadland in 1965.
The report was generally highly readable, though redolent with the usual tortured language of such reports in proposing its plan for ‘unification and extension of powers, policies and practices relating to the future planning, management and development of Broadland’. It emphasised the need for control of boat pollution (through sewage disposal), activity and numbers and the provision of new waterways, for to do nothing was ‘to abandon the region to erosion, conflict and decay’. It suggested a consortium of planning, river and navigation authorities to implement its proposals, develop support, create new facilities, advise on their economic implications and generally manage working liaison. It said rather little about the fundamental ecological problems in the waters – boats were still the fashionable bugbear and the telltale water chemistry that would have indicated the real problem had not then even been considered.
The report revived interest and concern for the torpor that had beset the previous decade or more, and The Broads Consortium was founded in 1966. It had four members from the Norfolk County Council, four from the East Suffolk and Norfolk River Authority, four from the Great Yarmouth Port and Haven Commissioners and one from the East Suffolk County Council. It included no ecological expertise at all. By 1971 it had, after much gathering of information, though no fundamental research, produced…a report. The Broadland Study and Plan was very much a local authority planners’ document rather than a comprehensive appraisal. In the period during which it was being produced, major changes in the ecosystems of the Broads were taking place or had already done so, yet there is no mention of them. They were recorded in a paper produced elsewhere in 1972.
The Consortium plan hung on to the usual problems, which it listed as the conflict between expansion of holiday and recreational facilities and the character of Broadland and conflicts between various uses for the limited water space. It concluded that more boats could be accommodated and proposed the excavation of new Broads and waterways (much like the proposed construction of more roads and car parks to solve traffic problems even now). It thought that since the northern waterways (the Bure, the Ant and the Thurne) were the most crowded, the increase should be on the Yare and Waveney, with an expansion of facilities at Great Yarmouth. There should be increased tolls to pay for it and increased rates for property owners benefiting from living by the water.
The plan’s whole emphasis was on meeting the demand for more facilities, on generating employment and rateable value rather than on safeguarding the goose that laid these golden eggs. The Consortium stuck a knife in its own heart by suggesting (sensibly) that the responsibility for navigation on the rivers should be passed to a body responsible for other aspects of river management, but (not so sensibly) proposed that this should be the existing River Board. If organisations behave like organisms in manoeuvring to ensure their own survival, then it is understandable that the Port and Haven Commissioners rejected this idea and wrote their minority report. The Consortium was disbanded. In the 20 years since the passing of the 1949 National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act, the competition between organisations had ensured the prolongation of the existing community. Nothing substantial had been done to protect the Broadland system and it was now deteriorating rapidly.
Next on the environmental stage was the Anglian Water Authority, replacing the River Board. The local authorities were concerned that such a large organisation would be insensitive to the needs of what was a tiny part of its area. The Water Authority set up a token Broads Committee, whose influence, despite its having executive control over all Water Authority activities in Broadland bar flood control and drainage, was minor. It was dominated by Water Authority members and, predictably, contained as a minority group, representatives of the Port and Haven Commissioners, the Nature Conservancy Council, the Anglers Consultative Council, the Broads Society (an amenity society founded in 1956) and the private and commercial boating organisations.
But as the water management was put on a slightly more logical basis, yet another of the random changes that affect the operation of organisations came about, with the reorganisation of local government. With two County Councils and six District Councils, a Water Authority and the Port and Haven Commissioners, Broadland, in desperate need of a wide-ranging, balanced management, with substantial input of ecological expertise, was now to be run by ten organisations, compared with a previous four, and with precious little ecological input. In the evolution of organisations, as in the evolution of organisms, there is no direction, just a response to continuous change.
Tokenism waxed and waned. The Broads Consultative Committee (full of representatives of all the usual myriad organisations) was set up by the local authorities to consider planning applications in Broadland. It was purely advisory and had no powers. The Water Authority’s Broads Committee could restrict itself only to Water Authority matters and its separate Land Drainage Committee had few representatives on it who were not avid to drain every last drop if they could. In 1983, a Water Act was passed in which elected local authority representation on the Water Authority was discontinued in favour of a board appointed entirely by the Government. The new board disbanded the Broads Committee entirely.
By the mid-1970s, however, there was a lot of concern among perceptive individuals in the area. If outspoken enough, individuals can catalyse more change than organisations; indeed, history shows that organisations follow individual thinking rather than the reverse. New problems were appearing: the loss of the submerged plants, fish-kills in the River Thurne and its Broads, loss of reedswamp and coypu damage. The regional officer of the Nature Conservancy Council, Martin George, suggested the appointment at least of a co-ordinator, a Broads Officer, to try to bring some cohesion to an increasingly messy problem, and the Countryside Commission (a government body with overall responsibility for the countryside, including the National Parks) raised again the issue of a National Park for Broadland.
The Countryside Commission was the latest in a series of bodies that had been responsible for recreation in the countryside, though itself labouring nationally under the same problems with agriculture as were experienced locally in Broadland. It too concentrated on the familiar issue of boats, though by 1976 when it started to move on the issue, there was increasing evidence that water quality was of much greater importance. Boats are, however, highly visible; phosphate and nitrate are not. The Commission’s immediate problem was that existing National Park legislation did not provide for control of river navigation and that to amend this legislation would create considerable problems for other National Parks. It suggested the setting up of a new authority specific to Broadland, though it did not think the Government would support it, as an alternative to new National Park legislation encompassing control over both navigation and water quality. There was the customary defending of entrenched positions by the existing organisations, but the local government authorities, perhaps mindful that the area was being damaged to the extent that a main source of revenue through tourism was threatened, made a proposal for a local Broads Authority. This would not need a new Act and, if they supported it financially, could be brought into existence more or less immediately as a joint local authority committee under the Local Government Act of 1972.
The Countryside Commission was not initially enthusiastic, for it saw nothing particularly new in this that had not already failed in the form of other committees, but it was remote enough from the area for its own survival not to be threatened by a retreat from its original stance. It decided that if it could nominate national representatives to the new committee, so that local rivalries could be tempered, it would support the idea and would contribute funding for projects to protect the area. Thus was borne the Broads Authority, with a remit to enhance wildlife and natural beauty, to protect economic and social interests and to preserve natural resources for recreation, holidays, scientific research and education.
In essence the only new ingredient was the national contribution. The Authority had no control over the key issues of water quality and navigation and there were oddities in the definition of its boundary area, which excluded the upper part of the River Thurne, reflecting a degree of nefarious influence among some of its first members. Its area included very little beyond the flood-plains. However, it thrived. The political environment had changed sufficiently to accommodate a new species with the advantages of financial resources from central government and a fortunate set of choices among its first officers.
It took over the previous local authority functions of planning, recreation, local nature conservation, ancient monuments, footpaths and bridleways. It channelled funds into projects such as the purchase of land for a new nature reserve at Carlton Colville and the rehabilitation of Cockshoot Broad by removal of the sediment that was almost entirely filling it. It also continued the tradition of the Nature Conservancy Council of funding research so that its policies would be based on new information and not only on somewhat hackneyed presumptions. This was largely the influence of a chief executive, Aitken Clark, drawn from a research and teaching rather than an administrative background – a fortunate new gene.
In 1982, the Broads Authority produced a clear strategy and management plan, What Future for Broadland?. This gave much more attention to habitat restoration and wildlife conservation than any previous report and inevitably was criticised by boating interests. Many of the old tensions persisted. There had been attempts at skulduggery in the compilation of the reports of one of the working groups that informed the eventual strategy and management plan. The Water Authority attempted to downgrade the water quality issue into an appendix away from the main text, but this was foiled. Fortunately, however, the new Authority was quickly presented with a flagship issue which, because it eventually successfully helped negotiate a solution, began to consolidate its influence.
This issue was the major controversy concerning the ploughing of the Halvergate marshes, the outcome of which was a Ministry of Agriculture-financed scheme to support traditional grazing on the marshes through payments to farmers instead of subsidies to grow wheat. This scheme was the prototype of a number of similar ones the Ministry now supports in ‘Environmentally Sensitive Areas’ and is discussed in Chapter 17. The issue was resolved after considerable acrimony and the resolution owed much to the Authority’s officers.
The Countryside Commission was thus well pleased with its adopted child and set about making the Broads Authority a truly national one through new legislation that would allow much greater funding from national sources and establish the area as a National Park in all but name. The Norfolk and Suffolk Broads Act was passed in 1988 and the Broads Authority came into permanent existence, in its new form, the following year. It has been the most effective vehicle yet for improvement of the Broadland environment. Its constitution is not perfect and some cracks have been papered over, but it shows signs of persistence that none of its predecessors have displayed. It now has control of the navigation. The Port and Haven Commissioners continued to be intransigent during the years of the local Broads Authority, and the Countryside Commission, in formulating the legislation, decided that there was sufficient local impatience with these attitudes that a transfer was politically feasible. The Port and Haven Commissioners thus came close to extinction, for they failed to adapt and are now reduced to running just the Port of Yarmouth.
The problem remains that the Broads Authority’s boundary, now including the upper Thurne, but omitting Fritton Lake, close to the River Waveney, because it was thought that this area had been too far developed by commercial interests, is still confined essentially to the floodplains. The Authority has no control over the catchments. It still has no control over water quality, though the body that has, now the Environment Agency, is, potentially at least, much more disposed to stringency in this respect than the former Water Authority. Also it still has to balance the often competing demands of preserving and enhancing the natural beauty of the Broads, of promoting the enjoyment of the Broads by the public, and of navigation. The Authority’s membership was engineered by the Government to favour navigation and farming interests over those of conservation and it must maintain a distinct navigation committee, which to some extent is an uneasy symbiosis of many of the attitudes of the former river commissioners. Nonetheless, the principle that conservation issues should be foremost and that environmentally benign policies should be applied, has been operated.
It took nearly 60 years from the first mooting of the idea of the Broads as a National Park for the present, very positive, arrangements to be achieved, yet Broadland is still extremely vulnerable. Its present and future is the topic of the remainder of this book. Its fate is immediately mostly in the hands of two organisations, the Environment Agency and the Broads Authority. Neither are immune to the forces that may overtake any organisation that is not swift on its feet in an environment that is changing, both politically and physically, perhaps faster than at any time since the retreat of the ice 10,000 years ago. Both must ensure that they remain small enough to be productive, yet large enough to be resistant to minor vicissitudes of change. Both must be extremely open to new ideas and capable of supporting genuinely innovative research to inform their policies. And both must shun the temptation to recruit into their ranks the predictable and the safe, for the demands of changing environments are not for conformity but for radical action.
The literature on organisations is generally of the kind known as ‘grey’. It includes official documents, often unpublished reports and material that represents the final compromise of many committee meetings, position papers and informal contacts. Some of it appears as the minutes of committees of official organisations and is of questionable value in determining what really happened. Minutes are always carefully examined and adjusted before being eventually approved in anodyne form at some future committee meeting. Many government documents are not released for 30 years and even then it is impossible to be certain that all of them are made available. Any account of institutional history, however detailed, must then be only a version of the truth. I have relied also on my personal experience and perception of current organisations in coming to my conclusions, as well as the documents they produce to project their chosen images.
I have used the accounts of historians and conservationists such as Sheail (1976, 1998), Stamp (1969) and Green (1985) to trace the general history of conservation in Britain and George (1992) for the particular details relevant to Broadland. The history of National Park discussions can be followed in MacEwan & MacEwan (1982, 1987), and three relevant government reports of Scott, Dower and Hobhouse are published as Scott (1942) and Ministry of Town and Country Planning (1945, 1947) respectively. A wider view of National Parks can be obtained by looking at the American experience in Runte (1987). Countryside conflicts in Britain in recent years are reviewed in Lowe et al. (1986).
The first formal reporting of the deteriorating situation in the ecology of the Broadland waterway was Morgan (1972) and the reports that preceded it, but overlooked some key problems, were Nature Conservancy (1965) and Broads Consortium (1971). The events surrounding the emasculation of statutory conservation in Great Britain are related by Marren (1993) and the Worldwide Fund for Nature (1997). The Norfolk Wildlife Trust celebrated its 50-year anniversary with a volume that contains an account of its history to that date (Norfolk Naturalists Trust 1976). The Nature Conservation Review was published as Ratcliffe (1977) and the first Strategy and Management Plan for Broadland as Broads Authority (1982). The issue of toxic blue-green algal blooms that gave particular prominence to the National Rivers Authority is published as National Rivers Authority (1990). Finally, the ecological basis for this chapter may be found in Hutchinson (1965).