2 The Official Conservation Agencies
The British government has always delegated its responsibilities for nature conservation to a semiautonomous agency. The governments of other European countries tend to keep theirs within agricultural departments or National Park bodies. The reason why Britain behaves differently probably lies in our early start and the influence of science in the 1940s (for a good account of this postwar science boom, see Sheail 1998). The founders of the Nature Conservancy, the first official conservation agency in Britain, saw it as a biological service, comparable with a research council or scientific institution, like the Soil Association. They hoped it would develop as a science-based body, using its own research programme to advise government on land-use policies affecting wildlife. As Professor Smout has pointed out, ‘the rule of the bureaucrat guided by the scientific expert has been highly prized in government for most of the twentieth century’ (Smout 2000). They were anxious that nature conservation should not be swallowed up in the departments for agriculture and forestry, where, as a newcomer, and so starting at the bottom of the civil service peck order, its influence would be stifled. Max Nicholson, who directed the Nature Conservancy between 1951 and 1965, had influence in high places and ensured that, as a semi-specialised body, it secured a semidetached status as a research council under the wing of Herbert Morrison, then Lord President of Council. As such, it could not be bossed about by predatory departments of state. There are advantages to ministers in such arrangements. Expertise is ‘on tap, not on top’, and if anything goes wrong it is the agency’s fault, not the minister’s. Dispensable Board chairmen can be sacked, but the minister need not resign. Much of the history of the Nature Conservancy and its successor bodies hovers around the tension between the zeal of semiautonomous agency officials and the brake of government (the appointed Councils of these bodies have tended to be part of the braking mechanism rather than the zeal). It is there between the lines of their annual reports and, now that the papers are at last available under the ridiculous 30-year-rule, you can read about the formative years of that thorny relationship in a fine, detailed book by John Sheail (1998). But here I need to skip over those, to many, golden, well-remembered early years with unseemly haste.
Max Nicholson, Director of the Nature Conservancy 1951-1965. (NCC)
The Nature Conservancy is said to have been the first official, science-based conservation body in the world, and the only one with a large research arm. Although money was always tight, the Nature Conservancy under Nicholson tended to box above its weight. It achieved a good deal, acquiring a nationwide network of National Nature Reserves and research stations, and gaining an international reputation for sound, science-based advice on the management of wild species and natural habitats. I begin the story where Dudley Stamp left off, in 1965, shortly after the Nature Conservancy lost its independence after becoming a mere committee within the newly formed Natural Environment Research Council (NERC). ‘One chapter is concluded,’ wrote Stamp, ‘but there is every sign of a new one opening auspiciously.’
If so, it did not stay auspicious for long. The 1960s should have been a good decade for the Nature Conservancy. The general public had become more ‘environmentally aware’ through events like the pesticides scare (Rachel Carson’s book about it, Silent Spring, became an international bestseller) and the Torrey Canyon disaster in 1967. The threat to our wild places had been underlined by the construction of a nuclear power station at Dungeness (Plate 11) and a reservoir at Cow Green in Upper Teesdale (Plate 13). The Conservancy was closely involved in these issues, and its growing fame was exemplified by the traffic jams on Open Days at Monks Wood Field Station (not to mention visits on different days by Prince Charles and the Prime Minister). However, its status within NERC drew attention to the essential ambiguity of the Conservancy’s role: could a body be scientific, and therefore impartial, and yet advocate a partial view – that conserving nature is a good idea? The Conservancy itself dealt with this duality by dividing its administrative responsibilities under one subdirector (Bob Boote) and its research under another (Martin Holdgate). Unfortunately the Conservancy no longer had full control over its affairs. For example, its budget for nature reserves had to compete for funds with NERC’s broader research, including geophysics, oceanography and the Antarctic. Internal censorship prevented the Nature Conservancy from speaking out on pesticides and other pollutants. Tensions grew in the boardroom, where some members thought it was worth making sacrifices to preserve the link between conservation and fundamental science while others decided that nothing had been achieved by joining NERC, and that the Conservancy would be better off going it alone. The Conservancy’s new director, Duncan Poore, was of the latter view.
Unfortunately there was to be no return to the pre-1965 days: the choice lay between the frying pan of NERC and the fire of a government department. The Conservancy’s committee split, with an influential group voting to leave NERC. A way out of the impasse was offered by the Government’s Central Policy Review under Lord Rothschild – the famous ‘Think Tank’ – which advocated the separation of customer and contractor. As a ‘customer’ of the natural sciences, the logic was that the Nature Conservancy should become independent of NERC, but the same logic prevented it from carrying out in-house research. Rothschild proposed that only half of NERC’s budget should be paid by its parent Department of Education and Science, with the balance found by commissioning research from other government departments. Most of the Nature Conservancy’s own little budget would now come from the new Department of Environment, or, in Scotland, from the Scottish Development Department (SDD). Funds were also transferred from NERC to pay for contract research. By one of life’s little coincidences, the Education Secretary who helped to set up this new Nature Conservancy Council (NCC) was the same person who presided over its demise, 16 years later – Mrs Thatcher.
Rothschild’s report gave the Conservancy the excuse it needed to make public its wish to leave NERC. Government agreed that the Conservancy’s dual role had ‘caused stresses difficult to resolve within the present framework’ (Sheail 1998). Unfortunately the solution, as Government saw it, was to separate science from administration. The Nature Conservancy would become a quasi-autonomous council of the Department of Environment, but its scientific stations would remain behind in NERC. This divorce, representing the exact moment when field-based natural history began to turn into administrative nature conservation, became known as ‘The Split’. The Nature Conservancy Council, usually referred to as the NCC, was established by Act of Parliament in 1973. Its first chairman was a Whitehall mandarin, Sir David Serpell, lately Permanent Secretary at the DoE. He promised to run the new agency on ‘a loose rein’ (which fooled nobody). As a sop to anguished pleas that the NCC must retain some scientific capacity to function properly, it was allowed to keep a small in-house team of scientists under a ‘Chief Scientist’, a term coined by Rothschild. But their job would be limited to commissioning and keeping abreast of research, rather than doing it themselves. In the meantime, its erstwhile Research Branch was reconstituted within NERC as the Institute of Terrestrial Ecology (ITE – now renamed the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology).
The Nature Conservancy Council (NCC)
‘No one was entirely happy with the outcome of the “Split”’ (Sheail 1998). Some saw it as a further demotion that threatened the special relationship between science and land management so carefully fostered by the Nature Conservancy. However, that relationship was already falling apart. While the White Paper ‘Cmd 7122’ had talked up the potential of nature reserves as ‘outdoor laboratories’ and the importance of its advice to land managers, the hard truth was that by the 1970s only a handful of nature reserves were used for fundamental research, and farmers and foresters were not queuing up for the Conservancy’s advice (they had their own scientists). Moreover, the crisis in the countryside was growing and it was no longer a matter of experimenting over the best way to manage a wood or a heath but of saving such places from complete destruction. Inevitably this required a shift in emphasis away from scientific research towards site safeguard, which, unless you happen to manage the land yourself, is an administrative task. Most of the Conservancy’s research budget now went on cheap, low-key surveys that helped to identify or characterise the places that most deserved safeguarding. Consequently, the split between the NCC and its former science branch broadened into a chasm. ITE gradually ceased to be a significant part of the nature conservation world – to the deep regret of many of its staff, which included New Naturalist authors like Ian Newton, R.K. Murton and Max Hooper.
The 1970s were a bad decade for the natural environment. In Britain, Dutch elm disease and the removal of hedges created stark, arable landscapes, while in the uplands blanket afforestation transformed many square kilometres of open country into sepulchral timber crops of introduced spruce, pine and larch. Limestone pavements were smashed to bits to adorn suburban gardens and corporate offices. The Norfolk Broads, still crystal clear in the early 1950s, became clouded with silt. The heaths went up in flames during the drought years 1975 and 1976, and, apart from the mountain tops, there seemed to be hardly any wild land that agricultural grants could not convert into profitable farmland. Hence, the NCC was overstretched, using what small authority it had to oppose harmful developments, reach agreements and establish nature reserves. On occasion, it stepped back from events to appraise the situation. In 1977, for example, it published a ‘policy paper’, Nature Conservation and Agriculture, containing the NCC’s thoughts on how to reconcile increasing food production with the maintenance of ‘Britain’s rich heritage’ of wildlife. Essentially the message was that, while vast amounts of public money were helping farmers plough and drain the land, the incentives to preserve wildlife were negligible. You did not have to travel far to see the consequences. A second policy paper, on forestry, was shelved after reported disagreements on the NCC’s Council, which contained members with vested interests in forestry.
In 1977, the NCC at last published A Nature Conservation Review, edited by its Chief Scientist, Derek Ratcliffe, describing the range of wildlife and natural vegetation in Britain, and singling out the 735 best examples of coast-lands, woodlands, lowland grasslands and heaths, open waters, peatlands and upland habitats, all graded according to their international, national or second-string importance. The Review was, and remains, an astounding tour de force, combining a rationale for site selection with a kind of Domesday Book of Britain’s wild places (though, as Jon Tinker pointed out in New Scientist, it had taken eight times as long to produce as the original Domesday Book!). The original purpose of the Review had been to provide a reasoned ‘shopping list’ for nature reserve acquisition. Because of the obvious sensitivities involved – for by no means every landowner would have been delighted to find his property on the list – this aspect was played down, and the Review was presented to the public as a reference book of important biological sites. In commending it in these terms, the Ministers for Environment and for Education and Science were careful to avoid committing themselves to any particular action. The Review sparked no change in environmental policy, but it did form a necessary reference point for site protection. Without some means of assessing the relative importance of wildlife sites, the NCC would be blundering in the dark.
The second key NCC document was its long-term strategic review, published in 1984 and entitled Nature Conservation in Great Britain (‘NCGB’). It was in part an assessment of the successes and failures of the nature conservation movement, and in part a set of ground rules for the future. The failures outnumbered the successes by 21 pages to five, and any impression given by the glossy pictures of a healthy, vital natural environment was contradicted by the lowering bar graphs that showed ‘with stark clarity’ how far wildlife habitats had diminished during the past half-century – a loss of 40 per cent of lowland heaths, for example, and an incredible 95 per cent of ‘lowland neutral grasslands’. Behind the statistics lay a detailed analysis of habitat loss undertaken by Norman Moore – but, as it happened, ‘NCGB’ proved to be the only opportunity to publish any of it. Perhaps Council thought it might depress the minister. The real significance of the review lay not so much in the detail but in its heightened sense of conviction. For the first time the NCC explicitly recognised nature conservation as a cultural activity, and not merely as pure or applied science. ‘Simple enjoyment and inspiration from contact with nature’ was not a partisan activity: it concerned us all. It followed that we should conserve nature in the same way that we take care of other essentials like air and water. ‘Nature conservation has in the past sometimes conducted its business on too apologetic and timid a note’, declared the NCC, looking back at its own history. Timidity had too often meant surrender. ‘We need to play a hard but clean game for our side,’ said the NCC’s new chairman, William Wilkinson. So there were now ‘sides’, us against them. The strategy was heartily supported by most of the voluntary bodies, who rightly saw it as a challenge, heralding a significant change of policy, and expected NCC to honour its brave words to the letter. But in the freewheeling climate of the 1980s, having the courage of your convictions meant having to fight for them. The five years of corporate life left to the NCC were hard ones, and led straight to its destruction.
There were really two NCCs, separated by the watershed year 1981 in which the Wildlife and Countryside Act reached the statute book. The pre-1981 NCC was a fairly low-key organisation with a staff of about 500 dispersed thinly about Britain, struggling along on an annual budget of about £6 million (the NCC had scarcely any income or assets). It advised government on issues affecting wildlife, commented on local plans and developments and grant-aided worthy projects, but was rarely in the headlines. The man in the street had never heard of it, which is not to deny that the NCC achieved a great deal on very little.
Sir William Wilkinson, chairman of the NCC 1984-1991. (English Nature)
The post-Act NCC took a little while to get going, but it became another organisation entirely, more powerful, more centralised, and often in the headlines, especially in Scotland. By 1988, the NCC had 780 permanent staff with a sixfold budget increase to £39 million. An enforced move in 1984 from the old Nature Conservancy’s stately quarters at Belgrave Square to a modern office block in Peterborough gave the organisation a chance to centralise its dispersed branches – an England headquarters at Banbury, scientists at Huntingdon, geologists at Newbury, publicists and cartographers at Shrewsbury were all sucked into Peterborough. The organisation also became computerised and corporatised. Corporate planning was introduced in 1985, requiring staff to complete monthly time records, recording (in theory at least) every half-hour of activity. The Act made nature conservation much more expensive. By 1988, nearly a quarter of the NCC’s budget was spent on management agreements on SSSIs.
The Wildlife and Countryside Act distorted the NCC’s activities for nearly a decade, as its regional staff struggled to notify SSSIs and negotiate agreements over their safeguard. Land not notified as SSSI became known as ‘wider countryside’, and there was little enough time to devote to it (with the honourable exception of urban conservation, largely a one-man crusade by George Barker). Unfortunately, the wording of the Act forced the NCC to adopt a heavy handed approach on SSSIs, in which an owner or tenant would be presented with a formidable list of ‘Potentially Damaging Operations’. Permissions to carry on farming in ways that did not damage the site’s special interest were called ‘consents’. This sort of language understandably put people’s backs up, as did the fact that there was no appeals system and the conviction that notification would lower the land value. Suspicion and potential hostility could be mollified by the farm-to-farm visits of the NCC’s regional staff, who were generally speaking more charming and persuasive than the documents they had to deliver. To the extent that the Act was a success it was theirs, not that of the politicians who created a botched system, nor the civil servants and lawyers who insisted on its rigid application. The local NCC staff rapidly learnt that the only way to make the Act work was by goodwill – hardline interpretations of the law and threats of prosecution simply alienated people, and got nowhere.
In some areas, especially in island communities, SSSIs were seen as an alien imposition. In Islay, teeming with wildlife, a severe dose of SSSIs looked like a punishment for farming in harmony with nature. Things came to a head in the small matter of finding a source of peat for an Islay distillery as a substitute for Duich Moss, one of the best raised bogs in the Hebrides. A team of environmentalists led by David Bellamy, intending to plead the cause of peatland conservation, was howled down by angry islanders normally renowned for their hospitality and gentleness of manners. It was not that the community was against nature conservation, only that they did not enjoy being told what to do by a Peterborough-based quango (a place not particularly noted for its teeming wildlife).
Notifying SSSIs was a much more complicated business than anyone had foreseen. To begin with staff had to find out who owned the land, and even that could be a hornet’s nest with, in Morton Boyd’s words, ‘many untested claims to holdings, grazings and sporting rights’ (Boyd 1999). SSSIs were an absolute, bureaucratic system imposed on a system of tenure that was often the opposite: communal, fluid, and based on non-Westminster concepts of custom, neighbourliness and unwritten rules. Outsiders blundering into these matters could unwittingly set neighbour against neighbour. They could also make themselves very unpopular. Moreover some SSSIs were already under dedicated schemes for forestry or peat extraction, or an agricultural grant scheme. In the Outer Hebrides an EU-fund-ed Integrated Development Scheme was in progress, while in Orkney an Agriculture Department-funded scheme was encouraging farmers to reclaim moorland. The NCC often found itself outnumbered. When, in 1981, it opposed the extension of ski development into the environmentally sensitive Lurchers Gully in the Cairngorms (see Chapter 10), the NCC found itself ranged against the Highlands and Islands Development Board, Highland Regional Council, and sports and tourism lobbies, as well as local entrepreneurs. It won that particular battle but, in the Highlands and Islands at least, the NCC eventually lost the war.
J. Morton Boyd, Scottish director of the NCC, at Creag Meagaidh, which he helped save from afforestation. (Des Thompson)
The break-up of the NCC
Replying to an arranged Parliamentary question on 11 July 1989, Nicholas Ridley told a near-empty House of Commons that he had decided to break up the Nature Conservancy Council. In its place he would introduce legislation for separate nature conservation agencies in England, Scotland and Wales. I well remember the shock. Just the previous week we had attended a ceremony to mark the retirement of Derek Ratcliffe, Chief Scientist of the NCC since its establishment 16 years before. ‘Things will never be quite the same again,’ we thought, little suspecting just how different they would be. I was in the canteen at the NCC’s headquarters at Northminster House as a rumour spread over the cause of the emergency Council meeting upstairs. The hurried patter of feet on the third floor, doors banging, chairs scraping, voices raised, all signalled unusual excitement. NCC’s chairman, Sir William Wilkinson, had, it seemed, been given a week’s notice of the announcement, but had not been allowed to tell anyone. He used the time to appeal to the Prime Minister, but she backed her minister. Council had had only one day’s official notice, although some of them did not seem very surprised, and a few welcomed it. We, the staff, were caught completely unawares. As Forestry and British Timber magazine gloated, ‘it was, no doubt, to spare the NCC the horrors of anticipation that the Ridley guillotine crashed down upon it last week. There was no warning, no crowds, no tumbrils, no (or very little) mourning. The end of the Peterborough empire came silently and swiftly’.
No mourning from foresters may be, but it sent a seismic shudder, shortly to be followed by an outpouring of rage, through the nature conservation world. ‘At no time was NCC given notice of such extreme dissatisfaction with its performance as to register a threat to its corporate existence’, wrote Donald Mackay, a former undersecretary at the Scottish Office (Mackay 1995). The only clue in Ridley’s statement was that there were apparently ‘great differences between the circumstances and needs of England, Scotland and Wales…There are increasing feelings that [the present] arrangements are inefficient, insensitive and mean that conservation issues in both Scotland and Wales are determined with too little regard for the particular requirements in these countries’. Evidently, then, events in Scotland and Wales had propelled the announcement.
The sentence had been done in haste. Ridley was about to move from Environment to Energy, where he was sacked a year later for making offensive remarks about the Germans. Nothing had been thought through. The implication was that, as far as nature conservation was concerned, England, Scotland and Wales would now go their separate ways, but left hanging was the not unimportant matter of who would represent Britain internationally and who would referee common standards within the new agencies. Moreover, far from being more efficient, a devolved system implied endless duplication (actually, triplication) and waste. ‘What would you rather have?’ asked Wilkinson, ‘a peatland expert for Great Britain, or three under-resourced experts in England, Scotland and Wales? It’s obvious isn’t it?’ Behind Wilkinson’s disappointment and frustration was the knowledge that his Council had been about to introduce a ‘federal’ system of administration that, he thought, would largely have answered the genuine problems being experienced in Scotland and Wales.
Some of the smoke from Ridley’s 1989 bombshell has since cleared. At issue was the NCC’s unpopularity in Scotland, and in particular its opposition to afforestation. Things came to the crunch in 1987 when, alarmed at the rate of afforestation in the hitherto untouched blanket bogs of far away Sutherland and Caithness (see Chapter 7), the NCC called for a moratorium on further planting in the area. Fatally, the NCC decided to hold its press conference in London, not in Edinburgh or Inverness, lending substance to the accusation that the NCC was an English body, with no right to ban development in Scotland, especially when jobs were at stake. It is alleged that there was a reluctance on the part of the NCC’s Scottish headquarters to host the press conference; its Scottish director, John Francis, had taken diplomatic leave. The Scottish media took more interest in a spoiling statement by the Highlands and Islands Development Board, whose chief took the opportunity to call for a separate Scottish NCC. The Scottish press took up the cry, and from that day on another ‘split’ was probably inevitable. The MP Tam Dalyell was in no doubt that this was why the NCC was broken up: ‘It originated out of a need that had nothing whatsoever to do with the best interests of the environment. It was about another need entirely, that is, the need for politicians to give the impression that they were doing something about devolving power to the Scots as a sop to keep us happy’ (Dalyell 1989).
Just as the Scots resented ‘interference’ from Peterborough, so the Secretary of State for the Environment resented having to pay for things outside his direct control (for DoE’s writ ran only in England and Wales). According to Mackay, Ridley, growing alarmed at the anticipated costs of compensating forestry companies in Caithness, suggested to his Cabinet colleague, Malcolm Rifkind, that Scotland should receive its own conservation agency and shoulder the burden itself. With the Conservative party’s popularity at an all-time low in Scotland, Rifkind must have seen political advantages in such a gesture, and ordered his Scottish Development Department to prepare a plan for detaching the Scottish part of the NCC and merging it with the Countryside Commission for Scotland. The case for Scotland automatically created a similar case for Wales. It seems, though, that Wales received its own devolved agency without ever having asked for one.
The secrecy in which all this took place is surprising, but it enabled ministers to rush the measure through before the inevitable opposition could get going – an early example of political ‘spin’. The NCC had few influential friends north of the Border, where voluntary nature conservation bodies were weak. Moreover, the afforestation issue had encouraged separatist notions among the NCC’s own Scotland Committee and staff. Broadly speaking they saw the future of wild nature in Scotland in terms of sustainable development and integrated land use, which in some vague way should reflect the value-judgements of the Scottish people. It made little sense to draw lines around ‘sites’ in the Highlands where wild land was more or less continuous. Hence they saw more merit in processes – making allies and finding common ground – than in site-based conservation, which, as they saw it, only served to entrench conflict. That, at least, is what I construe from the statement of the chairman of the NCC’s Scotland Committee, Alexander Trotter, at the break-up, that ‘It has been clear to me for some time that the existing system is cumbersome to operate and that decision making seemed remote from the people of Scotland’.
Some of the opposition to the break-up was blunted by the obvious appeal of combining nature and landscape conservation in Scotland and Wales. Many believed that the severance of wildlife and countryside matters back in 1949 had been a fundamental error, and that in a farmed environment like the British countryside they were inseparable. However, Ridley refused to contemplate their merger in England, arguing that the administrative costs would outweigh any possible advantages (a view the Parliamentary committee concurred with when the question was reopened in 1995). The main objection, apart from the well-founded fear that science-based nature conservation had suffered another tremendous, perhaps fatal, body blow, was the void that had opened up at the Great Britain level. Following a report by a House of Lords committee under Lord Carver, Ridley’s successor, Chris Patten accepted the idea of a joint co-ordinating committee to advise the Government on matters with a nationwide or international dimension. This became the Joint Nature Conservation Committee or JNCC, a semiautonomous science rump whose budget would be ‘ring-fenced’ by contributions from three new country agencies. Some of the NCC’s senior scientists ended up in the JNCC, only to find they were scientists no longer but ‘managers’.
Creating the new agencies took many months, during which the enabling legislation, the (to some, grossly misnamed) Environment Protection Bill, passed through Parliament, and the NCC made its internal rearrangements. Separate arrangements were needed under Scottish law, and so an interim body, the Nature Conservancy Council for Scotland was set up before the Scottish Natural Heritage was established by Act of Parliament in 1992. From that point onwards, the history of official nature conservation in Britain diverges sharply. Because of the interest in the new country agencies’ performance, I will present them in some detail. They form an interesting case study of conservation and politics in a devolved government. In Scotland and Wales particularly it has led to a much greater emphasis on popular ‘countryside’ issues, and less on wildlife as an exclusive activity. In England, too, there have been obvious attempts to trim one’s sails to the prevailing wind, with an ostentatious use of business methods and a culture of confrontation-avoidance. Let us take a look at each of them, and the JNCC, starting with English Nature.
NCC’s spending in 1988 (in £,000s)
| Income | ||
|---|---|---|
| From government grant-in-aid | 36,105 | |
| Other income | 2,461 | (mainly from sales of publications rents and research undertaken on repayment terms) |
| £38,566 | ||
| Expenditure | ||
| Staff salaries and overheads | 14,310 | |
| Management agreements | 7,287 | |
| Scientific support | 4,992 | (including 3,736 for research contracts) |
| Grants | 2,510 | (made up of 1,109 for land purchase, and the rest staff posts and projects, mainly to voluntary bodies) |
| Maintenance of NNRs | 1,399 | |
| Depreciation | 1,089 | |
| Other operating charges | 7,280 | (e.g. staff support, books and equipment, accommodation, phones) |
| £38,867 |
From NCC 15th Annual Report 1 April 1988-31 March 1989
English Nature
Headquarters: Northminster House, Peterborough PE1 1UA.
Vision: ‘To sustain and enrich the wildlife and natural features of England for everyone’.
Slogan: ‘Working today for nature tomorrow’.
English Nature began its corporate life on 2 April 1991 (April Fool’s Day was a public holiday that year) with a budget of £32 million to manage 141 National Nature Reserves, administer 3,500 SSSIs and pay the salaries of 724 permanent staff. Most of the latter were inherited from the NCC, including a disproportionate number of scientific administrators, and only 90 were new appointments. EN’s Council was, as before, appointed on the basis of individual expertise, and intended to produce a balance of expertise across the range of its functions. However, they were now paid a modest salary and given specific jobs to do. From 1996, under the new rules established by the Nolan Report, new Council posts were advertised. All of them had to be approved by the chairman, a political appointee. What was noticeable about EN’s first Council was that only one was a reputable scientist. None were prominently affiliated to a voluntary body, nor could any of them be described as even remotely radical. This Council was less grand than the NCC’s: fewer big landowners, no wildlife celebrities, and no MPs. In 1995, at the request of Lord Cranbrook, EN’s chief executive, Derek Langslow, became a full member, unlike his predecessors who just sat in on meetings and spoke when required. This made him a powerful figure in English Nature’s affairs.
English Nature inherited the structure of the NCC, with its various administrative branches, regional offices and headquarters in Peterborough. Externally the change from NCC to English Nature was brought about simply by taking down one sign and erecting another. An agency designed to serve Great Britain could, with a little readjustment, easily be scaled down to England alone. English Nature could, if it wished, carry on with business as usual. Even its official title remained the Nature Conservancy Council (for England); the name ‘English Nature’ was only legalised in 2000.
In the event, it opted for a radical administrative shakedown. The new administration was keen to present a more businesslike face to the world with a strategic approach in which aims would be related to ‘visions’ and goals, and tied to performance indicators monitored in successive corporate plans. A deliberate attempt was made to break down the NCC’s hermetic regions and branches into ‘teams’, each with their own budget and business plan. At Northminster House, partition walls were removed, and the warren of tiny offices replaced by big open plan rooms in which scientists, technicians and administrators worked cheek byjowl. There were also significant semantic changes. English Nature saw landowners and voluntary bodies as its ‘customers’; its work as a ‘service’ – one of its motto-like phrases was that ‘People’s needs should be discovered and used as a guide to the service provided’. Its predecessors had considered themselves to be a wildlife service. English Nature was overjoyed to receive one of John Major’s Citizen Charter marks for good customer service. Henceforward English Nature’s publications bore the mark like a medal.
American corporatism comes to nature conservation. This card, carried by English Nature staff in the late 1990s, borrows the language of big corporations (‘strategic change’, ‘inside track’, ‘empower/accredit’).
English Nature’s tougher organisation was mirrored in its presentations. Its annual reports seemed more eager to talk up the achievements of English Nature as a business than to review broader events in nature conservation. Looking back at EN’s first ten years, Michael Scott considered that the ‘strategic approach’ had engendered more bureaucracy along with tighter administrative control: ‘Senior staff talk more about recruitment levels, philosophy statements, strategic management initiatives and rolling reviews than about practical policies on the ground’ (Scott 1992). Nor was EN’s much-vaunted ‘philosophy statement’ exactly inspiring to outsiders, with its talk of ‘developing employee potential’ and achieving ‘efficient and effective use of resources through the operation of planning systems’. To those, like the postgraduates who listened in on EN’s lectures on corporate strategy, it might have sounded impressively professional, but, with the best will in the world, it didn’t sound much fun; and to some they seemed to have more to do with what happened behind the dark-glass windows of Northminster House than out there in the English countryside.
The internal changes were not as radical as they looked. English Nature’s statutory responsibilities were much the same as the NCC’s, and the focus was still on SSSIs, grants and nature reserves. But now that the SSSI notification treadmill had at last ceased to grind, staff could turn their attention towards more positive schemes and participate more in ‘wider countryside’ matters. English Nature reorganised its grant-aid projects into a Wildlife Enhancement Scheme for SSSIs and a Reserves Enhancement Scheme for nature reserves. Both were based on standard acreage payments, and every attempt was made to make them straightforward and prompt. They were intended to be incentives for wildlife-friendly management, for example, low-density, rough grazing on grasslands and heaths, or to fund management schemes on nature reserves. The take-up rate was good. The trouble was that they were never enough to cover more than a fraction of SSSIs. Meanwhile EN’s grant-aid for land purchase virtually dried up. Country wildlife trusts turned to the more lucrative Heritage Lottery Fund instead.
English Nature also took the lead on a series of themed projects to address important conservation problems. In each, the idea was that EN would provide the administration and ‘strategic framework’ for work done mainly by its ‘partners’. The first, a ‘Species Recovery Programme’ to save glamorous species such as the red squirrel and fen raft spider from extinction, was up and running within weeks. The following year, it introduced a Campaign for Living Coast, arguing that it was wiser in the long run to work with the grain of nature than against it. In 1993 came a Heathland Management Programme, the start of a serious effort to conserve biodiversity on lowland heaths by reintroducing grazing. In 1998, this swelled into an £18 million Tomorrow’s Heathland Heritage programme, supported by the Heritage Lottery. In 1997, English Nature proposed an agenda for the sustainable management of fresh water, detailing the ‘action required’ on a range of wildlife habitats, and started another multimillion pound project on marine nature conservation, part-funded by the EU LIFE Programme. More controversial was EN’s division of England into 120 ‘Natural Areas’ based on distinctive scenery and characteristic wildlife. The basic idea was to show the importance of wildlife everywhere and emphasise its local character. Each area had its own characteristics and ‘key issues’ which, for the South Wessex Downs, included the restoration of ‘degraded’ downland and fine-tuning agri-environmental schemes to benefit downland wildlife. The critics of ‘Natural Areas’ were not against the idea as such (though some Areas were obviously more of a piece than others) but saw it as a long-winded way of stating the obvious, involving the production of scores of ‘Natural Area Profiles’ replete with long lists of species. As with the Biodiversity Action Plan, part of the underlying purpose seems to be to foster working relations with others, especially local authorities.
Like its sister agencies, English Nature wanted to present positive ideas for helping nature and avoid the wrangles of the 1980s. It did so with considerable success, helped by the fact that conservation was gradually becoming more consensual. But the awkward fact remained that, by EN’s own figures, between a third and a half of SSSIs were in less than ideal management. Moreover, in its zeal to work positively with ‘customers and partners’, some found English Nature too willing to compromise and to seek solutions in terms of ‘mitigation’. An early instance was the ‘secret deal’ with Fisons over the future of peatland SSSIs owned or operated by the company. Fisons had agreed to hand over 1,000 hectares of the best-preserved peatlands to English Nature in exchange for a promise not to oppose peat extraction on the remaining 4,000 hectares. Those campaigning actively to stop industrial peat cutting on SSSIs were excluded from the negotiations, and left waiting on the pavement outside the press conference. Whatever tactical merit there might have been in a compromise agreement, the protesters felt that EN had capsized their campaign. English Nature argued that to try and block all peat cutting on SSSIs, as the campaigners wanted, would have involved the Government in compensation payments costing millions, and put 200 people out of work. To which, the campaigners replied that that was the Government’s business, not English Nature’s. And who exactly were the ‘partners’ here – the peat industry or the voluntary bodies?
It was English Nature’s misfortune to be seen to be less than zealous when an issue became headlines, such as the Newbury bypass (p. 217) or the great newt translocation at Orton brick-pits (p. 207). Of course, as a government body EN had to be careful when an issue became politically sensitive, but on such battlegrounds it was easy to see it as ‘the Government’ and bodies like the WWF or Friends of the Earth as the opposition; it contributed to the tense relationship between the agencies and the voluntary bodies at this time. The year 1997 was a particularly difficult one for English Nature. It failed to apply for a ‘stop order’ at Offham Down until prodded by its parent department (pp. 96-7). It wanted to denotify parts of Thorne and Hatfield Moors which would clearly enable the peat producers to market their product more widely. This ill-timed decision led to an embarrassing public meeting at Thorne, when chief executive Langslow was all but booed off the stage, followed by an enforced U-turn after the minister politely advised English Nature to think again. EN’s latest strategy, ‘Beyond 2000’, was ill-received, despite its clumsy attempts to involve the voluntary bodies with questions like ‘How can we improve our measurement of EN’s contribution to overall wildlife gain’ (uh?). On top of all that, in November WWF published a hostile critique of English Nature, A Muzzled Watchdog?, based on a longer report on all three agencies I had written for them. It was not so much what it had to say as the unwonted sight of one conservation body publicly attacking another that attracted attention. EN’s refusal to comment, apart from some mutterings about ‘inaccuracies’, did not help its case.
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.
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.