BY BERT BURNETT
The Conservatives’ vow to scrap Natural England and the Environment Agency and bring their powers back under direct ministerial control has set the cat among the pigeons at Defra. Victoria Atkins, the shadow Defra secretary, announced at the NFU breakfast briefing at the party conference that a Tory government would “restructure Defra completely” and abolish both quangos as the first stage of a year-long review of the department’s 34 arms-length bodies.
Her argument is straightforward: these bodies have become unaccountable, agenda-driven bureaucracies that stand in the way of the very people they are supposed to serve. She cited a dairy farmer with no pollution history ordered to spend £750,000 to prevent a pollution incident that might occur in 50 years’ time. She attacked Natural England over the heather-burning ban. She praised a Cumbrian farm cluster that fixed flooding on the River Winster in three weeks after, she claimed, both agencies had blocked efforts to act.
Quite right too. And if the Tories are serious about this, they should look north of the border, because everything they say about Natural England and the EA applies with equal force to Nature Scot.
Nature Scot is exactly what Atkins describes: an agenda-led quango, financed by government to do the government’s bidding, insulated from any real accountability to the people whose lives and livelihoods it affects. It has not done one thing to benefit the employment of traditional land workers. Not one. It has not increased any of the red and amber listed species it falsely claims to be trying to save.
What it has done is help block any measures that directly reduce the impacts of predators. In fact, it has actively assisted animal rights groups and self-serving conservation bodies in reducing the methods by which predators can legally be killed. That is not conservation. That is ideology dressed up as science, and it is killing the very birds these people claim to care about.
Here is the question that should be answered, and answered publicly: just how well are the populations of once-common birds doing on the ground Nature Scot manages? Have these particular bird species — mostly ground-nesting — gone up or down since Nature Scot bought the land it now owns?
It is one thing to tell us that birds of conservation concern are being seen. That is not breeding birds. That is, in all possibility, only transient birds. Or it is some reintroduced species — beavers, pine martens, wildcats — that has set up home or been filmed on their reserves. But that is a minute part of a conservation success. It is not painting the bigger picture, and it is certainly not painting the true one.
There appears to be no audit readily available online to show how well, or otherwise, the bird life on Nature Scot holdings is doing. These holdings are bought by and run by public money, yet the information is not readily available to the public who paid for it.
Are they like the RSPB, where actual numbers are being hidden to conceal the lack of sustainability of these red and amber listed species on their reserves? It is a fair question. If you are going to take the moral high ground and tell everyone how things should be done, then surely you must first demonstrate that you are having outstanding success using your superior methods. And what better way to do that than to publish the breeding successes of the birds on your reserves?
The Wildlife Trusts have condemned the Tory plans, with chief executive Craig Bennett warning that abolishing environmental regulators would “expose the UK’s economy to dangerous weather, the UK’s food supplies to biodiversity collapse, and UK homes to flooding and extreme heat.” The usual scaremongering. But note who supports the reforms: the Countryside Alliance, whose director of external affairs Mo Metcalf-Fisher said it is “vital that critical decisions about the future of rural communities are taken by elected ministers, not bureaucrats.”
That is precisely the point. And it applies to Nature Scot every bit as much as to Natural England and the Environment Agency. If these bodies are going to wield enormous power over rural communities, blocking land management decisions, restricting predator control, and buying up land with public money, then they must be accountable.
If they want to claim the moral high ground, let them prove it. Publish the breeding numbers. Show us the success. Or admit that the emperor has no clothes.
Bert Burnett is a retired gamekeeper of more than fifty years’ experience.