Nature Conservation. Peter Marren
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