Nature Conservation. Peter Marren
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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