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Nature's protectors should get out more
IAN MITCHELL
Port Ellen, Isle of Islay, Scotland
This article is reproduced in full from the
SUNDAY TIMES 3rd August 2003
with the kind permission of the author and the
newspaper
(Filed 23 August 2003)
www.land-care.org.uk
Ian Mitchell, a critic of Scottish National
Heritage, says its staff should just get on with their move.
One of the most virulent public campaigns
since Brian Souter's section 28 "referendum" three years
ago has been waged by the headquarters staff of Scottish Natural
Heritage against the Scottish executive's declared intention of
moving their offices from Edinburgh to Inverness.
From the executive's point of view, this
is part of a general policy of dispersing civil service jobs from
the capital. It is intended that Health Scotland and the Forestry
Commission will move in the near future too. Early indications are
that both moves will also be resisted by staff.
If location of offices can be resisted
by the civil servants it might affect, the question arises: are
ministers really in charge?
Are we governed by democratically elected
politicians or by bureaucrats whose main priorities are their own
employment conditions?
The principle argument that has been made
about the move to Inverness is that it will be inconvenient for
staff who would prefer to live in Edinburgh. John Markland, the
chairman of SNH, recently gave the main reasons as "family
ties and responsibilities, children
in school, partner's employment prospects, etc".
In the real world of enterprise and risk,
moving house for job-related reasons is not unusual. Very often
those relocations happen as a result of restrictions or changes
in the business environment imposed by bureaucratic regulation,
for example on farmers or fishermen. Is it really wrong, as Markland
seems to think, that civil servants be exposed to the uncertainties
they inflict on others?
SNH's main duties are defined in the Natural
Heritage (Scotland) Act 1991. There are just two of them: the first
is to "secure the conservation and enhancement" of the
natural heritage, and the second is to "foster understanding
and facilitate the enjoyment" of that heritage. In other words,
SNH has to look after and promote the environment. That sounds relatively
simple, and with an annual budget of Pounds 54m and rising, it ought
to be simple. But not with the current cadre
of "experts" that SNH employs, who seem continually to
be asking for more money.
Even bloated budgets rarely cause concern
if they are spent on organisations that successfully do the work
they are supposed to do. However, SNH does not. In the 12 years
since it was founded it has alienated almost every sector of rural
society that it does not give money directly to. SNH's mission statement
is "working with Scotland's people to care for the natural
heritage". Unfortunately, SNH works with too few people outside
the charmed circle of landowners and landowning conservation charities,
most of whose headquarters are also in Edinburgh.
A good illustration of why SNH's performance
has been, as I see it, so poor is provided by its own description
of the reasons why it has been a success. Read its latest annual
report and you will see nothing but self-satisfaction addressed
to the charmed circle of the new establishment. The rest of rural
Scotland is talked down to in lifeless clichés.
Do the crofters of Yell in Shetland who
have petitioned parliament about the injustice of a sites of special
scientific interest (SSSI) designation on their island really want
to know that in the year 2001-2002 SNH "completed a Scotland-wide
study of our relationship with SSSI owners and occupier as part
of our customer care programme"?
Do the fishermen of Barra, who have likewise
petitioned the parliament in fury at having been misled by SNH over
both the science and the politics of a proposed designation on their
fishing grounds in the Sound of Barra, want to hear that SNH has
"responded to over 1,700 consultations on designated sites"?
Do the farmers of Arran, who have been
enraged by the so-called science provided to SNH by the RSPB and
used to impose a European designation on their island, feel better
because SNH has "completed 10 consultation reports on terrestrial
SPAs under the EC birds directive"?
I suspect not. All they see is an Edinburgh-centred
agenda that leaves them floundering in a morass of regulation and
red tape.
Nature changes all the time. The countryside
must adapt to survive. But SNH is making it impossible for farmers
to diversify their businesses in response to the changes required
of modern agriculture.
A wind farm on Arran, for example, has
been proposed by a farmer who has been told by SNH he may not expand
his dairy herd. But SNH refused permission for the wind farm because
an expert had said there were important birds there. The farmer
knew there were not. The farmer has subsequently been proven correct.
There is only one way to bring SNH closer
to the life of rural Scotland, and that is to move its headquarters
into the areas it administers. My hope is that by living alongside
the people whose lives they disrupt senior executives will come
to realise just how damaging SNH's combination of arrogance and
ignorance is for the environment the agency is supposed to be protecting.
That, of course, must be why the Scottish executive decided to move
SNH to Inverness in the first place.
It would have been better to have moved
it to Rum, or the outer Hebrides. Anybody who doubts the wisdom
of this should ask themselves one question: would the hedgehog fiasco
on North Uist this spring have taken place if SNH's headquarters
had been in Lochmaddy? Remember that Pounds 26,000 was spent killing
66 hedgehogs out of an estimated population of 5,000 over a period
in which SNH admitted that the population had increased by 60. So
a net reduction of six animals was achieved at a cost of Pounds
4,333 per baby hedgehog.
If senior SNH management took their early-evening
snifters in the pubs of Lochmaddy, rather than the wine bars of
Marchmont and Morningside, they would have been laughed out onto
the machair. Instead they listened to the requests of the RSPB's
Scottish branch officers who work round the corner, off Queensferry
Road. The RSPB has a reserve on North Uist but does not want to
have to do any killing itself, for understandable reasons of marketing
policy.
The crofters of the Uists, however, would
happily have assisted SNH in undertaking a cull they regard as important
to protect the birds, which they both like and value as tourist
lures. But, like the old tartan establishment, the new green one
does not listen to the peasantry.
It has been reported that 75% of SNH's
headquarters staff have threatened to resign rather than move to
Inverness. This is a tremendous opportunity which the Scottish executive
must not let slip. For rural Scotland to be rid of the managerial
influence of people who are so uninterested in country life that
they would rather surrender their professional influence over the
natural heritage than move into the Highlands can only be a good
thing for nature in the long run.
Let us hope for the sake of our beautiful
and infinitely varied countryside that our ministers have the gumption
to stick their declared policy and effect a revolution in SNH by
forcing it out into the real world.
A country which, as a pre-election poll
showed, puts a very high priority on the future of its farming and
fishing communities will be eternally grateful to them if they do
so.
Ian Mitchell
Ian Mitchell is a member of the pressure
group People Too.
His book about the politics of nature
conservation in Scotland, Isles of the West: A Hebridean Voyage,
is published by Birlinn at Pounds 9.99
Further Reading recommended by Land-Care
1. People Too (2002). SNH's new hielan' hame.
Fresh Air Vol 1 no 1
Reproduced with permission
(see www.land-care.org.uk/light relief, Click
here to view)
2. Mitchell, Ian (2002). Scientific objection
to the designation of the Sound of Barra as a possible Special Area
of Conservation (SAC).
LandCare Scotland. Vol 2 no 1: pp 3 - 49. ISSN 1462-6454
(for copies please email landcarescotland@aol.com)
3. Mitchell, Ian (2002). Scientific objection
to the designation of the Arran Moors as a Site of Special Scientific
Interest (SSSI) and proposed Special Protection Area (SPA).
LandCare Scotland. Vol 2 no 2: pp 51 -168. ISSN 1462-6454
(for copies please email landcarescotland@aol.com)
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