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