My December Birdwatch column nudges the National Trust towards doing a bit more for nature – after all it is a massive land owner with a massive membership.
My case is not that the National Trust does nothing, nor that it does nothing of any value, but that it could, and should , be doing so much more.
I wonder whether the population trend of farmland birds is more favourable on NT land than in the English, Welsh and Northern Irish countryside as a whole? I expect it is, but the NT doesn’t know so it can’t tell us.
The NT is the largest single land owner in the Peak District National Park and owns some of the land on which, against the NT’s wishes, birds of prey have been persecuted and illegally killed. Isn’t that a bit odd? Or, very odd? that an NGO that has the conservation of nature as one of its aims allows grouse shooting on its land in a National Park and has not been able to clamp down on wildlife crime? What are we all paying our (rather large) subscriptions for then? Surely National Trust land should be a no-go area for wildlife criminals, and yet it seems that the NT cannot make this stick – rather ineffective management there then…
And, as I wrote last week, NT is waiting, waiting, waiting, on the issue of lead ammunition.
The NT treats the wildlife on its land as a source of anecdotes for its public relations rather than as an inalienable resource which it should measure and report upon – report upon its successes and failures.
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Wouldn’t it be good if all operations dealing with farmland published a farm bird survey score as part of their ethical protocol, or whatever, efforts. I was thinking not just of owners like the obvious NT, there is the Welcome Foundation which bought up the Coop farm stock but when you include the supermarkets most of the countries farm produce flows through their systems so you have a very wide coverage. To begin with they have their supplier groups. Some organise prizes among them for energy conservation, they could offer one like the silver lapwing for conservation effort. Their influence can also carry back down the food chain to suppliers of their suppliers. so remember they are responsive to pressure.
Mark you are absolutely spot on with your last paragraph. Conservationists must inspire wonder at nature as a core part of their work, but PR to market visits to NT properties is not about that.
Your line about reporting is perhaps unwittingly the most damning. The Trust measures its conservation performance (the “CPI”) annually at each property through an elaborate game of Mornington Crescent. All the regional advisors gather at the property and they then each guess a number (“how much of our ambition in this area is achieved?”). These numbers are then added up to see if their sum is bigger than the business plan target for conservation performance. When I asked a member of the regional management team how CPI worked for them, they said they did not care, as if the Visitor Enjoyment Scores are doing well, they knew Conservation Performance will be doing fine too. Visitor Enjoyment Scores are measured with surveys, they are not made up.
The triumph of marketing over content is a more recent part of the Trust’s malaise however. They have a deeper and more intractable problem. Their business model largely reflects those of the estates they have acquired. At the centre of all of these was the Land Agent. His role was not to invent, but to do the Lord’s bidding, and to negotiate the most favourable terms against tenants and contractors so that the Lord’s rentseeking lifestyle can flourish. Hard ball power negotiation skills and some capability in project management are great for building Capability Brown landscapes, remodelling great houses, keeping commoners at bay and managing slave plantations. Except on the margins this business model will never deliver on the Trust’s founders’ ambitions for inspiring people through access and conservation. The role of the warden was created to deal with those bits of land the Land Agent could not rent out. It is in these places that the Trust inspires the British public, not its huge Let Estate, which frankly provide little or no benefit for the nation. The Trust needs to break free of the shackles of traditional estate management. But as many of those making decisions come from that background, this is proving very difficult.
“they are not made up”
Except by the visitors
It has been interesting to watch the recent struggles of the NT. After Helen Ghosh took over she said in an interview that as only 30% of members were interested in conservation, the rest in simply visiting, it was right for the Trust to simply become a visitor attraction, what many of us had suspected it already was. It completely fudged the debate over whether or not it be a lobbying organisation, missing completely the point that whether or not it is politically active its management cannot fail but to be an exemplar – just like the Forestry Commission, for which it laid aside its a-political role to make a grab probably far more vigorous than has ever emerged into the public domain.
Then there was a change of Chairman which, combined with the messages from the forest sales fiasco, has led to a declared new interest in the countryside estate, and a restatement of aims which I read and was amazed to find contained not one single hard, measureable target. With an ex- civil service permanent secretary in charge that can hardly be an oversight.
The Trust does do good things but it seems to have difficulty punching its weight – it has been a pioneer of biomass energy but at one large woodland estate having installed the boiler it harvested a couple of hundred tonnes from a wood where whose character and biodiversity are suffering from lack of management, rather than realising the opportunity to spread the energy message more widely in the local area and start improving the environmental value of its wood at the same time.
David Hodd is spot on about the problem of land agents – except that on most private estates the owner actually restrains the most violent commercial instincts of the land agent. The NT doesn’t have that and it shows. Creating even further conflict, the profession is dangerously slanted towards short term gain.
Nearly 1,000 farmers, managing nearly one million acres of UK farmland took part in the 2015 BFBC or so it says on the website and it is likely that NT tenant farmers would be a subset of those ~1000 so someone with access to that data could query it for all farms with addresses within NT land relatively easily and without bothering the farmers again
First query would be what is the frequency distribution of farms and farm size in that sample, around the average sample farm size of ~1000 acres (405 Ha) – which seems a tad on the high side by a factor of ~x8
In terms of the National Trust in the Peak District (and, more generally, the Peak District National Park Authority) I think that the Mountain Hare symbolises the situation neatly. NT advertising will always show a picture of a nice alert hare, typically on a snow bound moor. They never show the reality; a pile of dead hares in tennent gamekeeper’s a trailer.
You wouldn’t sell much Homity Pie if you put a picture of potato and onion peelings on the menu
Think it far more worrying that RSPB concerns itself with all sorts of projects round the world and also lots of campaigns with all sorts of cuddly animals in UK while in my opinion more or less closing their eyes to Farmland birds rapidly disappearing.
After a while of course the old statement of its the fault of intensive farming.
Well we all know that by now but it is time they came up with positive ideas to combat it that practical farmers could put into practice.
Maybe all the brains of the organisation are busy with other projects of which there are many.Seems the subs going for salaries to top RSPB guys on all these other projects and Farmland birds get forgotten while they moan continually about the cuts to conservation.Put the money in the right places there is a good chance Farmland birds would increase.
Dennis, maybe you haven’t heard of ‘Hope’ Farm. If you haven’t been I’d urge you to have a look.
The problem isn’t any failure on the part of RSPB to diagnose the malady or identify remedies. These have been developed and proven. The problem is the reluctance of so many farmers and landowners (and critically the farming unions) to recognise the scale of the problem, adopt the aforesaid remedies and most critically to deliver them to a high level of quality, and the reluctance of Government to assist through regulation or effective cross-compliance.
Dennis see here….
http://www.gwct.org.uk/blogs/news/2015/october/bird-recovery-at-gwct-and-rspb-demonstration-farms/
http://www.rspb.org.uk/media/releases/details.aspx?id=408427
Oh Dennis, please!
The RSPB was responsible for by far the bulk of research conducted over the last two decades which pinpointed the causes of farmland bird declines (and a lot of the best research was conducted while Mark was head of their Conservation Science section).
Armed with that knowledge, the RSPB worked with farmers, GWCT and government to devise techniques for recovering farmland bird populations. These were then piloted within the Countryside Stewardship Scheme (as it was then), again with substantial input from RSPB farmland bird advisors, and proven methods were integrated into Entry and Higher Level Stewardship.
But then, as has been pointed out by Mark and others, the NFU intervened to ensure the HLS points-based system was manipulated to discourage farmers from adopting the very options that would most benefit farmland birds. And, in my opinion, a lack of quality advice to farmers also discouraged many from taking up the best options.
To my mind the biggest ‘villain’ in all of this was and remains the NFU (known as No F**king Use to small farmers in my area).
Messi,think you are wide of the mark.
Farmers could almost get the payments just by trimming hedges bi-annually something we did not like and really a waste of time for farmland birds so we did not need to do hardly any more and conservationists considered this bi-annual trimming a big necessity.
Farmers were completely hog tied by the rules as when I asked for a pond to be considered as part of the scheme it was turned down with the answer that I could not claim for it but if I put a barbed wire fence round it I could claim for the fence.
Pretty ridiculous I would say and it is impossible to get them to see sense.
Really funny how conservationists point to Hope Farm.Simply not a farm that would have a return on capital that any ordinary farmer could live on in fact it is quite possible it could be a big fat zero return.
Fact is RSPB do not even farm it.
They are more interested anyway in promoting Bob than getting the message across to ordinary farmers about what to do to improve farmland birds.
One fact is they consider it a problem that farmers who put small areas of wild bird mixtures on their farms maybe miss the point that farmland birds young need insects,well for sure there would be more insects on that plot than on almost any other crop.Therefore it is a win win situation that the RSPB seem loath to promote.
What a waste of time blaming farmers who went into the job to produce food,it is just like blaming conservationists for not bothering about producing food because RSPB would have a pretty poor record on that score.
Everyone needs to wake up because things put in place probably over the last 30 years to solve the problem have been a disaster and the need is to get in place the correct payments to farmers to make it worthwhile to solve the problem.
Carry on another worthless 30 years and it could well be too late.