Being a conservation investor 5 – what I think of the NT response.

I wrote to the National Trust to get some information on which I could decide whether or not to give them my membership or my donations. My book Reflections proposes that we should all think of ourselves as ‘conservation investors’ and decide where our money is best spent amongst the large range of wildlife charities in order to produce the most wildlife for the pound.

This was the very helpful response I (eventually) received from the National Trust.

I asked a variety of questions and some were designed to allow the National Trust to parade its successes and others were to find out things that matter to me. You couldn’t, I feel, say that they were a set of trick (or even tricky) questions.

I have chosen to respond to the answers in the following order:

Question 2 – when I read the NT’s Annual Report and Accounts I was struck by the fact that it spends nearly a million quid a year on governance. That is an eye-watering sum, isn’t it? Did you know? Have you ever read the Annual Report of any organisation of which you are a member? I think you should!

The National Trust is a very big organisation but even so… I tried, for about 15 minutes to find the relevant figure for the RSPB – but I failed. That may be because the RSPB is less upfront about their figure or it could be that I was at fault in being unable to spot it. If you can find it – please let me know. The fact remains that even though the sum is less than half a percent of total income, it’s still a lot of money. As an investor, I’d like it to be less.

Question 4 – the slowness of the delivery of the High Peak Vision. This is a subject in which I am very interested and which I praised in my blog when the Vision was launched (and praised it as it was being thought of and negotiated) and in my book Inglorious. I wouldn’t be praising the National Trust’s delivery of this vision today. The NT’s response was along the lines of well we’ve done something and it all takes time and money. They give an example of Hen Harriers doing well in 2022 but the response of threatened birds of prey to the High Peak Vision since it was launched a decade ago has been pretty meagre overall. The NT may be happy with its delivery but I am less than impressed. And I suspect that view is shared by many NT staff – I’m pretty sure I heard one of them talking at the Northern England Raptor Forum meeting last November and acknowledging that progress had been slow. Or did I imagine that? The NT is a landowner in the High Peak – owning land gives you the power (not unfettered power, but much power) to achieve your aims without having to chat to everyone and seek consensus. That’s why people buy land whether it be large upland estates or houses with gardens. The NT should pick up the pace, please. And if they had, I’d be more likely to reward them with my investment money.

Questions 6, 7, 9 and 10 were opportunities to shine – and the opportunity was taken in the response to Question 10 on carbon emissions. Not so much on Questions 6 and 9, but very interesting responses to Question 7. The carbon emissions issue is difficult and the NT appears to me to be tackling it seriously and less slowly than it moves in many other areas, I feel. The three examples in Question 7 were not ones I would have predicted and show the value of asking open questions – I’ll try to find out a bit more about all of these.

That leaves us with four more responses.

Questions 5 and 8 are about campaigning. The NT is not a campaigning organisation; it’s not primarily a campaigning organisation and it is not hardly a campaigning organisation. It’s a different type of organisation although it does sometimes, in my view, pretend to be more campaigning than it actually is. The answer to Question 5 has a good thing in it – the NT will promote the march in London on 22 June to its membership of over five million. It is, as I was told, impossible to know how many NT members participate in campaigns because of the NT asking them to do so but I know, and Harry should know, and others in NT most certainly know, that all NGOs monitor the responses of their members and supporters to asks and the NT will know that very few of their members do support such initiatives. For most campaigns different NGOs will use different bespoke internet links so that they can get just this sort of information.

There are two main reasons why the NT membership doesn’t really respond to campaign asks but they are of a chicken and egg nature. The first reason, is that the NT doesn’t ask their membership very often or very effectively to participate in campaigning. Give me access to the channels of communication open to the NT today and I will get a lot more of their membership on the streets of London on 22 June. This is NT’s choice, and they choose not to be very active in this regard.

The second reason is that NT will say that their members aren’t really that type of person and that is, generally true, but that’s the fault of the NT to a large extent because they do not ask their members to be that type of person (see above). And the whole ethos of the NT is strongly bent towards a transactional relationship which promotes what you will get from being a NT member (scones, free car parking, nice magazine etc). The NT is the embodiment of a transactional relationship NGO and almost the antithesis of a cause-led NGO. I can’t think of another wildlife/countryside NGO that is so far towards the transactional end of this continuum and so far from a cause-led approach. Can you name any? That’s just how life is and the NT is unlikely to change because it fills a niche, and has skilfully made it their own very large niche. And in terms of membership numbers and income it is a very successful niche.

Did you notice that I asked a very specific question in Question 5 about what NT did to promote a particular joint NGO campaign (and that wasn’t answered) and a very specific question about how many NT members responded (which wasn’t answered). The campaign in question had a large number of organisations theoretically signed up, including the NT (their logo was on everything as usual) but all this resulted in just 100,000 signatures being gathered. That’s not the NT’s fault alone, but with 5 million members they had a bigger pool to fish in than anyone else.

There is no point in me trying to persuade NT to be a campaigning organisation because it would take more time than I have left on Earth to make any small difference. But while they are so timid and averse to campaigning, or even mobilising their members, they are a small player in changing the world despite their massive size.

Question 3 is about whether the NT knows what is happening to farmland bird numbers on their very extensive land holding. They clearly don’t. The answer given is very similar to one I was given by the NT about 15 years ago when I was a director of the RSPB and invited them to play a larger part in farmland bird recovery and promotion of the need. Since then there has been some apparent progress but it is very very slow.

Declines of farmland wildlife are usually the top take-home message in the joint State of Nature reports – no-one can say that these are fringe issues. The NT quite simply should have a system for monitoring these easily monitored taxa now, and it should have been in place for years. If they had such a system, and published the results, then it would allow the NT to trumpet some real conservation successes (I hope) but it would almost certainly focus the mind on doing better too – monitoring almost always does. That might require changes to how much money NT spends, and how it manages its tenants. this is real life stuff, quite difficult stuff, but stuff that needs to be done to change the fate of wildlife on the ground. And as a massive landowner, the NT has a lot of ground.

To be fair, I suspect that this criticism of the NT can also be levelled at the Wildlife Trusts and nowadays at the RSPB too, and I would imagine the Woodland Trust. It is a systemic failure of the current conservation movement that they do not have good, organisation-wide, figures for the success and failure of their own conservation actions on their own land holdings.

And so we come to Question 1. If I were to rejoin the NT and spend around £90 per annum, how much of that £90 would be spent on wildlife and nature? The NT can’t, or perhaps won’t, tell me. They say that they don’t look at the world in that way – that is , from my point of view, a large part of the reason I am not strongly motivated to re-join the NT.

I feel, though maybe I am being unfair, that the answer is just a tad disingenuous in that the NT hasn’t even had a stab at the answer. It must have a clue. Of its half a billion pounds per annum spend it must have an idea how much it spends on wildlife or nature recovery? Maybe the 19% figure given for capital spend should be our guide.

If you have no interest in nature recovery then you might be shocked and affronted to ponder the possibility that 19% of your membership subscription goes to nature recovery. You might want that chunk to be spent on better car parks, cheaper membership fees, even better scones or a more stately homes. I’m almost in the opposite camp. I realise that the NT is a strange amalgam of nature and stately homes, and I accept that all these things are of importance and interest. It’s just that I am choosing where to invest my money, several hundred quid every year (and I do need to review my will soon) and I want to invest in helping to solve the UK wildlife crisis. If maybe £18 of my £90 is going in that direction, or even, frankly, if £45 of it is, then I’ll invest elsewhere to have the impact I seek.

You may see things differently, but as an investor in wildlife recovery, the NT won’t be seeing my money because it would be a poor investment from my point of view.

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