RSPB makes a statement

Yesterday, the RSPB made a statement about its ‘comprehensive review of operations’ – click here. I’ve pasted the full statement, in blue, below as it’s not that easy to find on the RSPB website. It’s certainly not front-page news.

A few comments on these 1149 words:

• I was itching to edit it into something more closely resembling English but I always feel like that about RSPB statements these days. Whose voice is this? An anonymous corporate voice.
• And it really is anonymous; there is no person’s name at the bottom of this statement, not the Chief Executive, not the Chair of Council, not the Operations Director, not the Finance Director, no one. Maybe it’s a junior Press Officer’s view of things but it doesn’t say it’s a press release. This statement is about quite a big issue within the RSPB, and for RSPB members, and yet it isn’t clear who is telling us about it. And it isn’t clear who is taking responsibility for it.
• Some retail outlets are going to bite the dust – there’s a list of them. I haven’t been to Rainham Marshes for quite a while but eating a sandwich in the cafe while overlooking the nature reserve was always a pleasurable experience. The future of that visitor centre is still up in the air.
• Some education work is going to be chopped but there is said to be a better way to do education coming along later that we can’t be told about yet.
• RSPB nature reserves cover 150,000 ha, so the uncertain future of <1% of them is <1,500 ha. Arne, where I was first a voluntary warden in my teens in 1975, covers c560 ha, so we might be talking about 2-3 Arne-equivalents. Minsmere where I also volunteered, between school and university in 1976, covers c1,000 ha so we might be talking of, say, 1-2 Minsmere-equivalents. That isn’t a huge area, but the impact depends on where those areas lie. It’s going to be difficult to find small areas, that are of low conservation importance and which deliver appreciable cost savings. It’s difficult to tell. We are told that in the last seven years, 8,500ha of land have been added to the RSPB estate so we are looking at land equivalent to about a year’s worth of acquisition.
• We are told that costs have risen from £150m to £164m in two years. I can’t find the £150m figure on the Charity Commission website – click here – nor any figure very close to it so that doesn’t help me at all. Those figures look odd to me – I wonder who checked them?

Where does this statement leave us? Well, not much the wiser, but it is good to see that RSPB realises it has an issue on its hands. It’s a pity, in a way, that all retail outlets aren’t closing, even those which make a profit, as the world doesn’t need wildlife conservation organisations selling tea towels, mugs and trinkets, or even binoculars or books (and even my books). And I think it would be better if all UK wildlife conservation organisations stopped doing ‘education’ and set up a bespoke organisation, of larger scale, to do it better. But that won’t be a popular view, I’m sure. Much ‘education’ work is really aimed at getting family memberships.

The elephant in the room is that there is a failure of income generation. We are all doing our bit by dying as legacy income has increased quite a bit but that is living off the efforts of others, decades ago, who made the RSPB a cause worth supporting, not current activity. I’d love to see inside the figures on income to get an insight into what is and isn’t working.

The RSPB membership is like other populations with the equivalent of births being membership recruitment and deaths being actual deaths and other less drastic failures to remain a member. It used to be the case that membership retention was very high – RSPB members were loyal and stayed for ever or until death intervened. At least that was true after a couple of years of membership. It’s easy to recruit people but difficult to keep them, but once they have been an RSPB member for a couple of years then many are with you for life, paying their membership, donating, spending and leaving a gift in their wills.

My advice to the RSPB for future reliable growth would be ‘promote the cause’ – nature conservation – and be honest about your successes and failures and see whether people will pay for what you do.  Too often these days, the communications I get from the RSPB seem to treat me as a potential customer (for things that I don’t want) rather than someone wedded to the cause and the RSPB’s nature conservation mission (which I do want).

I first voiced concerns over where the RSPB was heading in my September monthly newsletter (November newsblast will go out on 21 November – subscribe, free, here), and then on this blog in late September (RSPB in some trouble click here), in my October Birdwatch column, and here on this blog in October (The RSPB AGM click here) and a few days ago (Open letter to new RSPB Chair click here). I’m sure there will be more as events unfold.

The RSPB statement:

Like any responsible charity, we are always trying to make sure that the money that we receive from our generous members and supporters is spent in the best possible way to help nature.

The economy has not been in the best of shape in recent years. Every one of us is feeling the cost-of-living crisis and inflationary pressure, and many people are having to make difficult decisions in their day-to-day lives to make ends meet.

This situation also impacts the RSPB, and indeed many in our sector, in several ways, including increasing cost pressures as suppliers put up prices and rising energy costs across our large estate. Our income is growing but not fast enough to keep up with rising costs. To give a sense of this, it took £150 million to deliver our work two years ago. Today that same work will cost us £165 million, a 10% cost rise.

And so, to ensure our longer-term sustainability, we have completed a comprehensive review of our operations. We have looked across the organisation for improvements and efficiencies – from how we do our work to where we buy the things we need to do it.

As our incredible nature reserves and what we deliver for nature on them make up the largest proportion of our financial spend each year, we have also been looking at our reserve network and other small pieces of land that we own or manage to make sure that what we are doing in these places makes sense both in terms of protecting and restoring nature and financially in the longer term. Because nature needs us to be at our very best not only for now but way into the future.

Our staff who work on these sites and our incredible volunteers who do so much are the beating heart of what we do. But to remain strong and viable we need to make some changes.

To be clear, it doesn’t mean selling off large areas of land to the highest bidder and it doesn’t mean that any of our flagship reserves will disappear.

This work has meant really focusing in on what each site’s unique contribution to our strategy and mission should be. At some of our nature reserves, a very small number of facilities are planned for closure or potential change of management. This includes five retail facilities, one cafe, and four visitor centres across a total of seven sites –

• Loch Garten Nature Reserve, Abernethy, Scotland – retail facility
• RSPB Newport Wetlands, Newport, Wales – retail facility
• RSPB Dungeness, Kent, England – retail facility
• Flatford Wildlife Garden, Suffolk, England – reviewing options for the future of the reserve during 2025, including potential change of management
• RSPB Rye Meads, Hertfordshire, England – reviewing options for the future of the reserve during 2025, including potential change of management
• RSPB Fairhaven Lake Visitor Centre, Lancashire, England – retail facility and visitor centre
• Rainham Marshes in Essex, England – retail facility and cafe. The future management of the visitor centre will be explored over the next 12 months. The nature reserve will remain open.

At others, we are reducing our work in order to do more elsewhere. At these sites, totalling less than 1% of our landholding, this will mean working in partnership with other charities, community groups or local councils to find sustainable futures for these places. In the coming years, some will focus primarily on maintenance, and others on developing their incredible conservation outcomes.

Our long-term aim is to focus on what we do best and where we can do this most effectively, and we’re continuing to grow the area of land that we manage and conserve for nature year on year.

Strategic acquisitions, particularly to our existing reserves, are critically important to us, so we can provide nature with bigger, more joined-up places to call home. Since 2017, we’ve acquired over 8,500 hectares of new land to restore, from whole new reserves like Sherwood Forest and Glencripesdale in Scotland, through to strategic extensions such as at Blacktoft Sands in Yorkshire and Lakenheath in Suffolk.

The science tells us that nature does better in these larger more ecologically joined-up places and we have a number of exciting and large new acquisitions in the pipeline to be announced in the coming months.

We are also changing the schools visiting scheme on our reserves. Our education work has achieved some incredible things over many decades, bringing millions of children closer to nature, helping bring about change within the education system, and providing much-loved resources for teachers.

Young people are incredibly important to us. This is why we offer free entry to nature reserves for those aged 16-24 and our Youth Council recently collaborated on the 2024 Youth in Nature Summit, designed to inspire, empower and unite young people and leaders from across the environmental sector.

We have always regularly reviewed and refined our work to ensure it has the most impact, and our latest review of our educational programmes has concluded that our charitable and strategic aims are best delivered through an updated approach.

We will focus our education work on those areas where we can have the greatest impact and where we have a unique role to play. We are developing a new approach to education that we believe, over time, will reach even more children and allow them to connect with nature in a much deeper way. We will be able to share more details about what this means for the way we continue to welcome schools onto our reserves in 2025.

In the meantime, we remain committed to supporting schools and teachers through activities such as Schools Wild Challenge and Big Schools’ Birdwatch, and through our current digital resources for teachers on our website. We are also increasing our work with schools through our new ‘Environment Leaders’ qualification and the development of a teacher CPD programme (Continuing Professional Development) that will build the skills and confidence of many more teachers to support learning in, through, about, and for nature, working in partnership with others.

Change is always challenging. Since the RSPB began 135 years ago, we have been working to help create a world where wildlife and people can thrive. Today, thanks to the generosity of our members, supporters, partners, funders and volunteers, the RSPB is the UK’s leading charity for nature conservation. For this to continue for years to come, we will be even more focused on where this generous support can have the biggest impact – boosting numbers of birds and other wildlife, restoring the vital habitats they need, creating better nature havens for members to visit, and bringing more people together who love birds and wildlife and who want to take action to restore the natural world.

We are committed to keeping our members informed about these changes, and we will next update them in the RSPB Magazine in December.

15 November 2024

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