I am very grateful to Natural England (that’s @NaturalEngland for those of you on Twitter, where you can find me as @MarkAvery) for sending me details of the Walshaw Moor management agreement. They were clearly eager that I read it, so I have, and so can you here. What do you think of it? I’d…
Tag: agri-environment schemes
Wuthering moors 2
Last Wednesday all Natural England staff received an email entitled Natural England’s work in the uplands. It tried to explain why NE’s Chair, Poul Christensen, had been reported as saying that NE’s Vital Uplands document had ‘let his organisation down badly’. Because not everyone agreed with the NE vision, which you may have noticed was…
NIAs again
Nature is everywhere, it’s all around us and it is in trouble in many places around us. When government was looking for areas to qualify as Nature Improvement Areas it had plenty of places from which to choose – 76 proposals came forward for the £7.5m funding that was available for just 12 sites. Those…
Letter from Defra
I am grateful to Defra Minister Richard Benyon for this reply to a letter which my MP, Louise Mensch, sent to him on 15 December concerning implementation of the EU Birds Directive. The letter asked about farmland birds, hen harriers and marine protected areas. The Minister’s civil servants have written him quite a detailed reply…
It’s mad!
Yesterday’s blog suggested a different way of paying by results for success in agri-environment schemes – regional top-ups for participating farmers if the regional farmland bird index rises. It’s a tricky thing to administer, perhaps, but it is essentially a good idea (in my humble opinion). This month’s copy of The Field – with an…