Could it be true, as people are suggesting, that on top of their own £1m legal costs NE picked up the tab for Walshaw Moor Estates’ legal costs? And could those legal costs have amounted to £3m of taxpayers’ money? I’ll ask NE and Defra – I’m sure they will want to tell us.
Tag: Defra
Wuthering Moors 23
Natural England spent over £1m of your money pursuing legal action against the Walshaw Moor Estate for alleged breaches (but a mere 43 of them) of the Wildlife and Countryside Act and the Habitats Directive. The alleged offences related to the building of tracks, paths, car parks, grips, ponds, butts and other associated infrastructure for…
Wuthering Moors 22
This email exchange shows that the cost of the abandoned legal proceedings by Natural England against the Walshaw Moor Estate were over £1m of taxpayers’ money. This is your money and you have been given no satisfactory explanation for why the case was dropped when a few months earlier NE had been pursuing the Walshaw…
Where next with England’s forests?
The report of the Independent Panel on Forestry is a good one. I recommend that anyone interested in access, wildlife, trees, public policy, land use and politics should read it. The question for us all, particularly the coalition government, is ‘what next?’. Let’s go back to those distant-seeming days of early 2011 when David Cameron…
Forest Panel’s report published
The final report of the Independent Panel on Forestry has been published. The initial Defra response to the report was fairly warm, and fairly non-committal. Everyone else seems to like it: RSPB, Wildlife Trusts, Woodland Trust, National Trust, Butterfly Conservation, Save Our Woods, CLA, Royal Forestry Society. Media coverage includes: BBC, Guardian, Independent, Telegraph. Read…