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…
Tag: Richard Benyon
Wuthering Moors 20
We are beginning to shake some of the truth out of Defra over the Walshaw Moor affair. Below I attach four documents received either by myself or others through Freedom of Information Act and Environmental Information Regulation enquiries. They are: 1) a letter from the Secretary of the Moorland Association, Martin Gillibrand, to the Defra…
Wuthering Moors 19 – what is Defra hiding?
If you track back to 2 April on this blog you will find that I made Freedom of Information Act and Environmental Information Regulation requests to Defra and Natural England. Defra failed to respond to those requests until sending me a letter dated 4 May saying that they needed another 20 working days to respond. …
Late bits
Apologies, to the two three people who might notice, that this blog is ‘late’ this morning – I went out to listen for corncrakes at the Nene Washes yesterday evening and so was home late – no corncrakes. In a week when the government made a welcome U-turn on buzzard control (which was even mentioned…
Buzzards – where next?
Yesterday Defra did a U-turn on their proposals to investigate buzzard control for the benefit of pheasants. It’s not easy for governments to do U-turns, although this one is getting the hang of it, and we should thank Defra Minister, Richard Benyon for his re-think. Thank you! The RSPB did a good job, after being…