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…
Tag: wuthering
Wuthering Moors 21
This email between Natural England’s Andrew Wood and others (including some recipients whose names have been withheld) contains several matters of interest; Its title – this is the first time the the Secretary of State’s, Caroline Spelman’s, name has appeared to my knowledge in this case. It appears that back in December 2011 this case…
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…
Let’s hear it for the buzzard – and the osprey
I fled Scotland a day early and am now back home – the weather drove me away. I did consider turning up at the Scottish Game Fair on Friday, but standing around in the rain, in a soggy field full of people moaning about buzzards didn’t really appeal to me. I see they will get…
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. …
Wuthering Moors 18 – your help needed please
For new readers – put ‘Wuthering’ into the search facility on this blog to catch up. However, in short: Natural England were quite a long way down the line in prosecuting an upland landowner for alleged offences in connection with moorland management when it suddenly stopped all action and reached an agreement with the estate….
Bonfires and beacons
Despite the soggy weather, beacons have been lit across the UK to celebrate the Diamond Jubilee. Spare a thought for the inhabitants of Tristan da Cunha and their Jubilee beacon. When the most remote Jubilee beacon in the world was lit, its flames were fuelled by the bodies of invasive species of plants. Work to…
Wuthering Moors 17
I still await Defra’s response to my FOI/EIR request (too busy buzzard bothering?). There are various interesting parts of NE’s response to my request. As I read the NE response there is no hint that they ceased legal action because they found they were mistaken or their evidence was weak – they certainly don’t say…
Wuthering Moors 16
Here is the full response which I have received from Natural England in response to my request for information about the ‘Walshaw Moor Affair’ (see 15 previous blogs, all tagged with ‘wuthering’, the first of which is listed here). I will comment on this later in the week. But there are some very interesting passages…
Bits, some bits
went to London on the train from Peterborough on Thursday and saw 3 cuckoos got a reply from NE re Walshaw Moor – will blog later this week spent ages on Friday evening looking at a lone wader in vegetation and gloomy light wondering whether it was a Temminck stint – and it wasn’t, it…