Defra & Natural England’s response to George Monbiot in the Guardian
George Monbiot writes in the Guardian today raising concern over the functions of Natural England. He cites the recent (June) House of Lords NERC Act 2006 committee report that highlighted reductions to the budget of Natural England. The government responded to the committee report in May. Defra response
Our natural world is disappearing before our eyes. We have to save it
The Guardian ‘When our memories are wiped as clean as the land, we fail to demand its restoration. Our forgetting is a gift to industrial lobby groups and the governments that serve them. Over the past few months I have been told repeatedly that the environment secretary, Michael Gove, gets it. I have said so myself: he genuinely seems to understand what the problems are and what needs to be done. Unfortunately, he doesn’t do it.
Gove cannot be blamed for all of the fiascos to which he has put his name. The 25-year plan for nature was, it seems, gutted by the prime minister’s office. The environmental watchdog he proposed was de-fanged by the Treasury (it has subsequently been lent some dentures by parliament). Other failures are all his own work. In response to lobbying from sheep farmers, Gove has allowed ravens, a highly intelligent and long-lived species just beginning to recover from centuries of persecution, to be killed once more in order to protect lambs. There are 23 million sheep in this country and 7,400 pairs of ravens. Why must all other species give way to the white plague?
Responding to complaints that most of our national parks are wildlife deserts, Gove set up a commission to review them. But governments choose their conclusions in advance, through the appointments they make. A more dismal, backward-looking and uninspiring panel would be hard to find: not one of its members, as far as I can tell, has expressed a desire for significant change in our national parks, and most of them, if their past statements are anything to go by, are determined to keep them in their sheep-wrecked and grouse-trashed state.’
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