Two articles 1. European Commission warns UK over failure to protect blanket bog habitats This is in the Environment section along with a number of other items The Commission is urging the United Kingdom to stop burning blanket bog habitats within upland Natura 2000 sites in England and to take measures to restore the damaged habitats. Blanket bogs are […]
Civil Service World ‘Untangling the UK’s complicated relationship with European environmental policies and subsidies could be the hardest part of leaving the EU. Mark Rowe reports: When Theresa May talked of a Brexit cliff-edge – the risk of the UK leaving the EU with no trade deal in place – staff at the Department for […]
And so it begins. What was always going to be a difficult process starts very badly – the draft 25 year environment plan has been leaked. This is not going to be a comfortable time for Defra Ministers and officials since the reactions so far have been from complimentary. ClientEarth chief executive James Thornton told […]
Blueprint response to the Government’s strategic priorities and objectives for Ofwat April 2017 Blueprint for Water is a unique coalition of environmental, water efficiency, fisheries and angling organisations and a campaign of Wildlife and Countryside Link. ‘We welcome the opportunity to engage with Defra on the Strategic Policy Statement (SPS) to Ofwat. We are pleased […]
Defra published litter strategy Litter louts could be hit with £150 fines as part of ambitious new plans to tackle rubbish in England. Environment Secretary Andrea Leadsom unveiled the Government’s first Litter Strategy for England to reduce the near £800m burden to the taxpayer of clean-up costs. Under the new measures, the most serious litterers could be […]
Natural Flood Management (NFM) has as Duncan Huggett outlines has become very fashionable, but it is neither new or, as a top level scientific review highlighted recently, a ‘silver bullet’. There are still many questions to answer in relation to its appropriate application, not least in terms of location of schemes in the catchment. With […]
Bob Earll & Bruce Horton: The current challenges facing Defra are without precedent, not least the uncertainty over Brexit and its colossal workload. So the ENDS report suggesting further delays to the 25 year plan ‘framework’ (i.e. no detail) is hardly surprising. Business planning 101 would tell us that at times of massive uncertainty long […]
The Green Alliance added its voice to that of the Environmental Audit Committee highlighting the ongoing delay to the release of Agriculture and Environment 25 year plans. We seem to be in the phoney war phase of Brexit, the calm before the storm, when nothing is appearing. These two documents are crucial to the Brexit […]