for by no means every landowner would have been delighted to find his property on the list – this aspect was played down, and the Review was presented to the public as a reference book of important biological sites. In commending it in these terms, the Ministers for Environment and for Education and Science were careful to avoid committing themselves to any particular action. The Review sparked no change in environmental policy, but it did form a necessary reference point for site protection. Without some means of assessing the relative importance of wildlife sites, the NCC would be blundering in the dark.
The second key NCC document was its long-term strategic review, published in 1984 and entitled Nature Conservation in Great Britain (‘NCGB’). It was in part an assessment of the successes and failures of the nature conservation movement, and in part a set of ground rules for the future. The failures outnumbered the successes by 21 pages to five, and any impression given by the glossy pictures of a healthy, vital natural environment was contradicted by the lowering bar graphs that showed ‘with stark clarity’ how far wildlife habitats had diminished during the past half-century – a loss of 40 per cent of lowland heaths, for example, and an incredible 95 per cent of ‘lowland neutral grasslands’. Behind the statistics lay a detailed analysis of habitat loss undertaken by Norman Moore – but, as it happened, ‘NCGB’ proved to be the only opportunity to publish any of it. Perhaps Council thought it might depress the minister. The real significance of the review lay not so much in the detail but in its heightened sense of conviction. For the first time the NCC explicitly recognised nature conservation as a cultural activity, and not merely as pure or applied science. ‘Simple enjoyment and inspiration from contact with nature’ was not a partisan activity: it concerned us all. It followed that we should conserve nature in the same way that we take care of other essentials like air and water. ‘Nature conservation has in the past sometimes conducted its business on too apologetic and timid a note’, declared the NCC, looking back at its own history. Timidity had too often meant surrender. ‘We need to play a hard but clean game for our side,’ said the NCC’s new chairman, William Wilkinson. So there were now ‘sides’, us against them. The strategy was heartily supported by most of the voluntary bodies, who rightly saw it as a challenge, heralding a significant change of policy, and expected NCC to honour its brave words to the letter. But in the freewheeling climate of the 1980s, having the courage of your convictions meant having to fight for them. The five years of corporate life left to the NCC were hard ones, and led straight to its destruction.
There were really two NCCs, separated by the watershed year 1981 in which the Wildlife and Countryside Act reached the statute book. The pre-1981 NCC was a fairly low-key organisation with a staff of about 500 dispersed thinly about Britain, struggling along on an annual budget of about £6 million (the NCC had scarcely any income or assets). It advised government on issues affecting wildlife, commented on local plans and developments and grant-aided worthy projects, but was rarely in the headlines. The man in the street had never heard of it, which is not to deny that the NCC achieved a great deal on very little.
Sir William Wilkinson, chairman of the NCC 1984-1991. (English Nature)
The post-Act NCC took a little while to get going, but it became another organisation entirely, more powerful, more centralised, and often in the headlines, especially in Scotland. By 1988, the NCC had 780 permanent staff with a sixfold budget increase to £39 million. An enforced move in 1984 from the old Nature Conservancy’s stately quarters at Belgrave Square to a modern office block in Peterborough gave the organisation a chance to centralise its dispersed branches – an England headquarters at Banbury, scientists at Huntingdon, geologists at Newbury, publicists and cartographers at Shrewsbury were all sucked into Peterborough. The organisation also became computerised and corporatised. Corporate planning was introduced in 1985, requiring staff to complete monthly time records, recording (in theory at least) every half-hour of activity. The Act made nature conservation much more expensive. By 1988, nearly a quarter of the NCC’s budget was spent on management agreements on SSSIs.
The Wildlife and Countryside Act distorted the NCC’s activities for nearly a decade, as its regional staff struggled to notify SSSIs and negotiate agreements over their safeguard. Land not notified as SSSI became known as ‘wider countryside’, and there was little enough time to devote to it (with the honourable exception of urban conservation, largely a one-man crusade by George Barker). Unfortunately, the wording of the Act forced the NCC to adopt a heavy handed approach on SSSIs, in which an owner or tenant would be presented with a formidable list of ‘Potentially Damaging Operations’. Permissions to carry on farming in ways that did not damage the site’s special interest were called ‘consents’. This sort of language understandably put people’s backs up, as did the fact that there was no appeals system and the conviction that notification would lower the land value. Suspicion and potential hostility could be mollified by the farm-to-farm visits of the NCC’s regional staff, who were generally speaking more charming and persuasive than the documents they had to deliver. To the extent that the Act was a success it was theirs, not that of the politicians who created a botched system, nor the civil servants and lawyers who insisted on its rigid application. The local NCC staff rapidly learnt that the only way to make the Act work was by goodwill – hardline interpretations of the law and threats of prosecution simply alienated people, and got nowhere.
In some areas, especially in island communities, SSSIs were seen as an alien imposition. In Islay, teeming with wildlife, a severe dose of SSSIs looked like a punishment for farming in harmony with nature. Things came to a head in the small matter of finding a source of peat for an Islay distillery as a substitute for Duich Moss, one of the best raised bogs in the Hebrides. A team of environmentalists led by David Bellamy, intending to plead the cause of peatland conservation, was howled down by angry islanders normally renowned for their hospitality and gentleness of manners. It was not that the community was against nature conservation, only that they did not enjoy being told what to do by a Peterborough-based quango (a place not particularly noted for its teeming wildlife).
Notifying SSSIs was a much more complicated business than anyone had foreseen. To begin with staff had to find out who owned the land, and even that could be a hornet’s nest with, in Morton Boyd’s words, ‘many untested claims to holdings, grazings and sporting rights’ (Boyd 1999). SSSIs were an absolute, bureaucratic system imposed on a system of tenure that was often the opposite: communal, fluid, and based on non-Westminster concepts of custom, neighbourliness and unwritten rules. Outsiders blundering into these matters could unwittingly set neighbour against neighbour. They could also make themselves very unpopular. Moreover some SSSIs were already under dedicated schemes for forestry or peat extraction, or an agricultural grant scheme. In the Outer Hebrides an EU-fund-ed Integrated Development Scheme was in progress, while in Orkney an Agriculture Department-funded scheme was encouraging farmers to reclaim moorland. The NCC often found itself outnumbered. When, in 1981, it opposed the extension of ski development into the environmentally sensitive Lurchers Gully in the Cairngorms (see Chapter 10), the NCC found itself ranged against the Highlands and Islands Development Board, Highland Regional Council, and sports and tourism lobbies, as well as local entrepreneurs. It won that particular battle but, in the Highlands and Islands at least, the NCC eventually lost the war.
J. Morton Boyd, Scottish director of the NCC, at Creag Meagaidh, which he helped save from afforestation. (Des Thompson)
The break-up of the NCC
Replying to an arranged Parliamentary question on 11 July 1989, Nicholas Ridley told a near-empty House of Commons that he had decided to break up the Nature Conservancy Council. In its place he would introduce legislation for separate nature conservation agencies in England, Scotland and Wales. I well remember the shock. Just the previous week we had attended a ceremony to mark the retirement of Derek Ratcliffe, Chief Scientist of the NCC since its establishment
