Incompetence By Design
By George Monbiot
As state bodies are dismantled, corporations are freed to
rip the living world apart
It feels like the collapse of the administrative state – and
this is before Brexit. One government agency after another is losing its
budget, its power and its expertise. The result, for corporations and the very
rich, is freedom from the restraint of law, freedom from the decencies they owe
to other people, freedom from democracy. The public protections that constrain
their behaviour are being dismantled.
An example is the cascading decline in the protection of
wildlife and environmental quality. The bodies charged with defending the
living world have been so enfeebled that they now scarcely exist as independent
entities. Natural England, for example, has been reduced to a nodding dog in
the government’s rear window.
Its collapse as an autonomous agency is illuminated by the
case that will be heard next week in the High Court, where two ecologists, Tom
Langton and Dominic Woodfield, are challenging its facilitation of the badger
cull. That the cull is a senseless waste of life and money is well established,
but this is only one of the issues being tested. Another is that Natural
England, which is supposed to assess whether the shooting of badgers causes
wider environmental harm, appears incapable of discharging its duties.
As badger killing spreads across England, it intrudes upon
ever more wildlife sites, some of which protect animals that are highly
sensitive to disturbance. Natural England is supposed to determine whether
allowing hunters to move through these places at night and fire their guns has
a detrimental effect on other wildlife, and what the impact of removing badgers
from these ecosystems might be. The claimants allege that it has approved the
shooting without meaningful assessments.
Some of its decisions, they maintain, are farcical. In Dorset,
for example, Natural England assumed that overwintering hen harriers and
merlins use only one out of all the sites that have been designated for their
protection, and never stray from it. It makes the same assumption about the
Bewick’s swans that winter around the Severn estuary. That birds fly, enabling
them to move from one site to another, appears to have been overlooked.
Part of the problem, the claimants argue, is that staff with
specialist knowledge have been prevented from making decisions. The location of
the badger cull zones is such a closely guarded secret that Natural England’s
local staff are not allowed to see the boundaries. As a result, they can make
no meaningful assessment of what the impact might be. Instead, the decisions
are made in distant offices by people who have not visited the sites.
I wanted to ask Natural England about this, but its external
communications have been shut down by the government: any questions now have to
be addressed to Michael Gove’s environment department, Defra. Defra told me
“staff carrying out this work have all the necessary information. It would be
inappropriate to comment on an ongoing legal matter.” How can Natural England
be an independent body when the government it is supposed to monitor speaks on
its behalf?
Another example of how far Natural England has fallen is the
set of deals it has struck with grouse moor owners, allowing them to burn
protected habitats, kill protected species and build roads across sites that
are supposed to be set aside for wildlife. For several years, the redoubtable
conservationist Mark Avery has been fighting these decisions. This May, Natural
England conceded, in effect, that he was right. The agency that is meant to
protect our wild places has been colluding in their destruction.
A correspondent from within Natural England tells me its
staff are so demoralised that it has almost ceased to function. “Enforcement,
for example, is close to non-existent … Gove seems to have somehow both raised
the profile of environmental issues whilst simultaneously stripping the
resources … it has never been as bad as this.”
In March, the House of Lords reported that Natural England’s
budget has been cut by 44% since it was founded in 2006. The cuts have crippled
both its independence and its ability to discharge its duties. It has failed to
arrest the catastrophic decline in our wildlife, failed to resist the
housebuilders trashing rare habitats and abandoned its regulatory powers in
favour of useless voluntary agreements. As if in response, the government cut
the agency’s budget by a further 14%.
Dominic Woodfield, one of the claimants in the court case
next week, argues that Natural England has been “on death row” since it applied
the law at Lodge Hill in Kent, where the Ministry of Defence was hoping to sell
Britain’s best nightingale habitat to a housing developer. Natural England had
no legal choice but to designate this land as a site of scientific interest,
hampering the government’s plans. As the government slashed its budget and
curtailed its independence, the agency’s disastrous response has been to try to
save itself through appeasement. But all this has done is to alienate its
defenders, reduce its relevance and hasten its decline. “There are still good
people in Natural England. But they’re broken. They talk very slowly because
they’re thinking very carefully about everything they say.”
If this is happening before we leave the European Union, I
can only imagine where we will stand without the protection of European law.
The environmental watchdog that, according to Michael Gove, will fill the role
now played by the European Commission, will know, like Natural England, that
its budget is provided by the government and can be cut at the government’s
discretion. What is to prevent it from being nobbled as other agencies have
been?
Already, the deliberate mutilating of the administrative
state, delivering incompetence by design, has released landowners,
housebuilders and assorted polluters from regulatory restraint. Only through
European law have government agencies been forced to discharge their duties.
Brexit strips away this defence. And if, as some propose, it paves the way for
One Nation Under Gove, we should, the evidence so far suggests, be even more
alarmed.
But some of us are now mobilising to turn the great
enthusiasm for wildlife and natural beauty in this country into political
action, and to fight the dismantling of the laws that protect our precious wild
places. Watch this space.
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