Authority steps in to pay project workers

A NATIONAL park authority has moved to ensure a major natural heritage project that focuses on some of England’s remotest landscapes and communities is not undermined by a lottery fund’s decision-making process.

The Yorkshire Dales National Park Authority has agreed to pay the salaries of key project officers of the £8.5m Tees-Swale: Naturally Connected scheme for six months, despite uncertainty over whether National Lottery Heritage Fund bosses will approve funding for the scheme.

It is hoped the project will enable farmers in Upper Teesdale and Upper Swaledale to share knowledge and their land-management skills and work to improve and restore habitats for the benefit of wildlife and to allow farms to work as a whole system.

The scheme will help sustain low-intensity farming systems, which benefit wildlife, the environment and people as well as connect visitors with the way the landscape is managed and why this is important to them.

Gary Smith, the authority’s director of conservation, said all National Lottery Heritage Fund bid programmes “always face this awkward issue of what you do in the period between putting the bid in and finding out if you have got the money or not”.

He said: “It’s just too long to think people are going to sit around and say, ‘I’ll wait to see if I’ve still got a job in six months’.

“With this one in particular it creates a real issue for us because so much of the fundamentals of this project are about building trust between the project officers and the people they are working with.

“We think the national park authority ought to be the one that steps up to the plate in terms of the majority of costs of doing that, simply because of the difference in scale between the two organisations.”