Hands off our nature reserves, Ministers
Caroline Snow, Flood Street, Stoke Gabriel, Totnes.
Former Environment Minister Therese Coffey is among 12 Conservative MPs who have tabled a Bill in Parliament that will transfer the power to create and protect nature reserves from Natural England to Government ministers.
Sites of Special Scientific Interest (SSSIs) are the best sites in the country for wildlife and are protected by law from development or change of use that would damage their wildlife value.
Currently, Natural England is the Government’s statutory adviser on nature conservation and designates protected sites based on scientific evidence.
Under the proposed bill, any decisions on SSSIs would instead be made by the Environment Minister, currently Steve Barclay. 83 wildlife organisations have joined together under Wildlife and Countryside Link to warn that nature protections could be lost for short-term political and financial considerations.
It should be remembered that Natural England stood alone in resisting the attempts of the Government under David Cameron in 2010 to sell off our national nature reserves. This followed a plan to privatise the Forestry Commission’s forestry estate, selling all 650,000 acres of the nation’s forests, which met with such widespread public opposition that the sale was dropped.
Defra has already cut two-thirds of the funding for Natural England over a decade. The chair of Natural England, Tony Juniper, told the House of Lords in 2022 that “between 2010-19 proactive work on SSSIs essentially stopped due to Government funding cuts”.
The impact of this has been that a third of SSSIs are now classed as declining. Ministers, who have already overseen the shocking decline of our rivers and beaches, cannot be entrusted to safeguard these special places for nature and people.
David Harrison, Beamsley, Skipton.
Re: article on April 28 written by Bruce McLeod. He wrote about the evils of plastic tree guards in woodland. He quotes horrifying statistics of the number of tubes used. 200 million in the last 40 years, but he does not mention that most of these tubes were used because the Forestry Commission insisted that grant aid would only be granted if tubes were used.
In my 40 years experience of tree planting both with tubes and without, I can categorically state that plastic tree guards are a menace. They produce bent trees, making them only useful for firewood. They encourage disease in the plants they are supposed to be protecting, and when a tree dies, they are free to blow into watercourses, create a danger to livestock and are virtually impossible to recycle completely.
I fought for years to be allowed to plant trees without any plastic tubes and the trees that I have planted without tubes are healthier and stronger than those planted with tubes.
To add to these advantages, the cost reduction in not using tubes is immense. A tree at 18 months costs about 50p. A tube, £1, a stake 50p, so you can plant several times as many trees for the same cost. They are also cheaper to plant. So even if you lose 50 per cent to depredation, the cost per tree is still lower.