Nature Conservation. Peter Marren

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      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.