Planning and Infrastructure Bill heralds ‘top-down State control’

I’ve just been reading the Planning and Infrastructure Bill, prompted to do so by what I’d picked up from the Planning Reform Working Paper on Development and Nature Recovery. Yes, I really do know how to enjoy myself.

https://archive.is/NNqg5#selection-2675.0-2957.138

My attention was particularly drawn to the proposal in the working paper that developers in future will not be required to carry out environmental mitigation on site, but will pay a sum of money to a “delivery body” to carry out “strategic” works somewhere else.

The paper asserted that the government would make development easier, but still protect the environment.

It said that site-specific actions “may be effective in addressing the specific impact of a proposal, [but] by not taking a strategic view, we may miss opportunities to support wider objectives for the environment, land use, and public amenity”.

The words “strategic” and “strategically” were used many times, and the intention explicitly stated: “moving more responsibility for planning and implementing these strategic actions onto the state”.

Joy Bowes, a former solicitor, divides her time between Suffolk and her partner’s  223ha Lake District hill farm. It is home to a herd of Galloway cattle. Higher Level Stewardship conservation work has been carried out, with plans for more trees under Countryside Stewardship.

It was obvious that “somewhere else” will mean “on someone else’s land” and, having read the bill, I now know that Natural England will be authorised to compulsorily purchase farmland, or indeed any sort of open land, including allotments, to carry out environmental works.

This may explain why, in a recent interview, Natural England’s chair Tony Juniper seemed strangely unperturbed by the curtailing of site-specific environmental protection.

In brief, the bill says Natural England will draw up and consult on an Environmental Delivery Plan (EDP) for an area, setting out what environmental features need protection, what conservation measures are needed, and a schedule of the levies to pay for them.

Once the EDP is in place, any development which will affect a protected feature will be subject to the levy.

The developer pays the levy and builds its development, Natural England does something strategic with the money, the public gets the houses, factories or whatever, and nature doesn’t suffer at all. What could go wrong?

Well, during my years in local government, I saw how hard it could be to agree with developers’ payment for things such as highway improvements. And I can’t imagine that agreeing the levy will be much easier.

Local people may not be happy to lose an established woodland on the promise of new woodland five miles away.

Habitats or wildlife lost from a site surely can’t just be replaced or relocated elsewhere.

Then there is the matter of making sure the off-site mitigation is actually carried out in a timely fashion so we don’t end up with lots of development yet no compensatory benefit to the environment.

I am also uneasy that so much power will be devolved to Natural England. Not only will it determine, through EDPs, what environmental works are needed, it will also decide what land it requires to achieve this.

The bill even provides for a second go if the first mitigation is ineffective. I worry that this will allow a state-sponsored body to appropriate as much land as it can, to the detriment of affected landowners.

The government argues that, at present, it is too easy for bats, newts and human “blockers” to hold up essential development.

The bill opens the door to too much top-down state control and a complete disregard for the people who have to live with the consequences.

Compulsory purchase reform ahead – what’s planned?

A planning and infrastructure bill is due to be introduced early this year.

Suzie Horne 16 January 2025

https://www.fwi.co.uk/business/business-management/compulsory-purchase-reform-ahead-whats-planned

https://www.fwi.co.uk/business/business-management/compulsory-purchase-reform-ahead-whats-planned

Alongside other planning reforms, it is proposed to include wider compulsory purchase (CP) powers and restrict compensation to landowners.

A consultation published on 19 December 2024 sets out reforms that expand on provisions in the Levelling Up and Regeneration Act 2023.

These allow “hope value” to be removed in circumstances where social and affordable housing is being built, also for educational and NHS purposes, providing there is justification in the public interest.

What is proposed?

A key proposal is to extend this ability to disapply hope value to include CP orders made on behalf of parish, town or community councils by local authorities under section 125 of the Local Government Act 1972.

This would apply where the schemes involved are providing affordable or social housing.

“It’s unusual for town and community councils to be considering compulsory purchase because of the risks involved, unless they are in a joint venture with a developer,” says planning lawyer Fergus Charlton, a partner with Michelmores.

“This is pushing in the direction for the delivery of more housing and makes it more likely that a landowner will be served with a compulsory purchase order,” he says.

The consultation refers to the government’s desire that landowners should get a “fair” rather than “elevated” value for land taken by CP. However, “fair” in this instance simply means agricultural value.

Henry Church is a senior director with CBRE UK, a commercial real estate service and investment company.

He also has a long-standing relationship with the Compulsory Purchase Association, an independent organisation promoting best practice in the field.

Speaking in a personal capacity as a CP practitioner, Henry takes issue with the words “fair” and “elevated”.

“What this is seeking is for there to be payment for existing use value, ignoring any potentiality in the land,” he says.

“This approach goes against the principle of equivalence, which says that those subject to compulsory purchase should be put in no worse a position as a result of the process.”

Like many others, he thinks that the move could reduce the amount of land coming forward for housing, as those promoting it may fear spending to do so only to have it subsequently taken from them by CP.

“By disapplying hope value, you’re not getting rid of that value, you’re giving it to someone else.

“You need to be responsible about what you do with that value. So who does it go to – the local authority or the developer?

The cost of land is a factor in development, but disapplying hope value as a means of addressing the rate of housebuilding is too simplistic and risks land not being brought forward, says Henry.

Other measures

The consultation goes further in seeking to allow land to be compulsorily purchased without hope value.

The government is considering a general power to enable the secretary of state in England or the ministers in Wales to make a direction to remove hope value from compensation for a specific category of sites where this is justified in the public interest.

It suggests this could include land allocated for residential development in an adopted plan but which has not come forward for development.

This could bring a much wider range of farmland into the net of CP with no hope value, while some commentators have interpreted it as being aimed at those holding potential development land but not yet developing it – often referred to as land banking.

Land costs and development

The Country Land and Business Association (CLA) has long argued that land costs are a relatively small part of total development costs.

Compulsory purchase compensation aims to put those affected in the same position as if their land had not been taken.

However, this is rarely the outcome, says CLA chief surveyor Andrew Shirley.

The ability to remove hope value was introduced by the previous government and criticised by him as singling out land value as if that was going to solve the problem.

“A key consideration for the valuation process is what the land might be worth if sold on the open market by a willing seller,” he says, also criticising the planning process for delays and the recent revision of the National Planning Policy Framework for offering nothing to the rural economy.

“Hope value is real value, not a made-up value,” says Andrew.

“If a developer were to buy a field they would pay a value to reflect its development potential. Removing hope value [from the CP process] means the only person not making money from it is the landowner.”

Opportunity to develop before new laws

The planning and infrastructure bill may take one to two years to become law.

In the meantime, the CLA’s message is that is if someone feels they have development potential on their land, they should promote it, submit it for planning and/or sell or develop it, says Andrew.

If the proposals become law, it is expected that one result will be more joint ventures between local planning authorities and developers, whereby the developers fund or part-fund the compulsory purchase process in order to access the development land subject to the CP order.

Compulsory purchase powers

Compulsory purchase (CP) is a legal process by which land can be taken without the consent of the owner.

These powers are granted to local authorities, government departments and to other public and private bodies by legislation.

This includes mayoral combined authorities and other public bodies, including Homes England.

CP powers can only be used if it is deemed that there is a compelling case in the public interest to do so – for example, for infrastructure projects such as railways, roads, energy, electricity infrastructure, schools, hospitals, housing, and urban regeneration.

The government says that the proposed changes to the CP regime aim to speed up decision-making, reduce the cost of the process and ensure the compensation paid to landowners is fair.

Other changes in the government’s consultation

Where a CP is proposed and a direction to remove hope value is sought and opposed, the government wants the decision to be made by a planning inspector rather than the secretary of state or a minister.

Also, where a “no hope value” CP order has been made but there are no objections to the order, the government then the acquiring authority would have the power to confirm the decision, rather than the secretary of state or minister.

This would require an amendment to the Acquisition of Land Act 1981.

Law Commission compulsory purchase review

At the same time as the government’s consultation on compulsory purchase, the Law Commission of England and Wales is reviewing the system and also launched a consultation on 20 December 2024.

This work began in February 2023 and will suggest how to consolidate, modernise and simplify compulsory purchase legislation, with a resulting draft bill proposing technical changes to compulsory purchase procedure and compensation.

There have been frequent calls for reform of the complex and dated CP legislation, some of which dates back to 1845.

How to respond to the consultation

The consultation document was available online.

Responses can also be made online or by emailing CompulsoryPurchaseConsultation@communities.gov.uk

or by post addressed to:

Compulsory Purchase Consultation Team
Planning – Development Management Division
Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government
Floor 3, Fry Building
2 Marsham Street
London SW1P 4DF

How and When King Charles’s Real Estate Was Assembled – Monarch Inherits a £15.6 Billion Commercial Portfolio

By Paul Norman, Julia Lee CoStar News 5 May 2023

https://www.costar.com/article/1757681178/coronation-special-how-and-when-king-charless-real-estate-was-assembled

As much of the United Kingdom celebrates the coronation of King Charles III, his attitude towards the 15.6 billion Crown Estate portfolio he inherits as the reigning monarch will be crucial.

Tracking just how and when the monarchy assembled the most sparkling jewels in the portfolio, which also includes a glittering array of famous residences and monuments, sheds a modern light on the country’s history and expectations about what its property should deliver.

The Crown Estate essentially dates from 1066, when William, Duke of Normandy, claimed the English throne and invaded from what is now Northern France. Land across the country formally transferred as part of the “Norman Conquest” to William the Conqueror “in right of The Crown” due to his so called “right of conquest” as the new King.

By 1086, the King had famously commissioned the Domesday Book to quantify all the land in his kingdom who owned it, who lived there, and how much the land was worth and therefore how much tax he could charge. In essence, the King had become the first real estate valuer and the inventor of the precursor to the dreaded business rates as paid by almost every commercial property owner in the country. That underlying ownership of the Crown remains to this day because there “remains a presumption in favour of the Crown” unless it can be proved that land belongs to someone else

The Sovereign’s estates have always been used to raise revenue for wars and other strategems, and over time large areas have been given away as a method for the monarch to reward or punish subjects, shore up power bases or simply on a whim. The latter has prompted some of English history’s most chaotic periods Edward II’s decision to give most of Cornwall to his favourite Piers Gaveston still sticks in the craw 700 years later.

Land retained by William the Conqueror and his successors was divided into royal manors, each managed separately by a seneschal a governor or administrative officer and the period between the reigns of William I and Queen Anne was one of almost constant disposal of lands to an in-vogue courtier or to shore up support.

null (Getty Images) Edward I’s castles still dot the Welsh landscape. (Getty Images)

Throughout this time there were famous land grabbers and equally famous land losers. Edward I extended his possessions into Wales with a massive and still visible castle building programme, while James (VI of Scotland and I of England) had his own Crown lands in Scotland which were combined with the Crown lands of England and Wales when he took on the top job in England.

The estate fluctuated massively in size and value for centuries, but by 1760, when George III of American Independence fame acceded to the throne, it had been reduced to a relatively small size producing nowhere near the income the King required to stay above water.

By that time taxes had become the principal source of revenue for Parliament as it administered the country and an agreement was reached that the Crown lands would be managed on behalf of the government and any surplus revenue would go to the Treasury. In return the King received a fixed annual payment, until recently known as the Civil List. This agreement has been signed up to by every succeeding Sovereign. Crown lands in Scotland were included in the arrangement from 1832.

In 1955 a Government Committee recommended that to avoid confusion between government property and Crown land, the latter should be renamed the Crown Estate and should be managed by an independent board.

The estate is managed by a Board who “maintain and enhance the value of the estate and the return obtained from it” as their duty. The estate is an independent commercial business with the monarch owning the land it manages as long as he or she is on the throne.

So how much revenue does it produce? Over the decade to 2021, the estate had, according to the government’s website, contributed 2.6 billion to the public purse, although the Crown estimates the figure at 3 billion. In the 10 years prior to that, from 2002 to 2012, it generated 2 billion, according to Crown Estate filings.

For the most recent financial year of 2021-22, it made a net revenue profit of 312.7 million, 43.4 million higher than the prior year and ahead of its agreed target of 269 million as it bounced back from a difficult lockdown period, but still below pre-pandemic levels.

So what exactly does the Crown Estate own and how did its most famous addresses come into its possession?

The Crown has in recent years been reorganising itself into a single group business with four strategic business units London, Regional, Marine, and Windsor and Rural.

AERIAL, TOP DOWN: Flying above a large blue pond full of wild salmon in the middle of the ocean. Spectacular aerial view of countless fish jumping out of water underneath a net covering a farming pool (Getty Images/iStockphoto) The King owns the coastline and all the seabed to 12 nautical miles, including the rights to farm fish. (Getty Images/iStockphoto)

Marine Business

In recent times the Crown’s financial results have been massively boosted by the strength of its highly profitable marine portfolio. That increased in value by 22% to 5 billion in its most recent reported year.

It owns virtually all the seabed around the United Kingdom out to 12 nautical miles (the territorial sea limit), and controls who can operate in much of this space by awarding the rights to operate on the seabed via leases. It is an increasingly important and valuable role as it is responsible for allowing activities including oil and gas pipelines, marine aggregate extraction, fish farming, and telecommunications and power cables. The growth of offshore wind is driving significant revenues.

How does the Monarch own it?

The King’s ownership of the British coastline by convention goes all the way back to William the Conqueror. But there was no formal legislation declaring ownership until relatively recently, prompted by the discovery of North Sea oil and gas which led to the boundary-setting 1964 Continental Shelf Act.

The ownership of oil and gas on land and at sea rests with the Crown, but since 1934 the government has been in control of royalties and assigning drilling rights. In a highly lucrative intervention though, the Crown Estate was given the right to collect royalties from wind and wave power by the Labour government’s 2004 Energy Act.
The Crown Estate owns the land under the distinctive department store, Liberty’s. (CoStar)

London Business

The London estate comprises 10 million square foot of mixed-use central London property, primarily around Regent Street and St Jamess in the West End. Queen Elizabeth II’s reign saw radical changes in how the Crown manages its core London portfolio as it has wrestled with how to make Regent Street and the West End a cleaner, greener and more accessible destination.

Last year, the value of its London portfolio remained flat at 7.7 billion, which reflected, the Crown said, improved trading conditions compared with preceding years battered by the pandemic.

Regent Street

The most famous address in the portfolio is Regent Street, with the Crown owning the vast majority of its entire mile-and-a-half length that splices through the centre of London’s West End shopping and leisure district via its curved Grade II listed facades, some of the most impressive architecture in the city.

The street was built in 1819 and named after the then Prince Regent, later George IV, under the direction of architect John Nash. It is now best-known for its flagship retail stores, including Liberty, Hamleys and the Apple store, but it came into being as one of the first examples of real town planning in the country, and one of the world’s first purpose-built shopping streets.

The idea was to build a thoroughfare linking Marylebone Park, now Regent’s Park, with the Prince Regent’s Carlton House. The road ran through Marylebone Park with a lease to the government for 99 years from 1811 at the end of which it would revert to the Crown. Regent Street was then redeveloped between 1895 and 1927 under the control of the Office of Woods, Forests and Land Revenues, the former Crown Estate.

By the 1970s, the street had begun to noticeably decline thanks to under-investment and competition from neighbouring areas including the adjoining Oxford Street and shopping centres away from central London such as Brent Cross. By 2002, as it mounted a fight back, the Crown initiated a major redevelopment and to fund it made the then-radical decision to bring in investment partners for the first time.

It began a 750 million rejuvenation aimed at enticing international retailers and investment partners. At the same time it planned to rebalance its investment portfolio in favour of more regional investment to generate returns. The Crown is not able to borrow, so to free up capital for reinvestment in the estate and elsewhere, it went to market with a 25% stake in its Regent Street properties. In 2010 it signed an agreement that saw it sell the stake to Norwegian sovereign wealth fund Norges Bank Investment Management for 448 million.

The acquisition was Norges’ first major transaction after it was allowed to invest in real estate, ushering in a period of substantial reinvestment of the country’s oil riches in global property. Immediately, Norges agreed to help the Crown fund a 200 million retail and leisure investment called W4 on the west side of Regent Street. In 2017 Norges doubled its stake in the 20 Air Street development with the Crown to 50%.

The Crown Estate moved its headquarters from Carlton House Terrace to Regent Street in 2006.
1 St James’s Square is one of the genteel buildings typical of the area. (CoStar)

St James’s

The Crown has extensive ownership of around 3.5 million square feet across St James’s, a square mile of residential, retail and offices surrounded by some of the country’s most famous sights and tourist attractions.

The Crown’s involvement here dates back to Henry VIII, who had St James’s Palace built in the 1530s on the site of a former leper hospital. By 1837 Queen Victoria decided to move the royal family’s principal residence to Buckingham Palace just up the road, a site George III had bought for his wife in 1762.

With its redevelopment of Regent Street as a template, in 2010 the Healthcare of Ontario Pension Plan made its first direct real estate investment outside of Canada by acquiring a 50% 100 million stake in the Crown’s St James’s Gateway,

Then in 2013, as part of it 10-year investment strategy for the area, it established a joint venture that saw Canadian real estate company Oxford Properties take a 50% stake in the 320 million commercial element of its St James’s Market scheme.

The deal established a strategic partnership based on two 50:50 limited partnerships that each own 150-year leasehold interests in two blocks located between Regent Street and Haymarket.

Regional Business

The Crown’s regional portfolio includes prominent retail and leisure destinations across England, as well as a strategic land portfolio with large mixed-use development and regeneration opportunities. It also owns business parks, logistics and warehousing.

The value of the portfolio increased by 0.2 billion to 1.7 billion last year, reflecting improved investor sentiment, and higher footfall and better trading at its out-of-town retail parks. It has said the future success of these holdings will depend on re-mixing and repurposing where conditions allow.

More broadly through its strategic land ownerships, it is reviewing the potential for mixed-use development. It has continued to progress long-term plans for 350 hectares of land to the east of Hemel Hempstead, to accommodate up to 1.75 million square feet of commercial alongside approximately 3,100 homes. It is also pushing on with massive development plans at its 12-building Cambridge Business Park office campus, already home to the BBC among others. It is promoting plans for a further 500,000 square feet of offices, 500 homes and 50,000 square foot of shops, and community and cultural facilities.

Retail Parks

The most dramatic new investment drive in recent years has been into retail parks. The Crown Estate now owns over 5 million square feet of regional retail and leisure destinations across 17 assets, with over 1.3 billion of the gross value outside of London.

Well-known destinations include Fosse Park in Leicester, Rushden Lakes in Northamptonshire, and joint ventures at Princesshay in Exeter, Westgate in Oxford and Crown Point in Leeds. More recently it has been seeking to reduce its exposure with strategic sales.

How does the Monarch own it?

As the Crown Estate looked to invest in rejuvenating its core London portfolio during the reign of Elizabeth II, it also looked to drive returns by building one of the largest retail park portfolios in the United Kingdom, often bringing in passive 50:50 joint venture investment partners.

In 2014 it bought the biggest asset the 560,000-square-foot Fosse Shopping Park in Leicester for 345.5 million establishing a 50:50 ownership partnership with China’s Gingko Tree Investment into the bargain, with the Crown Estate managing the asset on behalf of the partnership.

The transaction at the time brought total third party funds managed in joint ventures to over 1 billion and is the largest in the Crown Estate’s history.

Its other 16 retail parks are in places such as Newcastle, Aintree, Nottingham, Swansea, and Cheshire. A notable other transaction in this space in 2014 was its acquisition of Princesshay in Exeter in a 50:50 joint venture with TH Real Estate.

The Crown did not limit this investment drive to retail parks, and it has a major industrial warehouse and distribution estate. A standout is Magna Park in Milton Keynes, a 650,000-square-foot warehouse which it bought from Gazeley and Landsec for more than 72 million in 2007, just ahead of the financial crash.

ASCOT – JUNE 20: Queen Elizabeth ll and Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh arrive in an open carriage on the fourth day of Royal Ascot on June 20, 2008 in Ascot, England. (Photo by Anwar Hussein/WireImage) (WireImage) Queen Elizabeth II, shown here with Prince Philip in 2008, loved Ascot, where the royals traditionally parade in carriages at the beginning of each day. (WireImage)

Windsor and Rural

The Crown looks after around 200,000 acres of land, including the Windsor Estate and a number of rural estates. As part of this the Crown also looks after one of Queen Elizabeth II’s favourite spots, Ascot Racecourse.

The rural portfolio of agricultural land and property primarily comprises tenanted arable working farms, includes estates such as Gorhambury in Hemel Hempstead and Putteridge near Luton.

Income from the portfolio is primarily derived from farm and residential rents, alongside visitor, filming and events and forestry income from Windsor. Last years profits increased to 18 million, as the visitor operation at the Castle rebounded strongly from the pandemic.

How does the Crown own it?

The original Windsor Castle was built in the 11th century, after the Norman conquest of England. Since the time of Henry I, 1100-1135, it has been used by the reigning monarch and is the longest-occupied palace in Europe.

SANDRINGHAM, UNITED KINGDOM – OCTOBER 03: Aerial view of Queen Elizabeth II’s Country residence, Sandringham Hall on October 3, 2006 in Sandringham, England. This Jacobean Country house is surrounded by 20,000 acres of Norfolk parkland. (Photograph by David Goddard/Getty Images) (Getty Images) Under Queen Elizabeth II, the Royal Family traditionally spent Easter at Sandringham. (Getty Images)

Homes and Monuments

The Crown and other Royal estates own vast swathes of real estate across the United Kingdom including famous addresses such as Buckingham Palace, Holyrood Palace and the Tower of London as well as landmarks such as Stonehenge.

According to a recent investigation by Forbes these properties include at least seven palaces, 10 castles, 12 homes, 56 holiday cottages and 14 ancient ruins held by the Crown Estate, the Duchy of Lancaster and the Duchy of Cornwall in right of the Crown for the duration of his reign. Forbes reports that others are controlled by the monarchy itself in trust for his successors and the nation, while another four properties are held by two foundations which the King established when he was Prince of Wales. Forbes estimates all of this real estate to be worth around $42 billion (33.54 billion) in value with Buckingham Palace the most expensive at an estimated 1.3 billion.

But a number stand out as they are owned privately by King Charles, who is free to do with them as he pleases. They include Balmoral in Scotland and Sandringham Castle in Norfolk.

How does the Monarch own it?

Balmoral was bought in 1852 by Prince Albert as a gift for his wife, Queen Victoria, a huge fan of the Scottish Highlands. Sandringham was bought as a country home for Edward VII, who was then Prince of Wales, in 1862 by Queen Victoria.

On the abdication of Edward VIII in order to marry American socialite Wallis Simpson, as Sandringham and Balmoral Castle were the private property of the monarch the new King George VI, Elizabeth II’s father, had to buy both properties for 300,000 a price that caused much dispute between the new King and his brother.

Another privately owned asset is Highgrove House, a country residence in Gloucestershire which Prince Charles bought in 1980 for 865,000 and which was recently inherited by Prince William under the Duchy of Cornwall.

Other interesting assets owned by the Crown include the Oval cricket ground and the Savoy Chapel in Westminster, the private church of the reigning monarch. Stonehenge was given to the nation, and so the Crown, in 1918 by Cecil Chubb.

Drax takes ancient trees from near my Carolina home and burns them 4,000 miles away. This greenwashing scandal utterly shames Britain

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-14665613/Drax-takes-ancient-trees-near-Carolina-home-burns-4-000-miles-away-greenwashing-scandal-utterly-shames-Britain.html

Drax takes ancient trees from near my Carolina home and burns them 4,000 miles away. This greenwashing scandal utterly shames Britain

There will be plenty of backslapping among the highly paid executives of Drax, Britain’s biggest power station, at today’s AGM held in the shadow of St Paul’s Cathedral.

Some of the biggest fund managers in the City will also be there, celebrating how Drax’s record £1.1billion profits have benefited them.

You might expect me, a fellow fund manager, to toast the occasion. But I will not be joining in. For the vast Drax power plant in Yorkshire is at the heart of the most egregious environmental scandal, the Big Lie of British energy policy.

Why? Drax used to be a coal power station. But it switched from burning coal to burning wood pellets – the most dirty and primitive source of energy.

See also:
– ‘Private Equity’s Forest Burner’, Drax Power Station, Corby, Emitting Four Times CO2 Of Equivalent Coal Plant
– Banking Nature (2015) documentary on the Privatisation of Nature, new WBCSD markets
– Planet of the Humans: how environmental and green energy movements have been taken over by capitalists

Supposedly, this produces renewable electricity and eliminates carbon emissions even though the carbon footprint here is up to twice that of coal, according to scientists, when transportation and production of pellets is taken into account.

A grotesque sham because, incredibly, none of Drax’s increased carbon emissions are included in Britain’s accounts. They are deemed to be emitted in North America – even though the wood is burnt in Yorkshire.

On top of that accounting sleight of hand, there is the pretence that trees chopped down instantly regrow and are therefore renewable. In truth, this takes decades – decades our climate cannot wait. It is hideously expensive, and one reason why, as Tony Blair put it on Tuesday, current UK energy policy is ‘doomed to fail’.

Since the changeover from coal, Drax has burned the equivalent of 300million trees at its Yorkshire power station. We are all furious about the destruction of the Sycamore Gap tree. So what should you feel about 300million trees, many of them from primeval forests? And, remember, you have been forced to pay Drax £6billion in ‘green’ subsidies for this travesty.

Even more absurd is that every single tree is imported, in diesel-powered freighters. Mostly all the way from North America.

Where is the energy security in that? Such security is on all of our minds after the blackouts in Spain this week – and a month ago at Heathrow. Drax makes a mockery of the Government’s slogan of ‘homegrown, clean energy’.

The company is by far the UK’s largest emitter of CO2. Not that you’ll hear that at the AGM today. The outfit boasts of ‘enabling a zero- carbon’ future and ‘constant, tireless action to benefit climate, nature and people’.

This is nonsense: Drax is the greatest greenwashing scandal in Britain.

I have been fighting its destruction for years, not least because many of the trees come from near my home on the Cape Fear River in Carolina. I watch the cargo ships plying the wood, commencing a 4,000-mile trip to Yorkshire. It is beyond madness.
Drax claims to care about the environment, but its real motivation is money. Its CEO, Will Gardiner, paid himself £5million a year while his company has destroyed large swathes of forest. His company is a rapist of nature.

The fund managers glad-handing him today need to realise how bad this looks. The true scale of this outrage became apparent three years ago, when BBC Panorama revealed that virgin forests in Canada were being cut down by Drax.

They got away with it for so many years because of the appalling failures of regulator Ofgem. It signed off Drax’s claims that its wood was from ‘sustainable’ forests, allowing your green subsidies to keep rolling in.

This so-called ‘watchdog’ even failed to get its act together after the Panorama revelations.

It was only after seeing whistleblower evidence about what was going on that Ofgem fined Drax. The fine was just £25million – paltry given the billions it gets from the public for this charade.

From my experience in the financial world, if any bank or fund was doing anything remotely close to Drax’s ‘capture’ of its regulator, its bald-faced lying to investors about sustainability and double-dealing, that firm would have been prosecuted.

In charging vast sums for destroying irreplaceable primary forests (which Drax denies doing), the firm has sucked cash away from genuine renewables.

As for Energy Secretary Ed Miliband, he was the architect of this disastrous policy back in 2008 when he headed the climate change department. He decided to ‘ramp up’ the burning of wood at Drax, promising that the trees would be ‘sustainable’.

But in February, an energy minister admitted in the Commons that Drax had been allowed to burn ‘unsustainable biomass year after year’ with officials ‘letting Drax do whatever it wanted’.

Miliband risks being remembered as the ‘Burn, Baby, Burn’ energy secretary who left gaping wounds in some of the world’s great forests. He is trying to persuade Parliament that Drax should be allowed to burn trees for another four years – and have a 13 per cent hike in its subsidies.

Many brave employees within Drax have helped expose the scandal. Principal among them is the top whistleblower Rowaa Ahmar, in charge of the company’s relationship with Government until she was sacked.

I have been proud to support Rowaa’s legal case. During her employment tribunal, she claimed Drax was telling officials that its wood was sustainable while its lawyers were admitting in internal emails that it was not.

One prize that eluded Rowaa was a KPMG report revealing where Drax’s trees come from. A judge decided to allow Drax to continue to squelch that report.

But last week the Commons’ all-powerful Public Accounts Committee came out with its own devastating report into the scandal, saying that it has no confidence in government plans to extend the subsidies Drax gets for another four years.

It found the biomass companies had been ‘marking their own homework’ in terms of compliance, that no regulatory body knew whether the wood was actually sustainable and that Drax was not value for money.

In addition, the committee said Parliament must see that secret KPMG report. The cover-up must end – the public have a right to know what is happening to billions of their money.

It is time for Parliament to question Mr Gardiner about his rapacious company and for Ofgem to salvage what’s left of its reputation by reopening its investigation into Drax. Ed Miliband has no good reason not to pause his plans to extend the duplicitous subsidies.

The Big Lie that Drax’s wood-burning is ‘sustainable’, ‘green’ and ‘carbon neutral’ has been exposed. It is a lie that shames the British Government and creates disbelief about their claims to be global leaders in tackling climate change.

Louis Bacon is an environmental philanthropist who won America’s most prestigious conservation award by the Audubon Society. He runs Moore Capital Management.

The Bankers at the Helm of the ‘Natural Capital’ Sector

by Michael Swifte – Wrong Kind Of Green . Org

Let’s put a spotlight on four bankers who positioned themselves in the ‘natural capital’ sector around the time of the Global Financial Crisis (GFC). Let’s have a look at some of their networks.

The reason these bankers have positions at the intersection of big finance and the conservation sector is because of their intimate knowledge of financial instruments and what some call “financial innovation”. They follow the edict ‘measure it and you can manage it’. They are the perfect addition to decades of work – as part of the sustainable development agenda – aimed at quantifying the economic value of nature in order to exploit it as collateral to underwrite the new economy.

Banker 1

John Fullerton is a former managing director at JPMorgan, he founded the Capital Institute in 2010, in 2014 he became a member of the Club of Rome, he has written a book called Regenerative Capitalism.

“No doubt the shift in finance will require both carrots and sticks, and perhaps some clubs.” [Source]

The first of Fullerton’s key networked individuals is Gus Speth who consults to the Capital Institute, he sits on the US Advisory Board of 350.org and the New Economy Coalition board and is good buddies with the godfather of ‘ecosystem services’ Bob Costanza. He has a long history supporting sustainable development projects and has some seriously heavy hitting networks. He founded two conservation organisations with which he was actively engaged up until 2o12, both organisations continue to support ‘natural capital’ projects among other diabolical efforts.

The second networked individual is Hunter Lovins, an award winning author and environmentalist who heads up Natural Capital Solutions and is an advisor to the Capital Institute. She is a long term cheer leader for green capitalism, climate capitalism, and sustainable development.

Banker 2

Mark Tercek was a managing director at Goldman Sachs and became the CEO of The Nature Conservancy in 2008, he has written a book called Nature’s Fortune: How Business and Society Thrive by Investing in Nature.

“This reminds me of my Wall Street days. I mean, all the new markets—the high yield markets, different convertible markets, this is how they all start.” [Source]

One of Tercek’s networked individuals is conservation biologist Gretchen Daily, the person Hank Paulson sent him to meet when he accepted the leadership of The Nature Conservancy (TNC). Daily co-founded the Natural Capital Project in 2005 with the help of WWF, TNC and the University of Minnesota.

Another prominent figure in TNC is Peter Kareiva, senior science advisor to Mark Tercek and co-founder of the Natural Capital Project, he is also the former chief scientist of TNC and its former vice president.

Taylor Ricketts is also a co-founder of the Natural Capital Project, at the time of founding he was the director of conservation science at WWF. He’s now the director of the Gund Institute for Ecological Economics which was founded by Bob Costanza.

Banker 3

Hank Paulson is the former CEO of Goldman Sachs, he was US treasury secretary during the GFC, he’s a former chair of the TNC board and the driving force behind the 2008 bail out bill. In 2011 he launched the Paulson Institute which is focussed on China, he has written a memoir called On the Brink: Inside the Race to Stop the Collapse of the Global Financial System.

Even before he was made treasury secretary by George W Bush, Paulson had an interest in conservation finance and greening big business. He was a founding partner of Al Gore and David Blood’s, Generation Investment Management which operates the “sustainable capitalism” focussed Generation Foundation. He has worked with Gus Speth’s World Resources Institute and the Natural Resources Defense Council to develop environmental policy for Goldman Sachs. In 2004 he facilitated the donation from Goldman Sachs of 680,000 acres of wilderness in southern Chile to the Wildlife Conservation Society and in 2002-04 he and his wife Wendy donated $608,000 to the League of Conservation Voters. He has also worked with the second largest conservation organisation on the planet Conservation International.

“The environment and the economy have been totally misconstrued as incompatible,”

“[…] It is is clear that a system of market-based conservation finance is vital to the future of environmental conservation.” [Source]

Banker 4

Pavan Sukhdev is a former managing director and head of Deutsche Bank’s Global Markets business in India, he was the study leader of the G8+5 project, he founded the Green Accounting for Indian States Project, he co-founded and chairs an NGO in India called the Conservation Action Trust, he headed up the United Nations Environment Program – Green Economy Initiative which was launched in 2008, he has written a book called Corporation 2020: Transforming Business For Tomorrow’s World

Sukdev’s work cuts across more than a dozen UN agencies and scores of international agencies and initiatives. Here are just some of them: IUCN, ILO, WHO, UNESCO, IPBES, WEF, IMF, OECD. Every kind of commodity and economic activity has been covered through his work.

“We use nature because she’s valuable, but we lose nature because she’s free.”

There are only a one or two degrees of separation between these bankers and the environmental movements with which we are very familiar. Looking at key networked individuals connected to the representatives of the financial elites – bankers – helps to highlight the silences and privately held pragmatic positions of many an environmental pundit. “Leaders” of our popular environmental social movements don’t want to be seen or heard supporting the privatisation of the commons, but they remain silent in the face of a growing surge towards collateralization of the earth. Perhaps they too believe that using nature to capitalise the consumer economy is preferable to the toxic derivatives that precipitated the GFC. Either way the underlying motivation – for anyone who might feel that ecosystem services thinking is useful for the earth – is the desire for the continuation of our consumer economy.

Should we redistribute land?

A chat with Tony Gosling of The Land is Ours campaign about direct action, his views of the history of land tenure, landlords and peasants. We discuss his relationship with George Monbiot and views on the Inheritance tax.

See this on the Diggers list https://mailman.gn.apc.org/pipermail/diggers350/2025-April/006656.html

The History of Organic Farming

Farming Explained

Episode 21 – The Organic Movement. The rise of European Fascism inspired the British aristocracy to develop an ultra-conservative revolutionary movement intended to restore feudalism and return the aristocracy to their former position as the ‘ruling class’. William Sanderson established a racist, misogynistic critique of industrial society. Gerard Wallop, Viscount Lymington and later 9th Earl Portsmouth put his significant wealth behind the idea, giving rise to the English Mistery. The Mistery attempted to hijack the conservative party and install Lord Lloyd as a dictator.

Upon failure, Lymington founds the English Array and Lady Eve Balfour’s estate becomes the Haughley Experiment, to defend their blood-and-soil ideology from scientific critique. Rolf Gardiner leads Kinship in Husbandry during the war, while Jorian Jenks is temporarily interned for being a threat to national security.

After the war they found the Soil Association, which included Jenks and Gardiner who corresponded with Nazi Food and Agriculture Minister Richard Walter Darre after.

The effects of this are discussed – the Sustainable Farming Incentive, the Land Recovery Schemes etc.

We take a look at the Soil Association’s selective account of its own history, its focus on ‘Lady Eve’, and the claims of its supporters on BBC Radio 4’s ‘Great Lives’. Sarah Langford, author of ‘Rooted’, and Patrick Holden, former director of the Association, both speak very fondly about Lady Balfour while continuously dodging questions about why she wasn’t taken seriously in her lifetime. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mkn3EiNQWbE

And we follow Lymington as he abandons his soil in favour of new ‘servants’ in British Kenya.

0:00 – Intro
0:30 – Blood and Soil
2:55 – Fascism?
5:00 – British Fascism?
6:10 – The Context
8:44 – Modern Feudalism
13:15 – The English Mistery
15:05 – Peasants!
17:46 – Continental Friends
19:05 – The Plan
21:39 – The English Array
22:39 – ‘The Soil’
26:00 – Anti-science
27:00 – Lady Eve Balfour
29:30 – A Second Chance?
30:20 – The Soil Association
31:08 – A Long Shadow
33:14 – The Soiled Association
34:59 – The Cover-up
39:35 – A Happy Ending

Secondary Sources:
‘Ur-Fascism’ by Umberto Eco
‘Eating Nature in Modern Germany: Food, Agriculture and Environment c.1870 to 2000’ by Corianna Treitel
‘Neo-Tories: the Revolt of British Conservatives against Democracy and Political Modernity’ by Bernhard Dietz
Dietz calls them ‘Neo-Tories’ where I call them organicists, because they wanted to return to the Toryism of the 18th century and earlier. Dietz does not define ‘fascist’ in his book, but his description of ‘Neo-Toryism’ fits firmly within Eco’s ‘Ur-Fascism’, which is the definition I believe best reflects the strange dynamics of fascist ideology. Dietz also concludes the movement fell into irrelevance upon the outbreak of war which overlooks its continuation as Kinship in Husbandry and the Soil Association.
Stone, D., ‘The English Mistery, The BUF, and the Dilemmas of British Fascism’ in The Journal of Modern History Vol.75, (Chicago, 2003) pp. 336-358.
Moore-Colyer, R. J., ‘Back to Basics: Rolf Gardiner, H.J. Massingham and “A Kinship in Husbandry”’, in Rural History, Vol.12 Iss.1, pp. 85-108.

Primary Sources:
Stamp, D. L., ‘Soil and Civilisation’ in Nature Vol.158, (London, 1946) p. 853.
Wrench, G. T., Reconstruction by Way of the Soil (London, 1946).
Wrench, G. T., Restoration of the Peasantries, with Especial Reference to that of India (London, 1939).
Lord Lymington, Famine in England, (London, 1938).
Lord Lymington, ‘Soil and Survival, Can the Health of the Land Survive Urban Science?’, in Country Life Vol.88, pp.125 (London, 1940).
Lymington, ‘A Knot of Roots: an autobiography’, 1965
Balfour, E. B., The Living Soil: Evidence of the Importance to Human Health of Soil Vitality, with Special Reference to Post-war Planning (London, 1943)
Jacks, G. V. and Whyte R. O., The Rape of the Earth: A World Survey of Soil Erosion (London, 1939).

Media used:
Beethoven’s 5th
‘A Farmer’s boy’
‘Make Fruitful the Land’
Planned greatergerman reich By Hayden120 – “Utopia: The ‘Greater Germanic Reich of the German Nation'”. Institut für Zeitgeschichte. München – Berlin. 1999
Hare by marwan2023

14 Sep 2024 by IAN BIRRELL IN THE ITALIAN ALPS and MARCELLO ROSSI

The mountain village of Caldes, surrounded by forests below the jagged peaks of the Alps, has been officially recognised as one of the most beautiful places in Italy.

Yet, today, many villagers are scared to go into those forests. One elderly woman told me she had abandoned hiking and photographing nature. Her neighbour pointed out the trails that he no longer strolls along every weekend.

Giuseppe Rizzi, 72, president of the village council, has stopped walking his dog to visit his allotment in the forest. And his wife Alba doesn’t feel safe going out after dark, saying: ‘I don’t remember ever being scared like this when I was growing up.’

The reason these villagers – many from ­generations of tough mountain folk who lived as hunters and shepherds – are so fearful is ­simple: a neighbour, while on a run last year, was mauled to death by a female bear.

The attack on Andrea Papi, 26, as he jogged in the Dolomites, shocked Italy, sparking a national debate over the wisdom of a policy to reintroduce brown bears here.

The clash pitted politicians against animal rights activists, conservationists against local people. Meanwhile, the bear, though spared from being put down by the country’s top court, is now trapped in captivity, with wildlife experts complaining about the cruelty of her ‘jail’ sentence.

The controversy recently ­reignited after another female bear was killed on orders of the region’s governor following an attack on a French tourist. In an unexpected twist, the ­victim, Vivien Triffaux, 43, then said he was ‘really sad’ for his role in the death of a mother protecting her cubs, adding: ‘I’m truly pained that our encounter cost her life.’

The saga over how to handle aggressive bears after the success of a ‘rewilding’ project in the Italian Alps comes at a time when hundreds of other brown bears across Europe – from Sweden to Romania – are being culled.

‘We have lost all our bearings on this issue,’ says environmentalist Francesco Romito. ‘We need to conserve bears for the future but also understand the fears of the local community.’

The bear now in captivity, which was responsible for Italy’s first fatal mauling for 150 years, has been named JJ4 – being the fourth daughter of Joze and Jurka, two bears caught in Slovenia and released with eight others into a national park near Trento more than two decades ago.

Their translocation was part of a project called Life Ursus, which began after bears in this region were on the brink of extinction.

This EU-backed scheme to restore the predators at the top of the food chain was deemed a success, with at least 120 bears now living in the region. Inevitably, there have been close encounters with people.

The bear, JJ4, was tranquilised (pictured) and is now in captivity having been spared by the country’s top court. JJ4 was responsible for Italy’s first fatal mauling for 150 years
Eurasian brown bears are big beasts. They can be taller than a human, weigh up to 800 lb and charge at 35 mph, with males roaming vast distances. Though usually shy of people and largely nocturnal, they can react aggressively when frightened – ­especially mothers with cubs.

After Andrea Papi was killed by JJ4, it emerged that the bear had been involved in an attack four years earlier – mauling a man who was hiking with his father. There have been at least six other assaults over the past decade resulting in serious injuries.

Many houses in Caldes now display banners demanding ‘Justice for Andrea’. His father, Carlo, told me people are furious over the rewilding scheme and failure to inform residents about attacks.

‘I’m filled with anger,’ said the retired head waiter. ‘The ­authorities knew there was a dangerous bear out there but didn’t warn ­anyone.

‘We’ve been waiting for justice but it seems it will never come. We want accountability – someone to go to jail. The decision to reintroduce bears has been a disaster.’

Caldes residents told me that a bear had been seen strolling through a children’s playground the previous night. A few days earlier, said one woman, a car had been badly damaged by a bear standing on it to reach fruit from a tree. Alberto Perli, mayor of Andalo, a popular tourist town, said that even fixing rubbish bins in concrete failed to stop these powerful animals from tipping them over to rummage for food. The authorities are now building underground bins.

Eurasian brown bears are big beasts. They can be taller than a human, weigh up to 800 lb and charge at 35 mph, with males roaming vast distances.

Surveys by Trentino’s wildlife department found the reintroduction project was well-supported when it began but now 70 per cent of locals dislike their booming bear population.

Franca Ghirardini, 61, mother of the fatally mauled jogger, complained that locals had never been consulted on rewilding.

Yet such has been the furore following her son’s death that she and her husband have suffered a repulsive barrage of hate mail and abuse on social media, resulting in 21 complaints to the police.

Some staff in the regional government have also quit their jobs due to the hostility aroused among animal lovers by the original ­decision to shoot JJ4.

The bear’s life was spared – along with another beast that attacked a hiker – after activists appealed to Italy’s highest court and judges ruled that putting it down would be a ‘disproportionate’ punishment.

Claudio Groff, who heads Trento’s Large Carnivores Division, said JJ4 was likely to be deported to Germany later this year. ‘Co-­existing with bears means removing those that pose a danger to humans,’ he said.

Marina Chini, of Collettivo Scobi, which campaigns on animal rights and opposed the putting down of JJ4, says the risk of being mauled by a bear is negligible compared with other dangers in the mountains. ‘Many, many more people are killed by cars,’ she said.

Alessandro de Guelmi, a retired vet who trapped 18 bears for research and public safety while overseeing captures in Trentino between 2014 and 2019, said a ‘fantastic’ scheme had been ruined after it was taken over by politicians. ‘I’ve never had a problem because bears are intelligent. If you know what you are doing, they will not harm you,’ he said.

He explained that it is a normal reaction to scream when confronted by a bear, ‘but this makes it afraid’. He told me about once coming across a sleeping bear. ‘I pulled its cheek softly, like with a cat or child, and it opened its eyes at me. I thought it might go crazy but as soon as it opened its eyes I knew it was OK. It was the most beautiful moment of my life. It felt like she smiled at me.’

Yet he believes it is better to kill rogue animals than keep them behind bars. ‘Captivity is the most horrible thing you can do to a bear – they must be free or dead.’

Labour’s 1.5m homes will be dominated by private equity firms charging huge rents

by James Wright  23 February 2025
https://www.thecanary.co/uk/analysis/2025/02/23/labour-build-to-rent/

The Labour Party’s pledge to build 1.5m new homes over this parliament risks being dominated by private equity in the Build to Rent sector, Common Wealth has warned in a new report.

Indeed, chancellor Rachel Reeves has tied herself to fiscal rules to embed the neoliberal market throughout government planning. In her budget, she pledged money for the Build to Rent sector in order to ‘crowd in’ private investment, rather than treating homes as necessary shelter provided publicly and mandated as affordable to all.

Private equity in real estate – The Build to Rent scandal

Build to Rent properties in the UK have increased to 20% of all new builds in recent years – and 27% in London, the thinktank states. Investors know that renting out essentials is a guaranteed way to make the most money.

That is, you get regular, passive income on resources people automatically need while retaining ownership of the ‘asset’ itself. Investors can then use the ‘product’ as collateral or eventually sell it.

At the same time, housing is a risk free investment for the government to make through public ownership, which can be organised on the basis of need and affordability.

Another way the current system is far from adequate is inherited wealth. Common Wealth notes that that in 2023 the majority of first time house buyers (57%) received financial assistance from their parents. The lottery of birthright should surely not prevail over the fact that housing is is a commonality.

Nonetheless, the thinktank further points out that between the onset of the financial crash in 2008 and 2023 the global real estate ‘assets’ under the management of “institutional investors” increased by around 450% from $385bn to $1.7trn.

Related: Would private equity building 1.5m UK homes bring down British house prices?

Rachel Reeves: making the situation even worse

In the UK, overseas investors believe the housing market system to be staying. In absolute terms, UK real estate was the largest housing market for foreign investment in the first quarter of 2024.

Private investors want to maximise their profits at every avenue. Common Wealth points out this is at odds with providing affordable and social housing. The thinktank notes that when asset managers Blackstone bought up and renovated homes in Stockholm, rents increased by a whopping 43%.

The report further shows that a “structural undersupply” of housing leads to year on year rent rises.

Instead of tackling the issue, Reeves seems intent on making the situation worse and diverting more resources away from public housing and towards private investment.

Rewilding row after National Trust ploughs over ‘irreplaceable’ waxcap fungi

Botanists said the work had destroyed a habitat that had taken decades to form

Environment Correspondent Olivia Rudgard – 20 April 2021
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/environment/2021/04/20/rewilding-row-national-trust-ploughs-irreplaceable-waxcap-fungi/

The grassland, now ploughed-over

The National Trust’s attempt to rewild a meadow in Cumbria has backfired after ploughing destroyed “irreplaceable” waxcap mushrooms.

Botanists accused the charity of “cowboy conservation” after the grassland near Cockermouth in the north west of the Lake District was ploughed over in an attempt to create a wildflower meadow.

Waxcaps are brightly-coloured mushrooms which grow on undisturbed ground, but they are increasingly under threat from intensive farming.

Rob Dixon, a botanist and conservation ecologist, who first noticed the incident and had spotted the fungi there in the autumn, said he had reported it to Natural England as a possible breach of regulations limiting changes to rural land. The government agency is investigating.

“There’s so much guidance out there about meadow restoration and grassland restoration, and this just flies in the face of all of it,” he said.

“The only term I can come up with that’s adequate is a sort of cowboy conservation. Obviously no clue about what they’re doing whatsoever.”

On Twitter the National Trust’s North Lakes ranger team defended the change, stating that the soil had “low nutrient value”.

“It is part of a planned work to create ~3 acres of hay meadow, providing a rich and varied habitat for hundreds of species,” the tweet said.

Waxcap mushrooms only grow on grasslands that have been left undisturbed for long periods, making them an indicator of ancient, nutrient-poor land that has not been used for farming.

Adding nutrients to soil in the form of fertiliser is often done by farmers looking to use it for crops, but nutrient-poor land is ecologically valuable because of the native plants and fungi it can support. Once ploughed away the fungi is unlikely to recover, experts said.

TWEET THE NATIONAL TRUST DELETED:
Thank you for sharing this with us. We’re working closely with the farmer at Shepherds Field on the Dunthwaite estate to manage the land in a sustainable, nature-friendly way. The area of land pictured which has been sub-soiled had low nutrient value
— NT North Lakes (@NTNorthLakes) April 20, 2021

Botanist Joshua Styles, founder of the North-West Rare Plant Initiative, said: “Waxcap grasslands take decades to establish. And grasslands that waxcaps grow in are really low-nutrient and unimproved.

“The National Trust has done away with this incredibly important habitat that’s taken decades and decades and decades to establish.”
As well as waxcaps, such grasslands can also be home to native plants such as sheep’s fescue, heath bedstraw, small cudweed and heath cudweed, now endangered in England.

An anonymous National Trust spokesman said: “We are aware of concerns over a field that has been ploughed near Bassenthwaite Lake, Cumbria, and we are currently looking into how this may have happened.

“The National Trust is committed to nature friendly farming and work alongside tenants to tackle the biodiversity crisis while ensuring land delivers for nature and farmers.”

A Natural England spokesperson, who wished to remain anonymous, said: “We are aware of reports and are investigating possible damage to semi-natural grassland near the River Derwent.
“We are unable to comment further at this stage.”

The National Trust was the target of a backlash on social media for turning over the soil in the field on its Dunthwaite estate, close to the Lakes Distillery between Bassenthwaite and Isel.

Farmer and author James Rebanks: ‘I hate the word rewilding – it’s been weaponised’

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/10/06/james-rebanks-interview-farmer-author-defra/

Ahead of the publication of his third book, he talks about turning down Defra, his fears for UK farming and a life-changing trip to Norway

It has been a hectic few months for farmer and author James Rebanks, what with his family’s farm in the Lake District to tend, as well as a much-anticipated new book, the follow up to his prize-winning best-sellers The Shepherd’s Life and English Pastoral. To add to the pressure, over the summer he received an invitation from the new government asking him to sit on the board of directors of the Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), the ministry responsible for the nation’s agriculture.

No wonder, then, that when we meet on his farm, tucked away in a vibrantly green Cumbrian valley in Gowbarrow Fell, 1,100 feet up in the hills between Keswick and Penrith, 50-year-old Rebanks is running rather than walking as he shows me its 500 acres where they keep Herdwick sheep and Galloway cows.

“I turned Defra down,” he says. “Mostly because of my fundamental problems with Defra about budget.”

For much of our time together, the straight-talking, personable Rebanks is all smiles and jokes. At school, he recalls, before he left at 16 with just two GCSEs, “I was rough round the edges, and only good at making people laugh.”

But when he talks about farm budgets he is deadly serious. It is a measure of just how deep he believes the crisis in farming to be.

With Brexit, the £2.4 billion in subsidies based on acreage paid to British farmers by the EU under the old Common Agricultural Policy are in the process of being replaced by Defra with a system that instead rewards good environmental stewardship. Rebanks wholeheartedly approves of the direction of travel, “but we haven’t delivered on the new deal and farmers can’t go on living on air”.

They are telling him, he reports, that because of delays, shelf-loads of bureaucracy and general “ineptitude”, the ministry is effectively standing by while their old-style subsidy payments are tapered off, without giving farmers access to the promised new funding for nature that is meant to replace them.

“Some farmers have lost as much as 38 per cent of their income. They can’t get on the new scheme unless they have a Natural England adviser prepared to treat them seriously enough to process their application and there aren’t enough advisers,” he says.

In such a chaotic situation, he has been one of the lucky ones. His money has come through, but overall he labels the transformation as a “tragedy”. “There are literally hundreds and thousands of farmers wanting to do amazing things for nature on their land who are being turned away,” he says.

To add insult to injury, in his eyes, Defra recently announced a £358 million underspend in the agricultural budget over the last three years. “That sounds to anyone not in farming as if farmers don’t want that money, aren’t trying to claim it. That is not at all what is happening.”

His refusal of the Defra offer is beginning to make more sense. In his own case he can point out around the farm how the new funds are being used: to put back hedgerows to reverse an alarming drop in bio-diversity in the countryside; to restore rivers to their old meandering courses to reduce the risk of flooding in towns and cities downstream; and to replant lost species like betony in his pastures that “do remarkable things for degraded soil”. But far too many farmers are not able to get on with the job that needs doing and which they want to do because of a logjam at the top.

That should matter to all of us, he insists. “Insufficient capacity in Defra means we are not buying enough of the nature that we need. We are miles away from doing what we need to do to mend rural Britain.”

It quickly becomes clear, as Rebanks races ahead, that he is as passionate about the acres he farms – he stands in a line of “dog-and-stick” Cumbrian Hill farmers stretching back 600 years – as he is about just how vital such family farms are. “We need more small farmers but at the moment we are losing them.”

Economics are driving them to the wall at the same time science is suggesting they are crucial to our collective future. “The best farming, the evidence shows, is quite human-intensive, less mechanical, less mono-cultural vast fields of one thing. Our diet and our landscape need much more of a patchwork.”

Rebanks grew up on his farm, working as soon as he could walk alongside his father and his grandfather (the heroes of his first two books). That has given him a profound respect for tradition that sits sometimes awkwardly alongside his belief that farming has to adapt to the crisis in nature and to climate change.
Many of the improvements he is making on the farm fit broadly under the banner of rewilding. “I don’t like the word rewilding and the permutations of it. If rewilding means, do we need more nature in our landscape, I absolutely own it.”

Other uses, though, annoy him. “My problem is the word is weaponised and then you have rewilders saying: ‘Your farm takes up too much room, James, that’s space we want for the wild.’ I get it, but I’m not going anywhere, and neither can I because I have to pay my bills.”

He continues: “What really bugs me about rewilding is when it simply becomes greenwashing. If you are a government not following through on your promises to transform 70 to 80 per cent of the countryside to make it better, you do some token rewilding bits here and there, flagship projects you can take people round.”

Farming can be a fraught business. “There are,” Rebanks reflects, trying to be more diplomatic, “people on both sides of this debate playing culture wars, and I am in the middle.” And, he adds, getting caught in the crossfire, because of the public profile his books and numerous public appearances have given him (which, of course, is why Defra wants him on board).
“I believe in compromise, but the current situation leads to grumpy farmers who no longer trust government or environmentalists, and a whole new breed of rabble rousers who know exactly how to play to their own tribe,” he says.

Rebanks is sometimes referred to as “Britain’s best-known farmer”, but surely that crown belongs to Jeremy Clarkson? “He is massively helpful,” Rebanks says, “whether you like him or not. I’m not a petrol head but he’s got people seeing how insane the economics of farming are. I’ve had more non-farmers approach me to talk about farming because of Clarkson’s Farm than anything else that has happened in the last 15 years.”

The sins Rebanks attributes to Defra happened under Conservative ministers. Does he think the incoming Labour team might do better?

He has just come back, he tells me, from attending a fringe meeting at this autumn’s Labour party conference. “I’ve never done anything like that before in my life. I’ve never been to anything political.” He is not even a member of the National Farmers’ Union (NFU).
Yet the farming minister, Daniel Zeichner, who has also been praised in these pages earlier this year by Tom Bradshaw, current president of the NFU, has visited the Rebanks’ farm not once but twice.

“He’s saying the right things. I’m absolutely confident he believes in a compromise between farming and nature, but I am not absolutely confident that he is going to in an argument with the Treasury on the right amount of money so we have the nature we need.”

If he doesn’t in Rachel Reeves’ forthcoming budget, what will be the consequence? “Instead of a gain of nature as has been planned, I think we are going to have a loss of nature. If you short change the spend, we all lose. It is very simple,” says Rebanks.
His passion for restoring nature is what took him to Norway for his new book, The Place of Tides, to a remote, uninhabited rocky island on the edge of the coastal shelf in the Vega archipelago, a Unesco World Heritage Site. He spent 10 weeks there working alongside two elderly women, Anna and Ingrid. Each spring they are single-handedly reviving a long-standing tradition of protecting nesting eider ducks, and harvesting their feathers once they leave their nests for duvets.

It feels like a bit of a departure from the very English setting and subject matter of his two previous books. “I went there,” he explains, “to get away from people, from history, to step out of all the stuff that worries me in the world.”
The trip also came four years after the death of his father, Tom, from cancer. Their relationship hadn’t always been easy, especially in his late teens when he left school and they were working side by side on the farm.

“At the time it was getting a bit desperate financially, he was getting a bit nasty, I was getting a bit uppity. There were some nasty fights.”

It was only in retrospect, he says, that he realised that taking himself off to a remote Norwegian island was a form of grieving. “In the years before I went there, I’d lost my dad, my aunties and all that older generation that anchored me, but on the island I found myself with people who were like them.”

He remembers shaking Anna’s hand for the first time. “I got a chill. Her hands felt like my grandmother’s hands, boney, sinewy, working-class hands. She was my people. She didn’t give a toss about my books.”

He makes it sound as though he had reached a crisis point in his life, yet inside his Cumbrian farmhouse, an old barn that he has been able to extend with the significant royalties from his books to better accommodate his growing family of four, Molly, Bea, Isaac and Tom, aged from seven to 18, the atmosphere is unmistakably one of warmth and love and life.

His two sons are just home from school, his mother-in-law is helping with the school-run, while Bea, who works on the farm and wants to follow in his footsteps, pops in and out. Missing is Rebanks’ wife, Helen, who in 2023 published her own book, The Farmer’s Wife, which followed her husband’s into the best-sellers’ charts.

Helen’s book, The Farmer’s Wife, has been adapted into a stage play Credit: Joanne Coates

Are they setting themselves up to become the real-life Phil and Jill Archer for the nation? He smiles. “I’ve only ever listened to The Archers for half an episode. That was enough”.

His wife is currently on a trip to London to see a stage dramatisation of her book. Will there be similar adaptations of his books? “I must have been asked about 20 times to be in a documentary about my life and I’ve turned them all down. I don’t like being recognised any more than I am.”

Helen came from another farming family and grew up close by. “She was the swotty, academic farmer’s daughter, determined to get out of the small town we had gone to school in. We met when I was 21 and she was 17.”

He credits her with awakening ambition in him after a misspent, “rough-round-the-edges” youth, encouraging him to go to night school to get his A-levels, and landing a place at Magdalen College, Oxford, to read history.

“I didn’t like it,” he recalls of his university days. “I had a vague, chippy and I now realise completely pointless hatred of whoever ‘them’ was, as if everyone at Oxford was one thing and I had to beat them. I could have enjoyed it more.”

It didn’t stop him getting a double first. His initial plan had been to use Oxford as a stepping stone to get a job that would pay him enough to save the farm.
Instead, he returned after graduating to work on the farm, but it had given him the courage in his spare time to attempt to realise an ambition to write that he had developed while reading his way through the novels on his “obsessively bookish” mother’s shelves. It is a habit he still makes time to indulge in, having just finished the Booker Prize shortlist (Percival Everett’s James is his top tip).

The Place of Tides, marks quite a shift in his writing, more novel than memoir, realised in rhythmic, poetic language. But it is familiar territory, namely his struggle to balance the timeless with the timely, tradition with the changes that need to be made for a changing future.
He first caught a glimpse of Anna on a 2012 visit to Norway. To make ends meet he had taken on some consultancy work on sustainability for Unesco. “I got 40 minutes off the coast, looked back at this panorama of mountains and rocks and sea and thought: ‘This might be the best place I’ve ever, ever been.’”

It’s quite a compliment for someone who believes his farm in the Lake District is the place he always wants to live. But something else caught his eye that day.
“These quiet, unheralded women were working out there with the eider ducks and I was curious. I remember thinking at the time: ‘I wonder if anyone else has written about this?’”

The challenge of finding a subject for his third book revived the memory. “I was probably a little bit dazed and confused after the first two books,” he concedes. “All sorts of weird things come out of success.” His second book, English Pastoral, won the Wainwright Prize for nature writing and was – like his debut, The Shepherd’s Life, translated into more than a dozen languages.

With his family’s blessing, he returned to spend the duck season with Anna and Ingrid. Anna comes from a long line of men and women who have done this work, stretching all the way back to a great, great grandfather in 1852. Nowadays, though, the tradition is teetering on the edge of extinction.
“I went there to get away from my worries about the future, but it was there. The sea is broken [by overfishing that has decimated the local fishing industry]. The people are getting old…”

From his trip to Norway he has brought back a variety of things. “It was the first time I had spent time in a place dominated by women, with women’s rules. I had to really think about that, embarrassingly, for the first time in my life.”

And on the farm? “I came back determined to mend home as Anna was determined to mend her island and its ecosystem. On the farm, we had been doing our bit, but we have definitely gone up a gear.”

He believes they are doing “the best farming we have ever done. We might now be one of the most progressive farms in Britain on transforming our soil. We have 15 worms per spade-full, when our neighbours have four. We need more worms in the soil.”

Not, he adds, that the day-to-day headaches of hill-farming ever go away.
“One of the biggest problems for anyone who farms around here is dogs off-lead that attack sheep. If we walk up the fell now where my sheep are, I can guarantee that there will be at least three people walking with their dogs off-lead, despite the signs telling them not to. They have an amazing sense of entitlement.”

What does he do when he catches them? “I give them a stern telling off. My dad would have said their dogs should be shot.”

Another medium-term cloud on the horizon is one that hovers over many family farms – succession. How will he sort it out with four children?
He shakes his head. “I haven’t got a clue what the perfect succession looks like when the capital value of land is wildly higher than its agricultural value because it is a tax dodge for corporates and pension funds.”

I can’t help thinking that whatever his reservations, accepting a seat round the Defra table would enable this articulate and thoughtful man at least a chance to impact on government policy in such matters. But then he has been burnt once already. In 2018 he resigned shortly after joining a Defra panel set up by then Secretary of State, Michael Gove, after environmentalists complained it had too many farmers on it.

Isn’t he actually both – farmer and environmentalist? “Yes,” he replies with a laugh. “And I need to show that there is a place for farmers like me in the environment of the future, and that we can deliver multiple things from the same piece of land.”

The Place of Tides by James Rebanks is published by Allen Lane on October 17 at £22.

Conservationists said field of rare flowers was ‘latest victim of overly simple approach to climate change’

Helena Horton – 19 February 2020

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/02/19/nestle-forced-apologise-rip-trees-planted-part-eco-drive-destroyed

Nestlé has apologised and ripped up saplings planted in an eco drive at one of its partner farms after the planting destroyed a meadow filled with rare wild flowers.

This was once a meadow filled with rare wild flowers, but is now full of plastic-encased saplings Credit: Wild Lakeland

Planting trees has become a popular way for farms and companies to carbon offset as businesses are urged to move towards being “net zero”, or carbon neutral.

But the dairy farm in Cumbria has been criticised by conservation charities after digging up a meadow that had been filled with Butterfly Orchids, Betony, Scabious, Restharrow and Harebell to make way for plastic-covered saplings.

Local conservation ecologist Rob Dixon, who noticed that trees had been planted in the meadow at Gateshaw Mill Farm, told The Telegraph: “Wildflower rich grasslands are a increasingly rare and extremely valuable habitat that rely on active management, such as livestock grazing, to keep them diverse and healthy.

“Tree planting is highly unsuitable on areas of wild flower rich grassland as the change in management and eventual shade will lead to the extinction of the wild flowers at expense of a few coarse, shade-tolerant plant species.

“There will be a huge knock-on effect on the bees, butterflies and vast array of wildlife that is dependent on the habitat.”

What the meadow looked like in full bloom

Conservation charity Plantlife said the practice of planting woodlands was widespread and businesses needed to exercise caution when doing it.

Dr Trevor Dines, the organisation’s botanical specialist, said: “This ancient Cumbrian grassland, with its abundance of rare flowers, has become the latest victim of an overly simple approach to climate change. In the understandable rush to plant trees, we risk sacrificing some of our most wildlife-rich habitats.”

While popular opinion suggests planting trees is one of the best ways to save the planet, meadows can actually store more carbon.

Dr Dines called this “plant blindness”, explaining: “Grassland soils have the highest carbon stock of any habitat in Britain and – with around 70-100 species of plants growing in a single field, and three million individual flowers per hectare in summer – are unrivalled crucibles of biodiversity.

“This is a classic case of plant blindness – it’s just a grassy field, right? Within the next two to three years, the orchids, betony and harebells will disappear from this corner of Cumbria as the canopy closes over and the sunlight recedes.

“Species-rich meadows and grasslands now occupy just one per cent of our land area. The terrible irony is that the inevitable disappearance of the flowers, insects and other dependent wildlife has been done in the name of the environment.”

Dr Dines added that ancient meadows needed the same level of protection as ancient woodland.

A spokeswoman for Nestlé said the farm would be removing the trees and trying to restore the meadow.

“As part of our partnership with First Milk, Nestlé’s milk supplier, we support a long running sustainability programme to empower and support Cumbrian dairy farmers to play a vital role in the sustainable stewardship of agricultural land,” she said.

“The programme of landscape management, of which tree planting is just one element, also looks to improve watercourse management, enhance biodiversity, improve soil quality, increase climate change resilience and reduce carbon emissions.

“We were alerted to the tree planting at Gateshaw Mill recently, which was carried out with the best intentions. We are working with the farm, the Game and Wildlife Conservation Trust and the Woodland Trust to rectify the mistake and restore the meadow without any lasting damage being caused.”

Tenth of farmland to be axed for net zero

Solar farms, tree planting and wildlife habitats to replace food production as Labour deals fresh blow to rural life

Farmland currently used for food production will be turned over to other uses