The PDNPA has decided to offer a partnership role to an organisation who will manage the estate on behalf of the national park. This kind of thing is not very different to what has happened in Sheffield where the council gave large parts of its countryside assets to Sheffield Wildlife Trust on a lease. In the case of the Eastern Moors estate the PDNPA has put the management out to tender. Two consortiums are bidding. One is the RSPB with the National Trust and the other is SWT along with Derbyshire Wildlife Trust. Nobody who knows anything about SWT on Blacka can have any wish for them to be involved in any further stretches of our countryside in this way. They are simply not competent.
Having found out about this process quite late in the day, the first thing that concerns us is the vision that the potential manager will be expected to implement. This vision can be seen here. There are some things in this statement I might approve of but where is the accountability at this stage? Was there wide consultation in defining this vision? Perhaps there was, but if so why were we not aware of it and able to participate in its formulation? And reading the text it's obvious that the issue of consultation has again been fudged. The part of the document that deals with consultation makes no sense whatsoever, viz:
The brackets just confuse the issue. Who is being consulted? Are the public who know and use these areas involved? What else is being consulted on? How did this get into print when it's logically absurd?"Continued consultation both in house (and with statutory bodies such as EH when appropriate) regarding management works (such as burning, flailing, heather cutting and scrape creation)."
2 comments:
I suspect that the whole point of the intended partnership exercise proposed by the Peak Park Authority is that it will enable more local community engagement in, and influence on, what happens on the Estate. If you have not been involved at all under the current regime, then even if you do not get everything you want out of the future set-up, you will at least have more opportunity to influence it than you have now, no matter who wins the tendering process.
It seems to me that even with their various failings and the management approaches that you do not agree with, SWT do seem to encourage you to participate and raise your concerns (so they are aware of an alternative view when they make their decisions)... which is not something that either RSPB or the National Trust have got an exactly good reputation for. You might be better with the Devil You Know - they are at least local, and they do at least encourage local input.
There’s some merit in your argument and I acknowledge the point you make in theory. But I’ve always wondered if more damage is done to the cause of local democracy and accountability by those who just do their own thing with no consultation, or by those who run an utterly sham process which most people see through. Especially when the results of the supposed consultation are doctored, twisted and even corrupted to give the impression to funding providers that the community supports them. Is it better to have people kept on the outside seething or taken in then cynically used whereby they finish up utterly disillusioned? From ‘their’ point of view the latter is preferable because those who’ve been used like this mostly acceot defeat and don’t return.
The other factor of course is the sheer incompetence of the one outfit. At some point people tend to say “For God’s sake let’s have someone who does a job well even if we don’t like what they’re doing”.
Not an easy choice.
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