What's Good for Them

Empire Building

Sheffield Telegraph’s front page this week is about SWT trying to buy Grenoside Woods. For SWT this is an important move because they like to get in the news and it fits in with their general strategy of expanding their empire. SWT are about as managerial an outfit as could be found outside Tesco’s and Walmart with the added ingredients of questionable competence and not being accountable to their customers or the market. Every move SWT makes is about trying to impress people with whatever image they are wanting to project. When they first persuaded a group of sleepy councillors 10 years ago that they should be given Blacka Moor and various other sites on a 30 year lease it didn’t take long to discover that ‘on the ground’ in practical terms they had little idea of what they were about. As someone with knowledge of the inner workings of Sheffield City Council said to me at the time (rather generously) “They are on a very steep learning curve”. Places like Blacka suffered because of this with outbreaks of destructive management of which typical examples were extensive tree poisoning and barbed wire installation. It was as if the governors of a large comprehensive school had handed over the maintenance of buildings and grounds to a group of Year 9 pupils. What they did seem to concentrate their energies on was building up their organisation by appointing managers for everything from public relations to putting out the office cat; each time we blinked there was a new manager.
To a puzzled observer it hardly seemed to matter what their business was. It could equally well be an agency delivering hot meals to the housebound; the core business was management itself. Being called a 'Wildlife Trust' was quite good for fund raising because you could always find a few nice old ladies to become subscribers after they had watched those lovely wildlife programmes on the telly. But the reality was they would accept grants from more or less anybody and there were plenty such about often from government departments with new job creation schemes. SWT's expertise was form filling - in particular forms of application for grants. They knew how to inflate claims of their own ‘achievements’ to impress those with fat cheque books. If money had been available for employing school leavers to perform sundry chores with nothing to do with wildlife they did not hesitate to apply for it.
Some of us had, rather naively, hoped that anyone taking over Blacka would start from a position of knowing and enjoying the place and wanting to spend time there doing what they could to keep it special. This was not the way SWT saw things. People arrived with no previous experience of the place with an air of "Here I am, your new manager!" For them Blacka was a resource to be exploited for the benefit of their organisation. Their managerial approach was at odds with the value that ordinary people placed on Blacka. As for work on the ground such as the maintenance of access, things were done (often badly) if grants were available to fund them. If grants were not there.... nothing was done. If grants were available they still did the work even if local people pleaded against the project.
So those who know and use Greno Woods should be warned that the current move is not about the woods and the wildlife. It is about SWT and what is good for them.