Sheffield Moors Partnership

The career conservationists were out in numbers last night to attend the South West Community Assembly meeting at Tapton School. Primed by RSPB/Eastern Moors Partnership to be there to support their bid to expand onto the Sheffield Moors this was an effective show of force on the part of the conservation industry locally. The planning of the campaign has been pretty well orchestrated and there was little doubt that councillors would be easily persuaded. It is pretty rare anyway for our councillors to make anything of a go at scrutinising anything that's put to them. There may have been some achievement in our getting them to insist that a consultation should go on in which the people of Sheffield would be considered stakeholders. My impression is that the bird people were not too happy with this and would obviously have preferred a quick fix. There had been signs all the way through that attempts would be made to jump people into this decision. This is a tactic often used by officers to bounce elected members into making rash decisions characterised by the use of phrases like a "window of opportunity" and "unique chance"; I've even heard "once in a lifetime". It is then not long after that local people realise the implications of a decision that was not properly examined by those whose job should be to shine a sceptical light on every proposal. I remember SWT's clever wheeze eleven years ago when they told us that Heritage Lottery Fund had ring-fenced funds available for grants to wildlife trusts but Sheffield would have to hand over Blacka Moor and other places for the sites to get the benefit of the funds. HLF told me indignantly that any organisation including the council was eligible for that money. We now seem to have a new organisation called the Sheffield Moors Partnership. These conservation exploiters do like to stick together telling the same story of how the land has to be managed - Ah there's grants in them there hills.