Burbage Agri-Environment Scheme

The Sheffield Town Hall officers and cabinet members who are so horrified at the idea of public scrutiny have secured an agreement with Natural England via Kier Asset Management and the National Trust to manage Burbage Moor as farmland for ten years. This has of course been undertaken with no public discussion.

The details of this agreement were not supposed to be made public. After all it's only public land, so why should the public be informed about? - as for being involved in any kind of meaningful discussions before the decision ... well let's not be ridiculous!

The detailed papers sent to me following my Freedom of Information request can be found HERE.

There are important reasons why this information is being put online here. Natural England as a public body is expected to conform to requirements of transparency and accountability. Some of the time it performs this well. At others individual officers are not up to scratch on these principles. The same goes for Sheffield City Council. Doubtless they consider that there are other priorities and being answerable to the people who employ them doesn't come high on the list. N.E. has in fact devised a rather fine scheme for showing people online where the agri environment agreements are and who gets the money and how much. It's via a map that is called Magic. You can see it here. I've spent quite some time looking at it. Using it I've been able to see, for instance, the details of agreements with some private farmers in the Peak District. But when you home in on Burbage Moor you get the following message:

AG00429811

Scheme

Entry Level plus Higher Level Stewardship

Customer Name

Unavailable

Town

Unavailable

Start Date

01/06/2013

Total Cost of Agreement (£)

Unavailable

Amount Paid to Date (£)

Unavailable

Total Area Under Agreement (ha)

905.58

You may be forgiven for coming to the conclusion that the public don't matter very much. Why indeed should we know what's happening to our land?

For example Messrs Wilcockson in Hope Valley is receiving Entry Level plus Higher Level Stewardship to the value of over £124,000 and that can be seen online easily. That is a private business receiving public money. It's good that we can see what's happening. So why can't we have details of public land in the hands of managers and agencies working supposedly for us, immediately available? What can these officers have to hide? If anyone were to claim that Burbage is a new scheme then surely that makes it even more imperative that we know about it. Later on would be to make it 'water under the bridge' too late to make any worthwhile comment. The ink on any agreement is now well and truly dry. We should have known about this a long time before it happened. Our problem is that the people who are working for us paid with our money have absolutely no commitment to the basic democratic value of transparency: in terms of the democratic expectations in public administration they are still in the first half of the 20th century.