By John Knox
Scottish Natural Heritage (SNH) has signalled a change in emphasis to focus more on using Scotland’s natural assets to create jobs and boost economic growth.
In its latest strategy document, the government agency says its ambition over the next five years “is that Scotland’s natural assets will generate wealth for all, sustaining us and improving our health, lifestyles and culture”.
The agency has often been criticised for being too zealous in its efforts to protect Sites of Special Scientific Interest. Critics say it puts landscape and wildlife before people and their need for jobs, housing and energy supplies. The new strategy will fit better into the hard-nosed age of austerity and the Scottish government’s priority of economic growth.
“We will streamline our guidance to deliver national and local priorities, simplify regulation and speed up decision-making,” the strategy document says. “Our advice will be evidence-based, proportionate and concise and will show decision-makers the levels of risk and uncertainty to which they may be exposed.”
So in future, there will be less emphasis on protecting eagles and rare ants and more on how windfarms and housing developments can go ahead without harming wildlife and beautiful landscapes. SNH will be trying to avoid the kind of trouble its objections encountered over projects such as the Boat of Garten housing development, the Beauly to Denny electricity line, the Lewis windfarm, the Trump golf course and the hedgehog eradication programme on Uist.
Conservationists will be alarmed at this swerve towards economic growth and they will be pointing out that SNH has a duty – in law and under European and other international treaties – to protect Scotland’s wildlife and the 20 per cent of Scotland’s land area that is covered by environmental legislation. They will also argue that natural assets are worth protecting for the long-run health of the economy and for the wellbeing of the human population – by which is meant a clean environment, more recreation and exercise facilities and the promotion of an outdoor culture.
These are points that SNH recognise. Its strategy document notes, at the very beginning, that Scotland’s natural assets contribute more than 10 per cent of economic output (£17.2 billion a year) and one in seven of all full-time jobs. But it says – reading between the lines – that the balance has to be altered in favour of immediate economic growth, to tie in with the political mood of the country.
SNH is also recognising that, in the words of the chairman Andrew Thin, it “will be part of a smaller public sector and will work with others to deliver the government’s outcomes”. The agency has already been through the bonfire of the quangos and has survived, but has to take on the work of the disbanded Deer Commission.
Thus its budget of £65 million and its 800 staff will be stretched more thinly across the country and it will have to work more closely with local councils, the National Park Authorities and the conservation organisations. It cites the Central Scotland Green Network – connecting parks, farmland and other open spaces in a green corridor between Edinburgh and Glasgow – as an example of partnership working to serve the needs of mainstream communities.
Other new responsibilities include expert advice on rural development, biodiversity, marine planning, farming reform, climate change and the move to a low-carbon economy. Plenty to be getting on with and a long way from issuing glossy brochures about birds and bees.
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