A multi-million pound levy on gravel and sand extraction used for nature projects will now be pocketed by the Treasury - it's another false economy from Defra
Having united the Socialist Workers Party with the National Trust, the UK's department for environment (Defra) has pulled off another unlikely pairing: the Mineral Products Association (MPA) and the Wildlife Trusts.
The issue is the pocketing by the Treasury of about �20m a year in taxes from the aggregates industry ? gravel and sand quarrying ? that had until now been spent on conservation schemes.
"I can't understand why the government has cut this funding. The money comes from a tax that encourages industry to reduce the amount of quarrying, and the industry is happy to see this money used to put something back, for nature and people," Jeremy Biggs told me.
He is director of Pond Conservation, which, along with the RSPB and others, has joined the campaign to reverse the cut. "Cutting the aggregates fund will reduce the quality of habitat restoration after quarries are worked out, and seems unbelievably short-sighted and counter-productive."
The aggregates levy ? �2 per tonne for the 200m tonnes a year the UK produces ? goes directly into the general tax pot, but a small proportion was used to pay for local conservation projects. One is in prime minister David Cameron's own constituency in Oxfordshire: the Lower Windrush Valley Project. Hundreds more around the country have benefited from the scheme, which ends on 1 April.
Nigel Jackson, the MPA's chief executive, says: "Our industry has provided a legacy of sites of great conservation value. It is vital that aggregates levy revenue continues to be used for this vital purpose."
You can see his point, given the conclusion of a December 2010 independent review commissioned by Defra itself: "Overall, the value-for-money assessment is good and many areas offer evidence of excellent potential value for money, particularly in the medium term."
A Defra spokesman told me: ""In a very tight spending review, we had to look closely at where we could make best use of the available funds. The government is committed to protecting our natural heritage, which is why we're producing the first white paper on the natural environment in 20 years, and why funding for Higher Level Stewardship (HLS) will increase by more than 80% by 2014."
The HLS budget increase is indeed very good news and the white paper ? depending on what it says ? may also be welcome. And conservationists have told me they were impressed by the work done by environment secretary Caroline Spelman at the UN biodiversity summit.
But like flood defence spending, this cut means an end to valuable and cost-effective work. Once again, Spelman's spending review gift to Cameron of the biggest budget cut in Whitehall has forced another false economy on her department.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/damian-carrington-blog/2011/mar/15/mining-biodiversity
Chelsea United States Alexander McCall Smith Kazakhmys Office for National Statistics Lancashire
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