Decision to end funding of local environmental record centres attacked.
Adam Vaughan, Sunday 6 March 2016.
Conservationists have criticised the decision to withdraw funding from a network of tens of thousands of local wildlife volunteers who collect data on the health of a variety of species and act as the “eyes and ears” of the government’s nature watchdog.
Local environmental record centres (Lercs), which collect and collate records of everything from great crested newts to bats and are used to inform planning decisions on legally protected species, have been told that a four-year deal to collect data is to end just one year in.
Last year, Natural England began funding almost 40 Lercs, which employ 128 staff across the UK, 500 volunteers in offices and an estimated tens of thousands more who record insects, plants and habitats in their spare time.
Stephen Trotter, the director of the Wildlife Trusts, England, condemned the decision to end the contract early, saying: “Lercs are the basis for much of our knowledge about what’s happening in the natural world and, in a time of climate change and widespread declines of wildlife, now is not the time to be pulling the rug from under them.
“The government has said it wants open data – and so do we. But Natural England needs to value the role and function of these small organisations if it’s going to achieve this. In my view, it is playing a short-term game in which society and the government could live to regret the long-term consequences if the network is allowed to collapse like a set of dominoes.”
Graham Walley, chairman of the National Forum for Biological Recording, many of whose members submit records to the centres, said they were important local services and the funding cut could be a “matter of life or death for some”.
Describing the Lercs as the watchdog’s “eyes and ears”, he added: “I think Natural England are in danger of becoming more isolated by not doing this routine funding of local record centres.”
Natural England said the move had been taken because the data – which is supplied with a licence on how it can be used – did not meet its commitment to an open data agenda.
But Tom Hunt, the national coordinator for the centres, which have had a formal relationship with Natural England for 15 years, said he could not understand the decision as he had had no contact with the watchdog since the current deal was agreed a year ago.
“Despite being the main contact between Natural England and Lercs, I am actually at a loss to understand how this decision has come about … To end this relationship without any consultation and without any clear reasoning or strategy for doing so is baffling,” he said.
The Natural England officer who emailed the Lercs the decision to end the contract conceded that the watchdog appreciated the “impact this news will have on you and your centres”.
Only three of 25 of the centres that responded to an internal poll on the changes said the decision posed an existential threat. But many are run on a shoestring with staff working long hours and volunteers contributing time out of goodwill. A 2010 report by Natural England cautioned that the centres “need a certain level of funding to retain a critical mass”. In 2014-15, Natural England paid the Lercs a total of £205,000; that funding will not be renewed after the end of March.
The agency, an arm of the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, could not say what new source of data would replace that provided by the Lercs, though it does have other sources including the national biodiversity network and records from NGOs.
Some centres warned that the loss of the data from April would put at risk the government regulator’s ability to meets its statutory obligations to protect wildlife and habitats under UK and EU laws. The association of local environment record centres (Alerc) said it supported open data but some of its members had concerns over how the data they provided was used.
A Natural England spokeswoman said the watchdog was “focused on making data – whether that’s information on a protected species, or data on the rural economy – as open and easily accessible to the public as possible.
“We’re currently looking at ways we can better target our spending and resources, which is why we’re shifting our funding away from local environmental records centres, which provide us with data under a licence, towards investing in a more centralised system of data that will enable records and information to be as transparent and accessible as possible.”
Alerc has written to the head of Natural England and the environment secretary, Liz Truss, to protest against the ending of the funding and what it says was only two months’ notice when the partnership required three months’ notice.