Jutting out into the wild Irish Sea, the remote islet of South Stack off Anglesey is a conservation wonderland. Guillemots, puffins and razorbills nest on its vertiginous cliffs.
Such an untouched natural haven requires little upkeep, you might suppose. So I raised an eyebrow when I read that the RSPB, one of the wealthiest charities in the UK – with annual revenues of £170million – had received a grant of £3,353.90 from the Welsh taxpayer to maintain their South Stack site.
What could the money be for? The answer was surprising: to refurbish the toilets in the RSPB cafe.
My surprise turned to incredulity when another grant for South Stack appeared, this time more than 10 times larger – £40,787.87, to do up the pay-and-display car parks and refurbish the cafe. Then, astonishingly, yet another instalment of public money for South Stack. This time a whopping £189,069.69. Such a large sum, I thought, must surely be for a significant conservation measure.
No. It was apparently needed for rebuilding work at the cafe, ‘professional fees’, and ‘fixtures and fittings’.
It all adds up to a total of £233,211.46 from the Welsh taxpayer to the RSPB to do up commercial premises that make them a lot of money – and if you go there, you have to pay £2.50 to park your car.
Jutting out into the wild Irish Sea, the remote islet of South Stack off Anglesey is a conservation wonderland. Puffins nest on its vertiginous cliffs
I don’t blame the RSPB. It is in the nature of large, rich organisations to be greedy. They have targets and financial pressures. If they can get away with finding someone else to pay for the refurbishment of their cafe, they are going to do it.
The fact that a small organisation campaigning to save a local curlew population, for example, might now be unable to obtain funding as a result is just so much collateral damage.
And the sad truth is that, however much the taxpayer forks out, the conservation industry’s hunger for cash will never be satisfied.
They may have already consumed billions but the need for more, we are always told, is desperate and urgent. Whatever the amount invested, the situation always appears to become steadily worse and the sums demanded grow ever larger. Applications for grants from the big beasts of conservation always include a dire warning of what will happen if they don’t get their payout – what some call the ‘Give us the money or the puffin gets it’ section.
A classic example of this can be seen in the RSPB’s application to the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) for £4.3million to protect nesting birds and their eggs on Orkney by eradicating the local stoat population. This was to supplement an award of more than £6million they had received from the EU for the very same purpose.
The precise wording of the application to HLF is interesting. In answer to the question, ‘why do you need lottery funding?’, the answer was unequivocal: ‘The resources required are beyond the means of the partners.’ Scottish Natural Heritage (SNH) put it even more strongly. In its contribution to the application, it said: ‘The resources required are beyond the means of the partners, individually or collectively.’
Such an untouched natural haven requires little upkeep, you might suppose. So I raised an eyebrow when I read that the RSPB had received a grant of £3,353.90 from the Welsh taxpayer to maintain their South Stack site
Neither of those statements is likely to be true. It seems unlikely that they were written in error as the partners had also been given £64,000 by SNH merely to produce their application to the EU and you ought to be able to avoid basic mistakes for that sort of money. RSPB was generating annual surpluses of around £10million at that time and SNH, as a Government-funded quango, could probably have chipped in had they wanted to.
So, they could likely afford to pay for the stoat cull – they just chose to say that they couldn’t.
Multi-million pound payouts like this are forcing people like me, who care deeply about Britain’s nature, to ask a few simple questions. Is giving shedloads of cash to a small number of already rich and powerful non-government organisations really the best way to deal with the problems our countryside faces? Who is getting the money and for what? Are the inevitably limited resources achieving sustainable outcomes? Are the recipients providing value for money?
Finding the answers to these questions should be easy but it’s not, as none of the participants is keen on being scrutinised.
For instance, the RSPB’s published accounts do not include enough detail to allow us to determine if the £8,604,000 it was given by Defra in 2023/24 achieved any sustainable outcomes. Similarly, while the National Trust’s annual accounts allow us to see that it received £8,935,000 of taxpayers’ cash from the Defra-sponsored quango Natural England in the same year, the Trust does not allow us to assess whether this vast sum constituted value for money. The National Trust claims it is too poor to do even small but important things.
Three years ago, a university study highlighted in a BBC report claimed that mass culling by gamekeepers was driving mountain hares to extinction in the Peak District.
This was demonstrably untrue. But not only had the paper’s author refused point-blank to talk to the gamekeepers or moor owners in the course of his research – in case, as he tellingly said, it upset his sponsors – he had used a daytime counting method of his own invention.
The tried and tested system for counting mountain hares is to look for them at night. They are nocturnal, after all. The Peak District hares weren’t going extinct – they were just asleep.
Three years ago, a study highlighted in a BBC report claimed that culling by gamekeepers was driving mountain hares to extinction in the Peak District. But the author had counted them during the day, when they were asleep
To sort this out, the body that administers our National Parks called everyone together, to organise surveys using both counting systems to allow a comparison to be made of the results.
Unfortunately, before the first count, the National Trust’s head office announced they could not afford to send a member of staff for three hours to count the very hares that they had recently been so vociferous about saving.
I looked up their accounts. They had a net income from investments of £95million, an annual income of £763million, and carried forward balances of £1.5billion. In the year in question, they reported a surplus, or what you might call a profit, of £177,946,000.
You can see the problem. An organisation worth a mere £1.5billion and only making a profit of £178million obviously can’t afford three hours overtime.
It keeps happening. Take the £244,000 obtained by RSPB to save the black grouse in North Wales. They received the money despite telling the Heritage Lottery Fund in a previous application that black grouse, which had more or less disappeared under their management at Vyrnwy in Powys, would become extinct there if they didn’t get £3.3million which, in the event, they were not awarded.
Other organisations, often one-man operations run by those passionate about saving wildlife and habitats, will also have applied for that money.
But is it likely that the successful bid will come from the people who are arguably best at conserving black grouse or from the organisation that is brilliant at writing applications?
The system is designed to favour the big beasts of the conservation industry. After all, how could a gamekeeper with a Biro outbid the RSPB, an organisation that spends £42million a year on fundraising?
Despite having less than 1 per cent of the Welsh population of black grouse on their own land, the RSPB seized the opportunity, and used its huge resources to snatch that £244,000.
All of these applications are huge and packed with jargon, but raise questions about whether the grant-givers actually read them. In an application for funding to produce an online pamphlet about rising sea levels in Dyfi, west Wales, the RSPB described one of its aims: ‘We will upskill our Fundraising Development Team through industry-led courses in areas such as data presentation and use of AI in fundraising.’
Really? In what world is it reasonable to give scarce resources to one of the richest conservation organisations on the planet, to improve their ability to extract money using AI?
What a hopeless mess. What a waste of scarce resources. What a tragic lost opportunity. Can’t anyone see that it isn’t working?
- Ian Coghill is a conservationist and former chairman of the Game & Wildlife Conservation Trust. A version of this article was originally published by Scribehound Countryside.
