Initially, ministers wanted to sell the nature reserves outright, but quickly found there were no takers. So for several months they have been talking about handing them over to the National Trust, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, the Wildlife Trusts Partnership, the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust, the Woodland Trust, Butterfly Conservation and Plantlife.
These charities do not object in principle to taking on the reserves, and all have the necessary expertise to run them. However, they have raised a number of objections, the key one being money, and in a written warning to Defra, the charities state that Government must ensure sustainable funding packages are in place to support delivery throughout the length of service delivery agreements. Translation: you will have to pick up the cost for the whole length of the time we run one of your former nature reserves.
There is a further financial caveat: the charities insist that the government must comply with regulations which safeguard staff when their jobs are transferred. This means that the Government will have to guarantee the salaries and pension arrangements of Natural England employees now managing the reserves, which are likely to be more generous than those prevailing in the charities.
The full cost to Natural England of running its reserves is £9.9m annually: this is made up of £4.5m for maintenance and other running costs, and £5.4m in staff costs. If the wildlife charities together insist on a similar sum for taking on the reserves, the potential savings will simply disappear. Some observers think this puts the whole idea in jeopardy. A senior government source admitted that it was now having to think through lots of different funding models.
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