Cooling Marshes, Kent, 7th December 2014

Friday 22 October 2010

CSR Verdict

Like many others, I spent much of Wednesday sitting in with the radio on, scanning the internet for news and opinion on the budget cuts. It may show my rookie colours but one of my first impressions of George Osborne’s speech was that things didn’t seem too bad. The tone was positive and the emphasis invariably on ‘the future’. It took me a moment or two to realise that this was a politician speaking and such tricks are part of their trade. With such a bewildering amount of information to sift through I reserved special interest for the plight of the environment sector.
As a nature lover I can’t help but worry about the state of the environment, so at a personal level it is perhaps the cuts dealt to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) that hold most meaning. Unfortunately the general consensus seems to be that DEFRA took a particularly hard beating: an 8% cut in annual spending or a total of 29% by the end of the review period in 2014-15. This was apparently the third highest cut dealt to any department.
To me that seems quite a lot but I find it hard to comprehend just what these cuts really mean and when we will begin to see the effects. Clearly priorities will have to be reviewed and it’s likely that some deserving causes will suffer. In this much-heralded ‘Year of Biodiversity’ what will become of our nature reserves and environmental stewardship schemes for example? Juliette Jowit, writing for the Guardian, believes some biodiversity projects are a risk; before pointing out that the “UK spends only about 1/700th of public finance on the web of life which underpins our economy, health and society”. Way to go.
Although the cuts are significant, they’re the facts we have to work with. It’s an embarrassment sure, from supposedly the ‘greenest Government ever’, but it means there’s now an even greater responsibility placed in our hands to look after the environment.
Neat summary of what it all means here:

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