A good thing?
Red tape will be removed for conservationists who want to rewild their land under a shake up of the environmental regulators, my colleague Helena Horton reports.
Rachel Reeves and environment secretary Steve Reed will remove the need for trusted partners - conservationists who have been working on nature schemes for some time - to apply to Natural England or the Environment Agency for permission to restore nature, as part of today’s push to cut red tape.
At the moment, if conservationists want to restore rivers or dig wetland areas, for example, they have to apply to multiple regulators for approval, in what can be a time-consuming and costly process.
Defra said the new plan will allow trusted nature conservation and environmental partners “to move fast on restoring nature without applying to multiple regulators for permissions.”
Jake Fiennes, director of conservation at the Holkham Estate in North Norfolk said the current system makes it far too difficult to restore the rare chalk stream running through the national nature reserve, or to dig wetland areas for the many endangered wading birds which call the estate their home.
He said:
Red tape will be removed for conservationists who want to rewild their land under a shake up of the environmental regulators, my colleague Helena Horton reports.
Rachel Reeves and environment secretary Steve Reed will remove the need for trusted partners - conservationists who have been working on nature schemes for some time - to apply to Natural England or the Environment Agency for permission to restore nature, as part of today’s push to cut red tape.
At the moment, if conservationists want to restore rivers or dig wetland areas, for example, they have to apply to multiple regulators for approval, in what can be a time-consuming and costly process.
Defra said the new plan will allow trusted nature conservation and environmental partners “to move fast on restoring nature without applying to multiple regulators for permissions.”
Jake Fiennes, director of conservation at the Holkham Estate in North Norfolk said the current system makes it far too difficult to restore the rare chalk stream running through the national nature reserve, or to dig wetland areas for the many endangered wading birds which call the estate their home.
He said:
A Natural England source agreed that the system needed reform. They said:“The Flood Risk Activity Permits are currently a disaster. Those of us helping deliver the government’s environmental targets are regulated to death while those committing freshwater ecocide do so with near impunity.
It’s an opt-in policing system that penalises compliance and desperately needs reform. Permissions and consents can be very onerous, costly, and take a long time to come through.”
“The present regulations slow down good things as well as potentially harmful things. The fact is that our regulatory frameworks were designed to stop bad stuff happening (very important), but now we need approaches that are more about encouraging good things.”