Wildlife cutbacks - Surrey County Council

[JohnR]

The Council’s plan to cut funding under its 50-year agreement with the Surrey Wildlife Trust to zero by 2021 will result in all the jobs of the Trust’s 16 rangers becoming redundant. Few of these very experienced and dedicated staff are going to be re-employed in the much smaller organisation that will replace them. The loss of experience and capacity will be highly detrimental to Surrey’s countryside - the likelihood is that footpaths and bridleways will not be properly maintained; woodlands, downlands and heaths will increasingly be taken over by scrub and invasive plants, and sensitive habitats - heaths, chalk downland and coppiced woodlands (homes to nationally rare and threatened species such as the dormouse) will be lost. If we care about and enjoy the places that make Surrey special, these unnecessary and damaging funding cuts must be reversed. The funding to avoid these job losses is small – less than 15p per head of population – in comparison to the risk of the harm caused.
There is currently a petition - http://petitions.surreycc.gov.uk/SWTfunding/ - to try to persuade SCC to reverse their decision. If you haven't already done so, please consider signing.

[peterc]

Bad news so I have just signed the petition, John.

ATB

Peter

[David M]

I am number 1,822 on the list of signatories.

Best wishes in your quest to have this decision reversed.

[Jack Harrison]

This is just an example of the continuous cut back in services of various kinds because of budget constraints: a direct result of keeping the public “happy” with a low-taxation regime.

I draw a parallel. Roads today are full of potholes to a degree that I have never seen before in my life due to inadequate funding. So while I pay less tax, I pay out perhaps even more in car repairs. Call me what you like, but I think we should pay more tax and see fewer loses like the funding in Surrey.

I am cynical about petitions. This one might win but something else would be cut instead.

My views are not new.

John Ruskin: “It's unwise to pay too much, but it's worse to pay too little”.

Jack

[NickMorgan]

John,
I have signed the petition, but I fear the "powers that be" may not take any notice at all. I suspect that they only care about the bottom line. Sadly the income for local authorities has been cut so much that these sorts of cuts are very common. I work in the Countryside Services team of a local authority and we are trying to defend our positions in the latest service review. We haven't been given any clue as to how much is needed to be saved or if any jobs are at risk.
Certainly across Scotland ranger services seem to be an easy hit. I don't really understand why, as the saving to the local authority is minimal. Rangers tend to work with very limited budgets and provide a very efficient service. We have hundreds of conservation volunteers working for us and they do thousands of hours of work, maintaining paths and improving habitats in local nature reserves. To maintain a path network doesn't cost much, but the benefits are very great.
Generally in tough times it is the environment that suffers.

[Sylvie_h]

Hi John,

I've signed the petition. Like Jack, I think the solution is for people to pay more tax, this would help saving 1/ the precious nature reserves that we have left in this country and 2/ the NHS which is in a dire state. There is money for Brexit (for which 60 billion £ were borrowed) but not for saving nature reserves and keeping people with cancer alive.... wrong priorities again.
Sylvie

[JohnR]

My thanks to everyone who supported the petition. I always feel that the powers that be take no notice, but for me it's the only way to say that I object. Having said that, the Leader of Surrey County Council has recently said that there will now be no referendum to put the rates up by 15% in order to fund social care, so our cries are sometimes noted.

Jack,
We always know when we are back in Surrey from a neighbouring county because the roads change from being reasonable to rough. I do wonder what the county spends its money on.