Made in Wales

<prefer to listen here>

There’s something about human nature and anniversaries that I can’t quite get my head around.

I get birthdays, and remembering the passing of friends and loved ones. 

But are organisational anniversaries a thing?

We seem obsessed with using these points in time as key anchors from which to announce the next big thing, launch strategies, make a point

Its like a way to underline a significance of something more than. 

I’m not judging, just you know, observing. 

And reflecting, because I’m really guilty of this too. Despite the sage advice of our once head of comms who warned (repeatedly)against such practice with the sweet bluntness of the best PR professional. Her smile declaring that no one outside of the  organisation would give two hoots about it being some random number of years since such and such law was passed. We on the inside may think we have reached some crucial moment that obviously has be celebrated, but it won’t be obvious or crucial to anyone on the outside, unless we make it so.

Basically, it’s the message that counts, regardless of what day of the year it is.

Her words have been on an uneasy loop in my mind these last few days.

My linked in feed has been a wash with posts of friends, colleagues and fellow designated landscape associates celebrating the 75^th anniversary of National Parks and National Landscapes within England and Wales.  I have seen these proliferate in number,  and added my likes, and hearts, and support emoji responses.  The posts are all on a theme

There is the beauty of real pride of our heritage, a part of the great post war nation building.  A recognition and remembering of a time when governments did brave and wonderful things like  protecting these vast tracts of landscape for the benefit of the each and every one of us. But most of these posts feel like a warning tinged with a fear, an undercurrent of grief, of potential thwarted, legacy lost through successive rounds of funding cuts.  The fear for the future if more money cant be found. 

I also feel this fear viscerally, but I have a horrible and sinking concern, that just calling out the systemic failure in funding will be insufficient to actually ensure the survival of ‘protected landscapes’.  I’m not sure spending more on a broken system will in itself fix the system.

I say all this with a heavy heart.  Anyone who knows me, knows how passionate I am about the role of protected landscapes in a fair and just society.

I have been obsessed with the movement since I was 11 years old.  Our annual camping trips to Beddgelert forest in Eryri – the pinnacle of my working-class-city-dwelling family’s year.  Those days spent in the hills narrated by my father (big in the union) retelling tales of my forebears fight to secure this right for us, to enjoy the countryside, unhindered, for free. 

Tales of the kinder mass trespass, the Manchester Rambler, somehow instilled in me a deep connection between these spaces of nature, and beauty, and how they were a gift to me which I held in the same level of thanks and reverence as other great benevolent acts, like the right to vote, or free healthcare.  In my young mind it conjured imaginings of Edwardian lady Suffragettes, hoofing up petticoated skirts to  march triumphant over the Llanberis pass whilst declaring the countryside the right of us all, whilst handing out free ice-creams.  Those holidays led to the kind of obsessive hobby, which much later with the benefit of a ND diagnosis, I would come to understand as the formation of the most lasting of all my autistic ‘special interests’.  (turns out its not just dinosaurs, or trains that occupy neurodivergent minds). 

It also led to a lifetime of love and connection and belief in the importance of protecting these environments, a love that eventually, by some form of serendipity, or the universe’s great plan (you choose),  turned into a successful and rewarding career in strategic policy.  A career which took me from 29 yr old drop out taking yet another temp admin cover in Brecon Beacons Planning team to  46 year old head of Policy for a Bannau Brycheiniog, proud voice for the value of nature in the big societal challenges we face. 

Proud to represent our vision.

And maybe prouder still of the team that makes all this happen.  Great thinkers, overworked underpaid, that just care passionately about doing the right thing.  Inspiration to keep going despite the funding challenges, the impossible governance structures, the overly bureaucratic processes, completely disproportionate to our organisational size and powers. However not even their unending optimism and hope for the future is enough sometimes.

Its not about the money (money), as Jessie J so aptly philosophises, I could have hustled my way through that I’m sure (just want to make the world sing).  Its more a structural than that.

A couple of months ago I started to write a list of all the things that bothered me about the way National Parks functioned, it went a bit like this

1. National Parks and National Landscapes only real powers are to act as planning authorities.  This skews our function to a focus on the preservation of the Park’s aesthetic value, potentially to the detriment of the way our place’s function (environmentally, socially, ecologically).
2. National Parks and National Landscapes rely on collaborative working to deliver the purposes and duty, working with all public and statutory bodies.  However the language of the Act is woefully weak in holding any such body to account, especially in Wales.
3. As landscape bodies, too often our focus seeks to act within the environmental sphere, to act on the immediate impacts of systemic decline.  We lack of the processes to enable our interventions programme to be delivered at more upstream locations.  Often it is socio-economic issues that drive ecological decline, but we have limited powers, or resources to support such a holistic view of management.
4. We have this weird system of governance that is slow and cumbersome and top down and (I’m going to stop there before this rant gets out of hand.)

My list of gripes are not earth shattering proclamations right,  these are things most people working, living, managing these landscapes would probably list too, probably come up with way more – I haven’t even started to unpick things like the impact of the designation on house prices and as a result, the demographic challenge that brings, or the cost of living, or the  complexity of the planning system,  coupled with the woeful lack of hard and soft infrastructure to service sustainable living….

In fact this list of gripes is so universal, so obvious, that even DEFRA recognises them. 

DEFRA’s 75^th anniversary celebrations came in the form of a slickly produced, landscape soaring video. Where Ministers bedecked in gortex walked a rather misty looking Peak District moor.  Their message, delivered with the benevolence of those bearing the best of gifts, was a promise of reform of  creating better systems of governance and funding create a resource fit for the 21^st century.

This announcement is so welcomed,

But (you knew there was a but right)

Not all protected landscapes are in England.

As things stand, not all protected landscapes will be supported by DEFRA’s eloquent vision. 

Not that I’m complaining.

I’m just jealous.

It just doesn’t feel fair.

So the great reform, is great partial reform, its a great reform for English National Parks and designated landscapes.  National Parks who are already fundamentally financially better off than their Welsh counterparts.

And again on average, Welsh National Parks serve a resident and surrounding population rank more highly across indices of deprivation than our English counterparts.

National Park	Grant Funding (2023/24)
Lake District	£8.372 million
Peak District	£8.103 million
Yorkshire Dales	£6.459 million
North York Moors	£6.029 million
South Downs	£5.836 million
New Forest	£4.907 million
Broads	£3.465 million
Exmoor	£3.937 million
Dartmoor	£4.164 million
Northumberland	£2.343 million
Total (England)	£53.615 million
Snowdonia (Eryri)	£4.505 million
Pembrokeshire Coast	£2.748 million
Brecon Beacons (Bannau)	£2.764 million
Total (Wales)	£10.017 million
Cairngorms	£5.989 million
Loch Lomond & The Trossachs	£4.634 million
Total (Scotland)	£10.623 million
Grand Total	£74.255 million

(Table 1: comparison of grant funding by National Park Authority and Nation 23/4)

What’s more the process of reform will be led by a panel of experts.

Now I don’t have anything against experts, you might even call me one, similarly my friends, colleagues and trusted partners.

But my gut feeling is that this is not enough, I am not sure that these problems can be solved by handing over the search for solutions to experts alone.  Yes we have relevant knowledge (but its just one form of knowledge) we have our perspectives (but not all perspectives). We also have baggage of years of struggle that seems to weigh us down .  What is more, in some cases to be successful reform will require the proverbial turkeys to vote for their festive demise. 

But hang on I hear you dear imagined readers cry, this will be subject to consultation, everyone will have an opportunity to contribute.

Potentially, but in reality, this allows a self selecting audience, who have the time, resource and ability to respond to the driest of all forms of communication – the written consultation – to make a case to said experts.  Or pay another expert to represent on their behalf.  As anyone who works in policy will tell you, often this becomes the intellectual equivalent of a stag fight, only instead of locking physical horns, the alpha struggle is who can out intellect the other, like a paper based debating society.  A game for the privileged few.

I’m not sure its enough.

So I had what my husband describes (complete with exacerbated eye roll) as ‘my flounce’ .  I decided to celebrate the  75^th anniversary of the National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act, by handing in my resignation, 18 years in, I’m done.

It’s a bit flouncy, but not full on flounce,  as yet I haven’t, you know,  left the metaphorical facebook group, I haven’t blocked any numbers, or turned off all notifications because I don’t want to face the counter challenge, nobody is writing on my socials ‘you alright hun?’.  I still want to be part of this world, and work to make these places the best they possible can.

But, to leave  felt like the only option left, using the only bit of power I had left in me, to say this is not ok anymore.

Because its not ok, it not ok, to leave the stewardship of something so precious as these awe inspiring places to anything other than the nation that they serve.  Or rather the nation and nature that they serve (do you see what I did there).

We need to stop thinking we know it all, or know best, we are not your mother. 

We need to start asking the people that these landscapes were designated for in the first place

• What do you need from the National Parks of the future?
• What do you think their priorities should be?
• How do National Parks fit in your life?

And, what’s more we need to ask the same questions to the natural world, our changing climate, our polluted catchments, our rivers, our air, our soil, our towns, our villages, what do you need to thrive? 

How can we best serve you.

Only by knowing the answers to these questions can we start to create the structures we need to deliver, based on an actual national mandate.   

And

This conversation, needs to be as joyful, and inspiring, and hope inducing as the landscapes are beautiful so that everyone is able to, and actually wants to contribute. 

So people know how important to get involved.

So as I await my P45 and start reluctantly to brush off a CV that is dominated by a lifetime working for Bannau,  I can’t help but wonder what the future will bring for both of us, what of National Parks of the future?  What about my future without National Parks as a steady anchor?

I still truly believe that National Parks and National landscapes are important assets in any nation that is committed to the wellbeing and future resilience of its communities.

I suspect I’m not unique in thinking this way, maybe there are others out there too who have entered into a reluctant agnosticism faced with the gap between our architects vision for us, and the reality of what we can actually deliver.

And I guess that is actually where I am now, in this strange liminality between one world and the next.  Sitting here, listening, thinking, willing and keen to learn the lessons from the past, to roll up my sleeves and get busy with the plans for the future.  Maybe its enough if I just ask the questions now, champion the answers with anyone who will listen.

Listening…

In the hope that in 25 years time, when protected landscapes reach their centenary, we really will have something special to celebrate.

Designing Protected Landscapes V2.0 – who is with me?