Thread by @MilesKing10

While lots of organisations have criticised Therese Coffey's comment that beaver introductions aren't a priority of the Govt, there's a far more insidious message contained within her 17th October letter to EFRA cttee. She doesn't mention conservation as a priority, once. 🧵 1/8

The Govt overall priority is "increasing biodiversity". This means "Our priority in achieving our ambitious targets on biodiversity is our focus on habitat restoration and creation, and improved connectivity of biodiversity corridors to tackle pressures on species..." 2/8

"including pollution, unsustainable use of resources & climate change, with targeted action to recover specific species." There is no mention of maintaining priority habitat at all. Priority Habitat only gets 3 mentions in the 262 pages of the Environmental Improvement Plan 3/8

The top priority to help species must be protecting their existing habitat, which by definition will be almost entirely Priority Habitat (S.41 NERC). Everything else comes after that. Yet this top priority gets no mention in the Coffey letter, and scant mention in the EIP 4/8

We know SSSIs are the main resource of Priority Habitat in England, although for some PH, a lot of the resource sits outside that network (Lowland Meadows for example). We also know that the Govt cut back monitoring of SSSI condition from 2010 so we're now flying blind. 5/8

We also know the main mechanism for protecting PH outside SSSIs - Countryside Stewardship, has been not been taken up by farmers anywhere near enough to ensure PH outside SSSIs is being well managed. Not that we would know anyway as there's no national monitoring scheme. 6/8

We don't even know where all the PH is, and we've been waiting for a proper National Grassland Inventory to record priority grasslands for 15 years. But in some ways that's all irrelevant now, because the Govt has told us their priorities are "habitat restoration & creation" 7/8

After all, it's much easier to measure habitat created, through agri-environment or BNG. Habitat restoration is trickier because when do you know a habitat has been restored? Easy enough though to make up metrics that can be reported on without worrying about actual outcomes. 8/8