Today I’m with wardens and countryside staff from across the region. We’re looking at the two future challenges facing the Trust in the countryside. The first is engagement: we’re a organisation that was started to preserve “green living rooms”, yet people know is better for our houses and pay for entry properties than for the thousands of acres of coast and countryside that we manage for free public access. Of course, as our regional director told us earlier today, part of the blame for this lies with our own marketing, which focuses on pay for entry, to make the money that we can spend on preserving the outdoors.
The second challenge is reducing our environmental footprint. Right now I’m listening to our head of environmental practices talking about how we must adapt our own way of doing things to support our core aim, of preserving the environment. Could we, for example become an oil-free organisation? Many of our countryside buildings are so remote that they are heated with oil held in tanks. If we don’t maintain those tanks properly and one of them leaks, it cancost us as much as £50,000 to clear up the environmental damage.
The two challenges converge in the expected increased demand on the land, for housing, food and energy production as well as, as usual, transport. Is this an opportunity for the NT to raise their profile with the public as protectors of the outdoors?
Of course it’s not just what we can say it’s what we can do. We’re trying to reduce the water we use, by capturing rainwater and replacing toilets with ones that use less, for example. We are installing biomass heating at Uppark and Scotney and controlling the amount if energy we use and the waste we produce. We could be better at interpreting these projects and others.
It’s interesting. We’re listening now to a representative from South East Wood Fuels, he’s shouing us that wood as a fuel costs up to 2,9p per kW/hr, Cetus 3.5p for gas, or 5.5p for oil. So there’s a real business case for going green. It’s also low carbon, locally sourced, and engaging. It could also offer a more sustainable, secure supply. In fact, SEWF ltd are making such a good case, I’m inclined to take the idea back to the school where I’m a governor.
On to water, and it’s interesting to think that as the largest private landowner in the UK we own huge chunks of land that are catchment areas for local water supplies. We are also a small water supplier, in that 900 private water supplies serve our tenants and some of our properties. How do we reconcile our responsibility to produce whole food on our farmland with our responsibility not to pollute the water supply with, for example, slurry from dairy farming spread on our tenant farmer’s field? On top of that our work impacts on flood defence, yet government policies don’t make it easy for us to work wholisticly around these issues.
These two resources, energy from wood and water, suggest there a real opportunity to improve the perception of our countryside as not just a leisure resouce but also a vital part of everyone’s supply chain.
After lunch we’re looking at the other end, waste. There’s a lot we can do about reducing the the waste we produce, as an organisation, but the burning issue for many properties is flytipping. A representative from Kent police talks about his role. Only one other police force nationally has a role like his, dealing with environmental crime. Flytipping is considered anti-social behavior now, which brings it into the police remit, where once it was policy that the police should not involve themselves in environmental crime. What’s particularly interesting is that when Kent police consulted on local priorities, the public put litter and flytipping at number two, and dig fouling at number three, both of which are problems for the NT too.
Flytipping is big business, people are paid to take rubbish away, but can save money on the commercial costs if waste disposal. In fact, if you pay someone to take your rubbish away, and they are not a registered waste carrier, then YOU can be prosecuted.
Waste it seems has more negative messages than positive ones which which to engage our supporters, but it’s not something we should ignore.
At the end of the day, we had questions from the floor, challenging the organisation on choosing the greenest equipment and vehicles to use, the issue of visitors having to resort to cars to travel to our properties, and community engagement taking resource away from the “actual work”.
The day raised many questions, I wonder just how many answers there are?
