Following “ecosystem services”- the 2015 buzzword, defined as “the benefits provided by ecosystems to humans” - another cringe-making paper was published today by the Natural Capital Committee, which seeks to model the UK’s aims to enhance air quality, flood resilience, landscape and biodiversity on the precepts and values of basic business accountancy. Apparently, thinking about “natural capital net gain principles” is the only way serious politicians can be expected to conjure up the issues at stake, among which the Natural Capital Committee includes “the development of natural capital decision support tools”. Every page of the Committee’s “Advice to government on the 25 year environment plan” is littered with such guff, its knee submissively bent to the bottom line of the bio-economy - which everyone now agrees is the Real Principle of good governance. The natural environment must now be understood as a kind of subsidized service industry, with a duty to maximise its product range and customer access in return for ever-greater efficiencies. For example, “Methods for assessing the social and distributional consequences of environmental investments should be employed and where necessary improved”. Unsurprisingly, the Advice is full of proposals for more reporting bodies, (“data gathering, monitoring and analysis”), independent scrutiny of governance and decision making – although it notes in passing that we already have the offices of the Committee on Climate Change and the National Audit Office, among many others. As real investment into environmental protection shrinks, new species of quango are feathering their prospective nests, uttering the familiar alarm call of “Brexit!” from the treetops. The Committee proposes that the “Plan should reinforce existing environmental duties of public authorities, including those enshrined in Section 40 of the Natural Environment and Rural Communities (NERC) Act 2006, to conserve biodiversity, including restoring or enhancing species populations or habitats”- but fails to tell us how this easily ignored legal duty might be “reinforced” in practice. As local people who challenged Faringdon Neighbourhood Plan have seen- a Sustainability Appraisal which chose to leave out the conservation status of a Conservation Target Area, Priority Habitat, and European Protected Species, was nevertheless considered good enough to pass the test of legal adequacy by the High Court, in spite of the fact that these omissions were clearly intended to mislead the public. Pointing out their duty to make good these omissions under the NERC Act met with no response whatsoever from Faringdon Parish Council, the Independent Examiner, or the District Council. So much for the democratic process… As with previous plans that followed the Convention on Biological Diversity, such as “Biodiversity 2020, A Strategy for England’s Wildlife and Ecosystem Services” what counts is not conviction in the latest jargon (which in Natural Capital is thicker than algae on a pond in July,) but the solid reality of implementation, and political will to impose penalties and demand accountability. That takes determination, and it is determination that is so obviously missing. A six year Review Event of Biodiversity 2020 held in April 2017 summed it up refreshingly straightforwardly: “Biodiversity is the variety of all life on Earth. This includes all species of plants and animals and the natural systems that support them. Consequently, biodiversity is important for its own sake, but also because human survival depends upon it. It contributes to our economy, our health and wellbeing, and it enriches our lives.” Public bodies tasked with halting biodiversity loss must be held to account, as a passionate group of local people has tried to do in Faringdon for the past three years. Our experience has been that, in order to get a policy to turn Wicklesham Quarry SSSI into an industrial estate passed through the Neighbourhood Plan, inconvenient facts have been consistently concealed, websites have promoted misinformation, councillors have misled voters, and ecologists have chosen to overlook core landscape and biodiversity data. Yet no one has been held to account. In the quarry itself at least one of the ponds that is a Priority Habitat has been trashed, its trees uprooted and vegetation stripped. Yet no one has been held to account. The latest bio-economic jargon will do nothing to halt the loss of biodiversity until and unless our existing planning and conservation laws are upheld. So who is responsible for doing that?