Up to now, Wicklesham Quarry SSSI has been failed by those in power. So long as a minimum level of box-ticking is in place, the natural environment is left to fend for itself. The results speak volumes. The UK is now officially one of the "most nature-depleted countries in the world" with "more than one in seven species facing extinction, and more than half in decline". These are the findings of the 2016 State of Nature Report, and Sir David Attenborough has responded: "The natural world is in serious trouble and it needs our help as never before."
Let's start with Wicklesham Quarry SSSI. Please will you help me today by sending a link to this update, and to the petition, to your friends, colleagues and neighbours & posting it on your Facebook page? Let's try together to boost the number of supporters before this irreplaceable site is lost.
The UK may not be good at conservation, but it's good at bureaucracy. Amazingly good... We have endless schemes of national designations - 'SSSIs', 'Priority Species', 'Conservation Target Areas' and 'Biodiversity Action Plans', but what exactly do they produce, apart from hundreds if not thousands of jobs paid for by tax payers? Clearly, they are failing to protect the environment. The only species benefiting are the domesticated consultant and lesser bureacrat. Government departments issuing Conservation Licences and approving Mitigation Schemes; council Monitoring Officers, 'ecology' consultants and quangos who churn out self-serving reports are set up to ennable private business to do whatever it likes, regardless of the wholesale destruction of our natural environment. It looks very much as if the whole lot could be laid off tomorrow without it making any difference at all to the UK's race to the bottom in global environmental decline.
Local people have watched what has taken place at Wicklesham Quarry SSSI near Faringdon over the past five years with growing anger and disbelief. The site bristles with designations that are supposed to ensure its protection: a national designation as a SSSI for geodiversity; a Conservation Target Area in Oxfordshire's Biodiversity Action Plan, for the protection and restoration of Priority Habitats and Species; and of course, it has - or had - ponds (Priority Habitat) that for many years were the mature breeding ground for a 'European Protected Species', great crested newts. It is also a site for Lowland Dry Acid Grassland, an increasingly rare and important Priority Habitat, and in 2000 when Wicklesham tetrad was surveyed, eleven rare plant species were found.
Who cares about this? Not Oxfordshire County Council, evidently. They are responsible for ensuring Wicklesham's restoration according to planning conditions, with the water bodies and endangered species carefully preserved. Instead, they have allowed Grundon Ltd repeated extensions, and each time they failed to meet the 'deadline' for restoration. Grundon also 'forgot' to apply for a Conservation Regulations Licence, conveniently ennabling the ponds to be trashed while keeping Natural England in the dark. What action has Oxfordshire County Council taken about this? None at all. When we sent photographs of the pond vegetation that had been cut down to the ground, including trees growing inside one of the ponds, the Director of Planning and Place dismissed the complaint. According to Susan Halliwell, the pond 'habitat' did not include the trees or plants....! We suggest Ms Halliwell consult her dictionary for the meaning of the word 'habitat'...
It soon become obvious that the ponds were deliberately filled in. Without the photographs that local people supplied to the Planning and Regulation Committee in July, showing the destruction, County Councillors would have been none the wiser, as their own officers had glossed over the fact that the ponds no longer existed.
Many people suspect corruption: why would officials and councillors permit blatant law-breaking unless they were being paid off, people have said? That's a question for the councillors and officials themselves. But it could be that they are part of a system designed purely for the sake of appearance, to con the public into an illusion of environmental protection and the rule of law where, in fact, neither exist.
If you want to read what Oxfordshire County Council officials have been saying and doing (or not doing) about Wicklesham Quarry, email a Freedom of Information Request for the Monitoring Reports on Wicklesham Quarry to Susan.Halliwell@Oxfordshire.gov.uk.
The final monitoring report for the current deadline of 30th August 2018 should already be available, and we wait to hear what will happen next. You can contact the campaign by email to: protectwicklesham@gmail.com