It seems Owen Paterson, the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, has caused uproar and backlash with his Planning related idea to allow Developers to be able to demolish ancient woodlands, build and then replace with new trees elsewhere, a form of biodiversity offsetting.
Even his fellow MP's appear to have nearly choked at this suggestion, with the government department working feverishly to deflect & 'explain' away his ill-thought comments by issuing press releases to soften the comments.
Take a moment to go research & read this topic, the implications are frightening as he looks at ways to streamline planning to allow building goals to be reached.
There is a e-Petition, growing in strength and hopefully a .gov petition as well. If you feel strongly about protecting the heritage we work in and take for granted, please make your thoughts known and support :
https://you.38degrees.org.uk/petitions/save-our-ancient-woodlands
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Save our Ancient Woodlands campaign currently still being run via Twitter, please sign if you feel strongly about this....
https://you.38degrees.org.uk/petitions/save-our-ancient-woodlands
thanks Gary
this is just the kind of thing Patterson will do the man is an utter shambles
Would love to sign Sid, but I couldn't go along with this little paragraph: "Your personal information will be kept private and held securely. By submitting information you are agreeing to 38 Degrees keeping you informed about campaigns and agree to the use of cookies."
No problem. We each have to make decisions and I respect yours.
John Baker said:
What an absolute twit, how do these people get put in charge of large government departments, the man obviously knows nothing about bio diversity or natural woodland.
Just money, money, money from the Developers, Arrragh!!!
These woodlands take hundreds of years to evolve and are not man made!
Another reason not to vote for this Liberal lead government again, I signed, stuff the cookies.
to be fair, its a classic case of floating an idea to see how hostile the response - its obvious he knew the response would be negative, but depending on how negative dictates what next :-
Extreme - do nothing leave alone
sevear - perhaps chop a few in exeptional cases down and make sure the replanting is excessive.
Mild - Go ahead with replanting elsewhere
and so on and so forth - it what polititians do! They sound out ideas first like this to see if their worth following........
Oppose it, sign the petition and show the response will be extremely negative - and the woods will be safe.