Site management

The Habitats Regulations place a duty on certain “Relevant Authorities” to produce a scheme of management for all Special Areas of Conservation (SAC) and Special Protection Areas (SPA) that cross the high water mark. Together these sites are known as European Marine Sites. For the Solent, the Authorities include, County and City councils, Port Authorities, the Environment Agency, and English Nature. Curiously, the Maritime and Coastguard Agency is not a “Relevant Authority” for this purpose. The regulations state that “If a scheme of management exists there shall be only one”. But as the Relevant Authorities are independent statutory bodies (whether in the public or private sector), they cannot subordinate their statutory rights and duties to a committee - there is no “joint and several liability”. There can be no majority decisions, no document that they have all “signed up to” in the sense that they accept collective responsibility for every aspect of the plan. Each authority has its own management plans, and has had for many years. So what should happen – and this ought to be a real and positive benefit – is that the plans will migrate towards consistency, especially with regard to those attributes for which a site has been designated. Consistency would be a massive improvement on what exists today.

Where it has all gone wrong is that the Authorities tend to see a ”management plan” as a document, rather than a process. Documents just gather dust.

It is now several years since the Solent European site Management Scheme (SEMS) was initiated, but the key terms of reference (Which I christened the Foundation Document) has yet to receive real publicity. So far no real management process has been developed. The Relevant Authorities are letting us down.

The content of this section is largely based on a paper I prepared for the Marine Environment Conference in Feb 2000. It was constructed after long debates with conservation bodies, mainly CCW in Wales. It has been inspected by English Nature, and one of their Directors showed broad agreement, but made the valid point that it does not go far enough in some peripheral areas such as consultation. If you want to see the full paper, email me, and I will send you a copy.