Wildlife law - time for reform

Preventing habitat destruction and neglect

Plantlife campaigns for the protection of our most threatened plants and their habitats. Legislative reform is a crucial component of effective conservation.

Plantlife and partner organisations, working through Wildlife and Countryside Link in England and Wales, and Scottish Environment Link in Scotland, ran long campaigns to improve nature conservation legislation across Britain. In 2000, the Countryside and Rights of Way Act became law in England and Wales. In 2004, the Nature Conservation (Scotland) Act received royal assent.

Here is a very brief synopsis of what this legislation means for wild plants.

Measures included in the Act will improve protection for wild plants by:

• Providing a duty on all public bodies to secure positive management of all Sites of Special Scientific Interest (SSSIs).
• Rewarding landowners for protecting wildlife, rather than compensating them for not undertaking damaging operations.
• Granting nature conservation agencies in England and Wales the power to refuse consent for damaging activities on SSSIs.
• Enabling nature conservation agencies in England and Wales to order work to be conducted on SSSIs to ensure positive management is secured.
• Allowing restoration orders to be granted when damage to a SSSI has taken place.
• Legally underpinning the Government's obligations under the Convention on Biological Diversity and the biodiversity action planning process to encourage all national and local government departments to take their biodiversity obligations seriously - with this change, Plantlife's Back from the Brink programme to rescue our most endangered species will be greatly enhance
• Increasing the penalties for offences against plants so that they are sufficiently high to act as a deterrent.

The Nature Conservation (Scotland) Act, in conjunction with the Criminal Justice (Scotland) Act is the equivalent in Scotland, more or less, to the CroW Act for England and Wales. Key features of the Nature Conservation (Scotland) Act 2004 are:

• A new biodiversity duty which obliges all public bodies to further the conservation of biodiversity.
• A comprehensive revision of the Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI) system - to deliver better protection for sites of nature conservation.
• New offences of damaging SSSIs will catch both owners/occupiers and members of the public who deliberately or recklessly damage or destroy protected sites.
• Species protection measures include mechanisms to update schedules and a new mechanism to ban the sale of invasive non native species.