Sale of nature reserves may benefit countryside – but not the public purse

The RSPB would be willing to take on public land, but the government would be wrong to think it is a money saver

The ownership of the UK's public land is under review. Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images

For organisations such as the RSPB, one opportunity that may come from a move towards "big society" and small government is taking on the management of land conservation.

I can be as ambitious as the next person when it comes to adding to the RSPB's land portfolio – 140,000 hectares (345,800 acres) and increasing every year – but experience shows that there are some gift horses whose mouths are well worth a second look. Because Such is the government's focus on deficit reduction, it is unlikely that a potential hand-over of land, for example national nature reserves, would not be motivated by a desire to reduce costs.

And why shouldn't it be? If organisations such as the RSPB can manage conservation land as well and more cheaply than statutory organisations, then don't we all gain?

A reassessment of land conservation by the government is certainly likely. We would approach this subject from the point of view of "what is best for nature conservation", and so would want any proposals that ensured the long-term maintenance of conservation. Any plans should not harm nature in the short term nor the long term. That would be essential.

One of the guiding principles for land management is that bigger is better. Large chunks of habitat are often disproportionately valuable ecologically for a variety of reasons. They are often more diverse, but more importantly, they are likely to be better buffered from external threats such as disturbance and pollution. It is also often cheaper to manage one large site than the same area divided into several smaller sites. That's why a lot of effort goes into adding to our existing holdings.

One area where cost and responsibility might be sensible to share is the extending of reserves – even if this applies to a rather small proportion of public land.

The RSPB already accepts and rejects gifts of land from individuals on the basis that the conservation value of the land was too low, the conditions attached to accepting the land too arduous, or the cost of management would have been too high.

Similar considerations would govern any consideration of publicly owned land. Sometimes, land that has been managed by, say, local authorities, has lacked investment for years and therefore there is a backlog of (sometimes expensive) management work to be done. The same applies to badly neglected buildings that we have the opportunity to procure.

And then there's Transfer of Undertakings (Protection of Employment). This legislation protects the terms and conditions of employment for any staff who are transferred during a change in land ownership. In other words, it removes the opportunity to cut labour costs (ie salaries and pensions) in the course of the transfer – and labour is often the highest cost in land management. Even if money were to be provided, it would mean something like the RSPB would have to develop a two-tier system of renumeration for staff doing similar jobs, depending on when they arrived in our employment.

Many organisations like the RSPB would be prepared to play a larger part in managing land that is currently managed by the state. But not if this is to the detriment of nature conservation either directly or indirectly through being a burden on us (which means we can't take on other nature conservation projects).

And that probably means that a sale of public land would not deliver huge savings to the public purse – only modest ones. Let's hope that the government doesn't rush into anything too quickly.

• Mark Avery is the conservation director at the RSPB. This post first appeared on his RSPB blog.

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