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A Curious Report from DEFRA
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- Written by James Paxman
If size is a measure of authority then DEFRA's new report, "National Park Authorities - Assessment of Benefits" will establish itself in a commanding position. At well over 200 pages it is a report that probably won't be printed by many, or read in detail. But for those who take the trouble to dip into it some fairly predictable and mundane conclusions are reached.
The focus of the report is on the benefits provided by the Authorities rather than the National Parks that they serve. One might argue that NPAs have no value at all except in terms of the husbandry of the environments they are trusted with. To that end, what is the point of this report ? It is surely the assessment of the benefit of the National Parks themselves that is important rather than their supposed guardians. The report is therefore a classic piece of introspection, focussing on process rather than outcome. This approach was more commonly associated with the previous government and is supposed to be going out of fashion.
...the nature of the work of NPAs means that it is often not possible to place monetary values on the benefits of NPAs.
Unsurprisingly, the report finds that expressing benefits for many intangible items in monetary terms is fraught with problems and, as we have noted before, it is a very speculative business. What is the economic benefit of public access to open landscape, high quality biodiversity in habitats, and preservation of cultural heritage ? On page 118 among the conclusions we get to the startling truth "...the nature of the work of NPAs means that it is often not possible to place monetary values on the benefits of NPAs."
On the plus side the report does contain a number of reasonably interesting statistics and comparitive figures between different National Parks. Dartmoor also features strongly in the report, being one of the three selected Authorities for detailed study. Although it has to be said that some of these numbers need to be treated with great caution. In the study of the Princetown Vilage Centre for example we find that as a supposed benefit, part time employment to the value of £40,000 has been created by the project. Some would argue that the scale of fixed costs attached to the Village Centre are out of all proportion to its capabilities to raise revenue. The marketing study supporting the project suggested that visitor numbers to Princetown would increase by between 1% and 20% resulting in increased visitor spend of betwen £8k and £156k. Try telling that to the trustees who are struggling to keep the doors open.
