As you will know by now (we hope!), the RSPB has been campaigning hard these past few months to get Government to phase out the use of peat in horticulture.
Why? Because extracting peat destroys vital wildlife habitats and is responsible for loads of greenhouse gas emissions. What’s more, there are plenty of peat-free alternatives available, making phasing out peat a no-brainer.
Government accepts this argument but seem remarkably reluctant to do anything meaningful about it. For the past dozen years, we have had a voluntary approach to phasing out peat use, with a target of using 90% peat alternatives by 2010. The result has been a spectacular failure - growing media in the UK is still 70% peat!
Even many of the big gardening businesses have had enough of this. They, like us, are calling for a meaningful Government intervention to deliver peat-free gardens and businesses. They recognise that a voluntary approach will do nothing to address the fact that peat-free is currently more expensive than peat, and lets companies who don’t care about the environment to get away with doing nothing – ‘free-riding’ on the efforts of others as economists like to call it.
In spite of this, Defra appear wedded to a voluntary approach for another decade. They subscribe to the idea that people just need a ‘nudge’ to do the right thing.
There is clearly a role for voluntary agreements. They can help pioneer new, more environmentally-sound technologies, for example. But they rarely offer long-term solutions to environmental problems. Just look at the failure of voluntary approaches to replace lead in gunshot, to deliver widespread responsible pesticide use, for example. And we all know what happened as a result of soft approaches to regulation in the banking system...
So, Mr Benyon, please listen to those who want to meet Government peat replacement targets, and let’s have a proposal that delivers us a regulatory framework that will spell out the end of peat use, whilst supporting the British horticultural industry.