With the floods in the south of the country focusing the public’s attention on environmental matters, John Sheard is concerned about plans to ditch legislation protecting our hedgerows

When I covered my first general election, back in the days when dinosaurs still ruled the world, MPs often came from readily identified sections of society. Many Labour members were trade unionists and a large segment of the Tory ranks was made up of landowners or yeomen farmers.

The latter group was largely stigmatised by the London-based national press as “backwoodsmen” who knew little of worldly affairs and were happy to act as lobby fodder for their Conservative ministers. But they had one important area of expertise which I fear is long gone today: they actually understood how the countryside worked.

I raise this not so much as a party-political concern but because of fear that this Tory-led coalition – “the greenest government ever” as David Cameron claimed – is about to create yet another major blunder because no-one seems to have learned the lessons of the past.

In a period when the news cycle has been inundated (sorry!) by widespread flooding, often coupled with blistering criticism of the Environment Agency, a strange remark by the Prime Minister during what looked to be an off the cuff talk to BBC television had me shooting upright in my seat.

It was made during some factory visit and Cameron was talking up his business-pleasing plans to cut the red-tape which smothers many small to medium sized companies. One area to be chopped, he said, was the Hedgerow Regulations.

Now to the average manufacturer, this would suggest some fusty old laws concerning only a few country cousins. In fact, the hedgerow laws are virtually brand new and were brought into force – years too late – after one of the most unnecessary and short-sighted environmental disasters ever inflicted on the English countryside.

In its dying decades towards the end of the 20th Century, the late and unlamented Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food was desperate to increase food production by any means possible: landscape values was of zero importance.

So they encouraged farmers to grub out their hedgerows to create bigger fields which would allow the introduction of bigger farm machinery (one of the reasons why, even here in the Dales, £100,000-plus mega tractors are a common sight).

This encouragement was backed up by generous grants so many farmers took to grubbing out hedges with great zeal.

It was not until literally tens of thousands of miles of hedgerow had gone that someone at MAFF listened to the anguished cries of conservationists pointing out that millions of birds, mammals, rare plants and billions of insects had lost their homes and sources of food.

When this finally sank in, MAFF scrambled to save face by offering grants to farmers to re-plant the hedges they had grubbed out. But in what would have been a comedy of errors had it not been so obscene, they forget to scrap previous grants so for one period of time, unscrupulous landowners were being paid to dig up their hedges and then replant them.

So in 1997, the Hedgerow Regulations were passed into law, making it compulsory to apply for planning permission from the local council to grub up any length of hedge over 20 metres in length, more than 30-years-old and containing certain plant species.

Whilst welcome, these laws came at least 10 years too late.

The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds says hedges may support up to 80 per cent of our woodland birds, 50 per cent of our mammals and 30 per cent of our butterflies.

The ditches and banks associated with hedgerows provide habitat for frogs, toads, newts and reptiles. On a historic note, some hedgerows can be 600-years-old or even more.

Now here in the Dales, we tend to think of our fields bounded by our famous drystone walls, so in the great hedge grub-up, we fared better than most. But that is far from the full picture of this sad tale.

The RSPB places great store on the importance of hedgerows as links between patches of woodland, highways and byways along which wild creatures can navigate.

As I have reported before, the Dales have one of the lowest woodlands densities in England, thanks to large scale tree felling to make way for sheep grazing in the 18th and 19th centuries. That makes our lowland hedges even more crucial to our wildlife.

I contacted the RSPB to ask them what they thought of the Prime Minister’s labelling of the hedgerow regulations as mere red tape and they were horrified but not yet ready to comment formally: they will wait until more details become known before putting out any statement.

At a time when the Environment Agency is under fire for doing too little, too late over this winter’s massive flooding, hopefully someone there is aware that our hedges are vital. It is said that armies always fight the previous war.

Well, our hedgerow battle has already been fought and won. Let’s not grab defeat from the jaws of victory.