£53,000 for Seven Pages: The Bog Talk Fiasco

When Natural England and the University of Exeter embarked on their "Bog Talk" research project in 2023, they promised groundbreaking insights into environmental land management in peatland areas. What they delivered, after £52,887.59 of public money and nearly two years of delays and tensions, was a seven-page report containing findings that would surprise no one who has spent an afternoon in an upland pub.

Acronym Soup

The project was delivered under the RENEW (Renewing Biodiversity through a People-in-Nature Approach) programme—a partnership between the University of Exeter and Natural England examining biodiversity recovery. Led by Dr Charles Masquelier, a social scientist at Exeter's Environment and Sustainability Institute, the work fell under Theme 3 of RENEW, focused on land management issues.

Natural England, as the government's statutory conservation body, funded the work through its Protected Site Strategies (PSS) programme. The PSS team, meant to develop innovative approaches to conservation on protected sites, became mired in what the correspondence reveals as chronic organisational dysfunction—high staff turnover, poor internal communication, and conflicting priorities between central teams and local area staff.

The project's spectacular waste of resources—both financial and human—reveals everything wrong with how publicly-funded environmental research is conducted in Britain today.

The Budget Blow-Out

Freedom of information requests show that the original allocation of £40,133.30 somehow ballooned to £52,887.59—with an additional £12,754.29 spent simply to relocate the work from Cumbria to the Peak District after the original site was abruptly cancelled in March 2024. To put this in perspective, the same money could have funded three full-time conservation officers for a year, or planted hundreds of thousands of trees, or restored acres of actual peatland.

Instead, it funded three three-hour meetings with farmers in October 2024, producing insights such as: farmers feel their knowledge isn't valued, there's a "lack of mutual accountability" between land managers and conservation bodies, and people want "effective communication channels."

An undergraduate social science student could have produced comparable findings in a week. Indeed, a cursory review of existing literature on farmer-conservationist relations would have yielded the same conclusions without spending a penny.

A Comedy of Errors

The correspondence obtained via freedom of information request reads like a dark comedy of bureaucratic dysfunction. On 18 March 2024, with travel booked and partnerships organised, Natural England's area team suddenly declared Foulshaw Moss "no longer suitable" for the work. Dr Charles Masquelier's same-day emails show understandable frustration: "Are you able to say why? We've done a lot of preparatory work."

The reason eventually given was vague institutional-speak: "farmers at a sensitive point with other NE led work going to fall on top of our inputs." Translation: Natural England's own internal chaos made the project impossible.

The project then pivoted to the Peak District—but even selecting new sites proved tortuous. When Masquelier contacted Natural England's suggested local coordinator in March 2024, she "knew nothing at all about Bog Talk." Natural England hadn't actually discussed the project with her before giving Exeter the green light.

Urgent Requests and Endless Delays

Throughout the correspondence, one pattern repeats: urgent requests for invoices and progress reports from Natural England, followed by months of institutional paralysis when it came to providing feedback on actual work.

In March 2024, Natural England sent an "URGENT REQUEST" for payment documentation. Yet when Masquelier submitted the final Bog Talk report in February 2025, Natural England went silent for months. By April, they declared the report "should not be disseminated at all, to anybody, at the moment—especially not to the farmer group."

This created an excruciating situation. The Peakland Environmental Farmers, who had "given considerable time" to the research—as their chairman wrote in a formal letter dated 31 January 2025—were left in limbo, questioning whether "Renew was the place for that transformation" of relationships with statutory bodies, or if the group should "direct our very limited resources more usefully."

Banal Findings, Obvious Conclusions

The final report's insights read like management consultancy clichés dressed up as research discoveries. Among the earth-shattering findings:

• "Land managers play an essential role in delivering environmental goods and services"

• "What they already do in terms of nature recovery is not being sufficiently recognised"

• "A lack of institutional memory, absence of 'boots on the ground,' and high staff turnover" hampers conservation work

• "Communications could be better"

The report's grand solution? An "outcome-based agri-environmental scheme" with "landscape-scale groups" for "bespoke environmental plans" and "knowledge-sharing." In other words: exactly what numerous policy papers, government consultations, and farmer organisations have been proposing for years.

One can almost picture an intern producing the same analysis by spending an afternoon reading existing literature on the subject.

The Human Cost

The real scandal isn't just the money—it's the squandered trust. The Peakland Environmental Farmers devoted time they don't have to spare, believing their participation would influence policy. Their chairman's January 2025 letter captures the frustration perfectly: "Time is passing quickly and if we are to engage more productively with statutory bodies, we need to know that there is an appetite and a plan for transforming these basic cornerstones of effective collaboration."

By April 2025, Natural England officials were expressing concerns about "methods and way you have framed the study," with the Deputy Director noting uncertainty due to their "natural science background" versus the social science methodology. These concerns should have been raised during project design, not after £50,000+ had been spent and farmers had given up their time.

Dr Masquelier warned in March 2025 that "relations between NE and this group will further deteriorate (not to mention our own—Exeter's—relationship with the group)." This is the real waste: burning bridges with the very stakeholders whose cooperation is essential for conservation success.

Lessons Unlearned

The resolution, when it finally came in September 2025, consisted of a meeting where Natural England attended "in listening and learning mode"—something that could have been arranged for the cost of a train ticket and a morning's work.

The Bog Talk project exemplifies Britain's dysfunctional approach to environmental policy: expensive academic consultancy replacing common sense; institutional territorialism preventing coordination; bureaucratic processes consuming resources meant for actual conservation; and, above all, the bizarre assumption that farmers' views need £50,000 of social science research to be understood.

One suspects that sitting in any rural market café for an hour and buying farmers a round of tea would yield identical insights—with £52,837.59 left over to spend on something that might actually help restore a bog or two.

The scandal isn't that we don't know what farmers think about conservation schemes. The scandal is that we spent £52,887.59 pretending we needed expensive research to find out what anyone who bothers to listen already knows: farmers want respect, clear communication, practical flexibility, and outcomes-based rather than prescriptive approaches. Groundbreaking stuff.