Day Three - Wild Justice wastage of public funds
In early September, Packham tweeted a letter he had sent to Defra concerning “the amount of influence that certain external lobbying bodies… have within Defra... [and] how much time these external bodies have in communication with Defra staff… and what form that communication takes.”
This was actually one of Packham’s brighter ideas – invoke an FOI to see who has been taking up the time and resources of Defra, and agency he described himself as being “by definition… accountable to UK taxpayers.”
In fact, we here at C4PMC thought it was such a good idea that we decided to do our own Freedom of Information request, to Natural England, another tax-funded institution. It read:
“Given your limited annual budget made up of taxpayers money please can you provide a breakdown of how much money and time you have had to spend dealing with legal challenges and other requests made from Wile Justice, the activist campaign group made up of Ruth Tingay, Mark Avery and Chris Packham?”
Here is the response we got, not including staff time:
That's tens of thousands of pounds of taxpayer money, in 2021 alone, spent dealing with endless campaigns of Wild Justice carried out in the name of “standing up for wildlife.” But how good of Chris to make sure Defra weren’t wasting our money…
That’s not to mention all the money they have taken from their own donors to fund their failed court cases.
As the Countryside Alliance put it at the time, “Wild Justice has achieved almost nothing of substance in the two years of its existence other than to waste significant amounts of government resources -- and that of organisations forced to intervene on its pointless actions -- whilst happily spending the money it has crowd funded from gullible supporters.”
Turns out it is not just been them but us, the taxpayers, too.