IT is more than three years since I last wrote in this column about our stretch of the lower Avon valley where there are two sites of special scientific interest; these are ‘Ramsar’ sites, which is the highest designation of environmental importance.

One site is the river itself and the other is the water meadow that surrounds it.

They are, of course, interdependent - for example, the preservation of the meadows requires management of the water level in the river to prevent excessive flooding.

The magnificent water meadows are the result of centuries of human activity. The weed in the river needs to be cut in order to manage the water levels and prevent excessive flooding. If the volume of weed increases, it displaces the water, causing the river level to rise and break its banks into the flood plain; reduce the weed however, and the water flows more easily down the river valley.

If you don’t cut the weed then persistent flooding means that the farmers can’t get on the land to get a hay crop, or turn out cattle.

Water meadows do need water however, and are supposed to flood. The incomparable landscape is the product of a balance between allowing the flood plain to operate naturally for part of the year but managing the water level with a judicious weed cut in the spring and summer to allow farming to take place.

To preserve this habitat Natural England has, over the years, dispersed grants to the landowners and farmers to encourage them to sensitively manage this environment. The critical ingredient to this management however, was the weed cutting. The weed cut was itself integral to the preservation of the river as a site of special scientific interest with its fish life. For this reason the cut was always only partial, leaving sufficient cover at the banks and also a strip down the centre. The responsibility for the weed cutting lay with the Environment Agency and its predecessors. I wrote about all this before, because I had just secured a meeting with Hilary Benn who was, at that time, Secretary of State for the Environment, the article which appeared in the Forest Journal back in March 2010 can still be found on my website, desmondswaynemp.com.

The purpose of the meeting was to try to put right the things that had gone seriously wrong at the two key agencies, Natural England and the Environment Agency. The former was in thrall to a new ideology that nature should always be allowed to take its course, and if that turns everything to a vast bog, then so be it.

The latter just needed to save money and wanted to withdraw from flood management affecting farmland in order to concentrate its resources on protecting built up areas.

So the Environment Agency asked English Nature if it could discontinue weed cutting, and English Nature agreed on the grounds that it would not be detrimental to the sites of special scientific interest. The result is that the land has become too wet for the farmers to get on it; it is becoming increasingly derelict and unsightly, good only for bog grass and willow wood. In effect, it is trashing the very habitats that English Nature has been paying farmers to preserve.

I didn’t get much joy from my meeting with Hilary Benn in 2010.

Last week however, I had another go with the new Secretary of State Owen Patterson. He seemed much more receptive to the case that I put to him along with local members of the National Farmers Union. We made a number of suggestions about how the problem could be dealt with locally and in a less costly manner.

It is significant that the quote from local contractors for the work was £30,000 compared to the £80,000 to £100,000 being bandied about by the agencies.We await the outcome of the representations we have made, but I want to reassure those people who write to me and come to my surgeries about the issue, that we are still trying.