As we watch quangos being picked off one-by-one in the great budget cutting exercise, it’s easy to dismiss non-departmental public bodies as a waste of time and money. The reality is sometimes very different, particularly when it comes to environmental NDPBs which often forge a clear link between policy and action.

Cat Fuller is a biodiversity technical specialist with the Fisheries, Recreation and Biodiversity team for the Environment Agency in the South East. It is the responsibility of Cat and others in her department to ensure projects and guidelines get transferred from paper to real life. “Take something like the Water Framework Directive,” she says. “We ensure the actions that relate to river restoration and enhancement actually get delivered on the ground.”

While the Government provides top-down guidance in the form of policy and directives, the public provide vital bottom-up action.

Cat says: “Generally most of my time is spent working with people external to the Environment Agency. I’m out meeting people and groups to find ways of getting the most for the environment with the communities around us. There is one community group I work with called Sussex Ouse Conservation Society, which is part of the Association of River Trusts, and we are all trying to work together to deliver river restoration, better fish passage, water monitoring and so on.”

On the other side of the scale, Cat’s role also involves working with the Flood and Coastal Risk team. “They do large-scale habitat enhancement through capital projects,”

she says. “They have the capability to do intertidal work, for example, which has massive impacts on people and the environment where they live.”

Working with the Environment Agency was a natural progression for the 28 year old from Shoreham. During her degree in Applied Biology, an industrial placement saw Cat work with the monitoring team at the EA checking macroinverte-brates, fish and plants in local rivers. After graduating in 2004, she returned as an assistance officer and in 2008 took on the specialist role she is in now.

Over the years, the focus of the work has changed to include longer term environmental concerns, such as climate change and biodiversity. A flood risk strategy will also provide biodiversity benefits alongside flood defence, for example. It’s a change that Cat says has resulted in a much greater public awareness of biodiversity, and increasingly people are beginning to realise a natural habitat offers many more services than just being pretty to look at.

“One of the biggest challenges right now is we’ve finished our targets on the Rio Convention, we’re at the end of the International Year of Biodiversity, and quite a few Government targets have reached the end of their life. The balance for us is to continue delivering environmental projects while we wait for new targets and plans.”

And what about the “C word” on everybody’s lips? Cat says: “We’re going through a huge period of change. Before the Government announced cuts we already had an active project looking at the most efficient way to deliver at least what we currently do. The budget announcement is yet to be filtered into the detail. I wouldn’t be happy if I didn’t have 100% belief that EA will carry on delivering what it does now, even if that’s in a different way.”

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