Public Asked to Volunteer for Nature Work; Paid Version Last Advertised in 1990

The Environment Department has published a questionnaire inviting the public to say what nature needs. It runs to ten questions, closes at five o'clock on the 31st of August, and is open to anybody. No expertise is required.

Question seven asks whether you would be interested in helping with nature projects in your community.

The Comical would. We looked into how.

The Department spends around £5 million on environmental services. The former Principal Auditor found that thirteen of them never went to tender. Some were running under contracts that had expired. Some were running under no contract at all. All were running.

Botanical services are provided without formal agreements. Air quality monitoring, food control and the climate change programme sit with a company nobody competed against. The macaques are managed by two organisations, with a third engaged separately for macaque awareness, leaving the macaques better represented than the electorate.

Two sets of trustees perform what the report calls "particular duties and services" in the Upper Rock. The Comical has read that phrase eleven times and concludes it is doing a great deal of work.

The contract for the Alameda Gardens, Commonwealth Park, Campion Park, the Upper Rock and the gull population was put out to tender in 1990. It has not been put out since. It is older than the euro, older than the internet, and older than half the people now invited to comment on it.

The Department has said it is satisfied with the service. That sentence is, at present, the entire procurement process.

So the position is this. Nature work in Gibraltar is available to volunteers immediately, and to bidders in principle, subject to a competition last held while the Berlin Wall was still being carted away.

The services cannot be re-tendered, we are told, because they are highly specialised. Opinions about them are so unspecialised they are being collected from anyone with a phone.

Question eight asks what would make it easier for you to get involved.

Nature experts say, a tender.

Question three asks whether there are natural areas you feel have deteriorated. That question was answered last year, at a length of five hundred pages, by the Principal Auditor. Parliament was told the answer was wrong, and then told: "Of course, if the allegations in the report were true, they would not be unfair. But they are not true. And they are therefore unfair."

The Comical has read that three times and now believes it.

We have completed the questionnaire. Under species in need of urgent restoration we entered the tender: last sighted in Gibraltar in 1990, no confirmed breeding since, habitat continuously occupied.

We have also volunteered. We are happy to work for nothing. At present it is the only way in.

A NOTICE TO READERS. This consultation is real. It closes at 5pm on the 31st of August, anybody may submit, and no expertise is required — nor will any be checked:

https://forms.cloud.microsoft/pages/responsepage.aspx?id=9OSs_Cje-kyRe8byb4ValYkA87qeJzRMum19oT_ftJlUN1dSWlYxQU9ROEY5VUNBUUMxT0EyUjBKVi4u&route=shorturl

Available to volunteers immediately, and to bidders, never.