“The mountains of Snowdonia, the Lakes… and the tors of the West Country belong to the people as a right and not as a concession. This is not just a Bill. It is a people’s charter – a people’s charter for the open air.” Those were the words of the Labour minister Lewis Silkin in 1949 after introducing legislation to create the first national parks in Britain, which celebrate their 75th anniversary this year.
As a Devon resident I’m a direct beneficiary of this “people’s charter” every time I hike over Dartmoor. But a walk across Dartmoor also reveals how these supposedly protected landscapes have declined. The last lapwing nested on Dartmoor in 2022, ring ouzels have stopped breeding there, and I count myself lucky to have heard one of the moor’s last curlews calling over the mires.
National Park Authorities (NPAs), set up to protect nature and promote access, have suffered greatly from austerity, enduring 40 per cent budget cuts since 2010. But the problem also goes deeper. National parks in Britain are not, in fact, owned by the nation. The majority of land within them is privately owned, much of it by large aristocratic estates – making it near impossible for NPAs to influence how it is managed. Half of Dartmoor is owned by just 15 landowners, and 95 per cent of the Yorkshire Dales is in private hands. A large chunk of the Lake District is owned by that much-vaunted custodian of the countryside, the water company United Utilities.
Keir Starmer’s Labour government has been left an almighty mess to clean up, and very little time in which to do it. I’m not just talking about the sewage in our rivers. Ministers have just five short years in which to meet legally binding Environment Act targets to halt the decline in species, and to reach the UN “30×30” pledge, under which 30 per cent of the country is meant to be protected for nature by 2030 (we’re currently at 3 per cent). Meanwhile, our upland peat bogs, the UK’s single most important carbon store, are releasing millions of tonnes of carbon dioxide annually – the result of disastrous mismanagement by landowners.
Labour has a history of introducing bold policies for nature. Clement Attlee’s postwar government is known for establishing the welfare state, but it also founded what the historian Matthew Kelly calls the “nature state” – an architecture of ecological policies and institutions that are still with us today. Attlee’s administration created not only national parks, but also the planning system, national nature reserves, sites of special scientific interest, and the first green watchdog, a forerunner to the current Natural England. Starmer’s government must update the nature state to meet the 21st-century challenges of climate and ecological crises.
It should start by ending the war on the watchdog, waged by the Tories on behalf of their chums in the landowning and shooting lobbies. The last Tory minister responsible for Natural England, the grouse moor-owning Robbie Douglas-Miller, was part of a clandestine effort to undermine it by granting a review into its remit. Labour should give Natural England back its budgets and its independence.
This October, countries from around the world will gather in Colombia to report on progress towards the UN’s 30×30 goal. If Labour ministers wish to avoid embarrassment there, they must swiftly do what their Tory predecessors failed to, and greatly extend the area of land and sea protected for nature. One obvious way to do so is to make “nature recovery” a core statutory purpose of NPAs – something recommended by the 2019 Glover Review, but ignored by the government at the time. And ministers should work to ensure more land in national parks is actually owned by the nation – something that’s common around the world, from Japan to New Zealand.
“It is bizarre that government opts out of land ownership as a means of delivering wildlife recovery,” writes Mark Avery, a former conservation director at the RSPB. Despite decades of privatisation, the public sector still owns around 8.5 per cent of England, encompassing millions of acres of woods, moors and farmland. Much of this, however, could be better managed for nature. Too many of the Forestry Commission’s conifer plantations, for example, are sterile monocultures doing little for biodiversity. Wildlife and Countryside Link, a coalition of conservation charities, has called for the government to set up a “public nature estate”, bringing together public-sector landowners to supercharge nature’s recovery on their landholdings. Encouragingly, during the election campaign, Labour pledged to “coordinate nature’s recovery with bodies responsible for public land and major landowners”.
Yet in a country where 1 per cent of the population owns half of all England, it’s clear that the government also needs to influence how private landowners treat their land. A key environmental principle is that the polluter pays to clean up the mess they make. But when it comes to land use, we pay the polluter, handing billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money to landowners and farmers every year in the hope that they might be good stewards. Sometimes it works, but too often the system lacks accountability. Large estates should be required to publish reports setting out how they’re helping to restore habitats and store carbon on their land. To guide a more rational use of land, it’s essential that Labour put in place a land-use framework – something the Tories promised, but once again failed to deliver – backed by a new Land Use Commission.
The public should have a greater direct stake in the land, leading more people to take greater care of it. On this issue, Starmer’s government can take inspiration from policies introduced by the Labour-led Scottish government in the early 2000s. The Land Reform (Scotland) Act 2003 introduced a right of responsible access over the Scottish countryside – opening up far more land for people’s enjoyment than has been the case in England – and created a community right to buy. Today, half a million acres of Scotland belongs to communities, and they’re proving to be rather better stewards of it than their predecessors. The people of Langholm, for example, have turned a former grouse moor once belonging to the Duke of Buccleuch into a nature reserve. The former first minister who oversaw the Land Reform Act, Jack McConnell, told me he regards it as one of his proudest achievements in office.
England, however, has lagged behind when it comes to community ownership. But Labour’s announcement of a strong community right to buy in England under the Devolution Bill in this year’s King’s Speech was encouraging. The party appears to recognise the untapped potential of communities as powerful custodians of nature. It was, after all, local residents – wild swimmers, anglers, kayakers – who exposed the scandal of our polluted rivers. Imagine how much more could be achieved if a community came to own a river – or a wood, or a peat bog. Seventy-five years on from Labour’s creation of national parks, we need a new people’s charter: one that gives us all a greater say over how land is stewarded for the common good.
Guy Shrubsole’s new book, “The Lie of the Land”, is published by William Collins on 12 September. He will appear at the Cambridge Literary Festival on 23 November
[See also: Labour’s battle for Britain]
Content from our partners
Related
This article appears in the 04 Sep 2024 issue of the New Statesman, Starmer under fire