Alistair Carmichael MP Warned Defra. The Peak District and Cairngorms Wildfires Proved Him Right.

Over the past fortnight, Britain has watched its uplands burn. A wildfire that began near Manchester spread across the Peak District, sending thick smoke over Glossop, Snake Pass, Woodhead and Dove Stone, while a major blaze tore through the Cairngorms, forcing the evacuation of homes, businesses, campsites and the Cairngorm Mountain Resort. At one point around 19 wildfires were burning across England and Wales at the same time. This was not a freak event. It was a warning, and it was entirely predictable.

The Cairngorms fire alone burned an estimated 250 hectares, with some reports putting the affected area closer to 400. It reached the boundary of the Loch Garten nature reserve and damaged nationally important Caledonian pinewood, some of the rarest habitat in the country.

Firefighters drew water from Loch Morlich through high volume pumps and worked for more than 24 hours to bring it under control. In the Peak District, specialist wildfire teams fought through dry peat and tinder-dry heather on foot, using beaters and backpack sprayers because the terrain allowed little else.

The timing could hardly be sharper. Just days before the moors caught light, the chairman of the EFRA Committee, Alistair Carmichael, wrote to the Defra Secretary, Emma Reynolds, asking directly how the department intends to manage wildfire risk if the practical tools for reducing fuel load are being taken away.

The letter is not a fringe intervention. It is the considered view of the cross-party parliamentary committee that scrutinises Defra, and it deserves to be read alongside the images of burning moorland now filling the news.

Carmichael's letter carries real weight because of what sits behind it. The EFRA Committee's wildfire inquiry received 190 submissions, and almost 70 per cent of those came from individual land managers, the people who are on the moors every day and who fight these fires when they start. That is not a lobby. That is the frontline speaking with one voice. The letter draws out three concerns from that evidence: the danger posed by vegetation build-up on unmanaged ground, the complexity of the managed burning licence system, and a lack of transparency around Natural England's evidence review on burning, known as NEER155.

Each of those concerns has just been written across the hills in fire. Take vegetation build-up first. The single biggest factor in how far and how fast a moorland fire spreads is the amount of dry vegetation available to burn. That is the fuel load. Where heather is old, rank and left to accumulate, a spark becomes a firestorm. Where the fuel load has been reduced through managed burning and cutting, fires stay lower, slower and easier to stop. Carmichael's letter names this directly, and the Peak District and Cairngorms have now demonstrated it directly.

Take licence complexity second. The 2025 burning regulations extended restrictions on managed burning, and the licensing system for burning on deep peat has become so slow and involved that many managers cannot use it in the narrow window when conditions are right. A tool that cannot be used in practice is no tool at all. When Parliament's own committee is asking Defra to explain how the system is meant to work, that is a sign the system is not working.

Take the evidence base third. The rules restricting managed burning rest heavily on NEER155, and Carmichael's letter presses Defra on the transparency of that review. If policy that governs how we protect the uplands from fire is built on contested evidence, then getting that evidence right is not an academic exercise. It is a matter of which moors burn next summer.

One detail from the past fortnight should trouble everyone. As the Cairngorms burned, RSPB Scotland reported that no helicopters were available to support them because every aircraft was deployed to fight the fires raging in England and Wales. When the whole country is alight at once, there is no cavalry to call. There are not enough helicopters, not enough appliances, and not enough hours in the day. The only fire that is easy to fight is the one that never grows large, and the only reliable way to stop a moorland fire growing large is to deny it fuel before the summer arrives.

The uplands are not wilderness. They are working landscapes that hold carbon, store water, support rare wildlife and sustain rural communities. When they burn, all of that goes up in smoke. The 2018 Saddleworth and Roaches fires released tens of thousands of tonnes of carbon dioxide and scarred landscapes that took years to recover.

The fires of July 2026 will do the same, and worse, unless the lesson is learned.

Alistair Carmichael has asked the right question. The fires of the last two weeks have answered it. You cannot lock away the tools that reduce wildfire risk and then express surprise when wildfire risk rises. Managed burning and cutting are not the enemy of the moors. They are the firebreak.

Emma Reynolds and Defra now have the parliamentary question, the evidence of 190 submissions, and the smoke still hanging over the Peak District and the Cairngorms.

It is time to listen to the moors, and to the fire officers who fight to save them.

You can read Alistair Carmichael's letter to Emma Reynolds in full here: https://committees.parliament.uk/publications/54071/documents/301178/default/