Andy Burnham and the RSPB

Wildfires are terrible things. People who see them on television, or as plumes of smoke on a distant hillside, think they can imagine what they are like, but they almost certainly can't. To understand the full horror you have to be up close, or worst of all, fighting it in the eye of the storm.

The heat, the smell, the danger and the destruction can be traumatising. The focus is understandably on the loss of thousands of tonnes of ancient and irreplaceable peat, but with a summer wildfire there is the inevitable loss of wildlife too: the eggs and chicks of ground-nesting birds like merlin and curlew, and the snakes, lizards, frogs, voles and leverets. At least, so far, we have not lost a human life, but as wildfires increase in intensity the fear increases with them.

Yet we have brave people who will always go towards the danger because they feel a sense of duty to fight the fire. The fear that keeps the rest of us away is put aside, and the instinct to do the right thing takes over. Obviously the Fire and Rescue Service personnel are top of the list, but in the uplands we must add the farmers, shepherds and gamekeepers, all of whom turn out and use a lifetime's knowledge and skill to help fight the fire.

These people have always done the right thing. It is in their DNA and their culture; to turn away or find an excuse would be unthinkable. They do what they do because that is what they are, not for thanks or reward. That is perhaps just as well, because they get very little, or none at all.

As the summer heatwaves get hotter and longer, as the number of selfish, thoughtless idiots increases, and as the fuel loads become ever greater and more continuous, the frequency and intensity of big, dangerous wildfires increases. Why wouldn't it? In a rational world our response would not be to put an ever greater burden on the brave few who fight the fires. It would be to do all we can to prevent them, and when that was impossible, to make them easier to fight, control and eventually extinguish. Unfortunately, we do not live in such a world.

In our world, we have to face the fact that prejudice often trumps evidence, and that there are a lot of apparently intelligent and powerful people who are prepared to make things worse, far worse, rather than admit they might be wrong. Although, obviously, only if it doesn't inconvenience them directly.

Nothing shows this more clearly than the obsessive objection to cool rotational burning, and the frankly bizarre belief, in the face of all the evidence, that Wet and Walk Away will stop wildfires. The RSPB, the National Trust and Natural England have all become steadily more fanatically opposed to cool rotational burning as the wildfires have got worse. Nothing is allowed to stand in the way of their beliefs, and they are completely uninterested in what the practitioners think. Why would someone in an office miles away want to listen to a farmer, a gamekeeper or a firefighter covered in ash and grime, when they have the Natural England burning review to read? Well, they ought to, before someone gets killed.

Even Parliament can see that this farce can't be allowed to continue. The Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee, recognising the real and pressing danger, is holding an inquiry into wildfire. As a result, we can read what the National Fire Chiefs Council, the professional body for the UK's fire and rescue services, thinks about the opposition to vegetation management. This is some of what they told the committee:

"FRS experience has shown that efforts to improve biodiversity and environmental resilience, such as through rewilding and rewetting peat bogs, can actually have a detrimental impact on wildfire risk due to the associated increase in the amount of vegetation and the resultant fuel loads."

"Nature-based solutions have also resulted in vegetation being allowed to grow across natural fire breaks which had previously helped prevent the spread of wildfires, producing larger wildfires that are more difficult to contain."

"Proper land management is key to ensuring that the wildfires that do occur are more easily contained and do not spread as easily."

Don't worry. The RSPB, the National Trust and Natural England will all ignore these warnings.

Greater Manchester Fire & Rescue Service fight wildfire on the moorland fringe above one of England's largest conurbations, the ground where the locals have lost count of the number of wildfires on the Wet and Walk Away land managed by the RSPB and the National Trust. They wrote from direct operational experience.

Their recommendations included "maintained fuel breaks and anchor points (tracks, paths, moorland edges), vegetation management around the urban–moorland fringe, and maintaining/marking emergency access and water points."

On burning itself, GMFRS said that on land where tools "such as managed burning, grazing, and mechanical cutting are used," the aim should be to "reduce continuous fine fuels in the highest-risk areas while protecting peat, biodiversity, and water quality," with proper assurance, monitoring and landowner accountability.

Don't worry. The RSPB, the National Trust and Natural England will ignore these warnings.

In 2018 a huge wildfire swept across the unmanaged moorland at Winter Hill. When it was finally extinguished, the FRS reported their views to the upland partnership whose members include the RSPB and the National Trust.

The FRS report was clear and very easy to understand. As a result of cool rotational burning being stopped, there were no functioning fire breaks, no fuel load reduction, and no areas of shorter vegetation or anything else that might have impeded the fire.

The report stated that "the fire, supported by an easterly wind, spread rapidly through a continuous arrangement of surface fuels... its rate of spread at the head part of the fire reaching approximately 1000 metres an hour."

The FRS identified some key challenges that had contributed to the disaster and which, in their view, needed to be addressed urgently.

The first three on the list are clearly important in the context of the ban on cool rotational burning:

1. Unbroken and continuous arrangement of vegetation across the landscape.

2. Combustible fuel loads.

3. High surface and ground fuels.

4. 
   

The report goes on to list "deep seated fires in the peat layer" and "limited access to and across the landscape" as further important factors. It concluded with the clear statement that "the combination of very supportive weather and the presence of high fuel loads on the landscape presented the FRS with the most difficult wildland fire-fighting operation ever encountered in NW England."

Generally, and unsurprisingly, the FRS keep asking for the same things: good access, adequate water supply, and fuel loads kept as low and as broken up as possible. The regulator and the conservation industry have no intention of giving them any of those things. What they can have is Wet and Walk Away. Strangely, the FRS expert didn't mention that.

Did this change the closed minds of the RSPB, the National Trust or Natural England? What do you think. They are too far in. To change now they would lose face, and that they cannot and will not do. Tragically, but typically, their front-line staff will often admit in private, and off the record, that something has to change, but they would lose their jobs if they said so publicly.

Bad though not admitting the truth is, at least it is not as bad as deliberately misleading. And there is a final twist to Winter Hill. In 2020 the RSPB were running yet another campaign attacking cool rotational burning. As is the normal practice, they collected endorsements from significant people who, while they generally knew little about the subject, trusted the RSPB. One of these was from someone you may have heard of recently: the Mayor of Manchester, Andy Burnham. That is the soon-to-be Prime Minister, Andy Burnham.

For some reason, the example of the iniquity of cool rotational burning that he cited was the Winter Hill wildfire. He chose a fire that his own FRS said had been made infinitely worse by the absence of the very cool rotational burning that the RSPB had persuaded him to attack. This was not in the confusion of the moment. It was two years after the fire, and more importantly, well after the FRS report had been received by, amongst others, the RSPB.

Andy Burnham plants sphagnum moss

We may never know whether the RSPB drafted his words, or whether they simply bit their lips when the future Prime Minister made a statement so contradictory that even President Trump would blush. But either way it happened, and that speaks volumes for the honesty of some of the people involved in the campaign to take away one of the key tools in the wildfire-fighting toolbox. Anything goes. If it is acceptable to make a fool of a future Prime Minister, are there any limits?

Apparently not. The RSPB, the National Trust and Natural England will have their way whatever happens. They will ignore the farmers, the shepherds and the gamekeepers. They will ignore the FRS and the local communities. They will ignore their own front-line staff and the evidence of their own eyes. They will have their way, and we, the landscape, its wildlife and the peat, will bear the consequences.

It is mad, but they have got their way. The record wildfire year of 2025 was just the start. The wildfires will come. The same poor devils will fight them. The same people will sit and watch. Is there any hope? Who knows. A new Prime Minister, casually set up by the RSPB, might just decide that having the landscape on fire every time the sun shines is too big a price to pay to save the faces of Natural England and the RSPB.