Another day, another plan, another consultation, another shambles

The North Pennines National Landscape (NPNL) was the North Pennines Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. The incoming Labour Government changed the name because that is what incoming Labour Governments do. It created a fleeting impression that they were interested, and the permanent impression that the 'Nation' owns the place. It doesn't of course. It mostly belongs to hard-pressed and hard-working private people, whose only contact with the state is to be endlessly messed about by people with clipboards whilst being robbed.

This new entity is not a landscape. It is a state-funded offshoot of the conservation industry. It has an Advisory Board, but advice is not management. It will do as it wishes. It shares the beliefs and prejudices of organisations like the RSPB and Natural England, and it has just produced a new 5-year management plan. The fact that it owns no land, manages no land, farms no land, has no money, no regulatory powers or practical knowledge of how the people who toil away in the NPNL's 2,000 square kilometres function, obviously has zero impact on the team's ambition and self-belief.

They have produced their plan, which they say should be seen as a strategy, and it is out for consultation. It is enormous: 784 pages with links to a mass of other documents and references. It went out for consultation pre-Christmas when everyone was distracted and is sitting there waiting to quietly sneak over the deadline without too much comment and fuss. It is a radical document. Shorn of the mass of verbiage it proposes huge and speculative change. The authors have little patience with farming as currently practised, and clearly think that grouse moor management and other forms of game management should be suppressed. They plan to replace these activities with creeping rewilding.

This is not an isolated incident. Across the UK, rural communities face relentless interference from conservation bureaucracies. In the Lake District, the National Park Authority has pushed rewilding agendas that threaten centuries-old shepherding practices. In Scotland, the Cairngorms National Park's tree-planting mandates have forced hill farmers off land their families have worked for generations. In North Yorkshire, Natural England's blanket restrictions on moorland management contributed to the catastrophic 2019 blaze that destroyed over 700 hectares of precious peatland—far more damage than controlled burning ever caused.

It would be wrong to give the impression that there is nothing good in the proposals. It would be difficult to produce 784 pages without some good ideas, but the problems start at the beginning. The word is never enhance, it is always restore. When you enhance, you make something already good even better. When you restore, you repair something broken and return it to its perfect state.

This plan is about restoration. What already exists must therefore be defective and need returning to a lost perfection. This has two consequences. First, the search for lost paradise always leads to abandoning management, more trees, peat bogs, scrub and the return of lost fauna—and yes, it does propose releasing beavers. The second is that the beautiful, living, working landscapes that already exist, and are loved by almost everyone, are in reality a caricature of a ruined paradise.

This is the paradox underlying the plan. The AONB was established because of the beauty of the land and its wildlife. This existed because of how the land was managed, not in spite of it. Now the same management must be changed so this beautiful place can change into something else. What that something else will be is not clear.

The North Pennines contains 40% of the UK's upland hay meadows, 30% of England's upland heathland and 27% of its blanket bog, 80% of England's black grouse, and 22,000 pairs of breeding waders. Most of those wonderful features only exist because of how large parts are managed for farming and game. Which, if you don't like either and you are writing a plan, is unfortunate to say the least.

But that was then. This is now. Now we find that the farming is wrong, that moorland management is wrong. Almost everything that got us to this point is wrong and needs to change.

This paradox results in the plan being equivocal about the beauty and richness that already exists, but surprisingly certain about what it imagines a distant past looked like before all those pesky people started to live and work there. An example is its approach to ground-nesting waders, and in particular the curlew, which has been selected as a champion species with a target to double numbers in the next five years.

What they don't make clear is that the North Pennines grouse moors, and the in-bye land around them, are one of the few 'curlew factories' in the world. The North Pennines produce curlew like Volkswagen produce cars. Unlike most of England, curlew are doing very well indeed—now. There's a lot of suitable habitat. The pasture and mowing grass on the in-bye land, and the short vegetation patches created by burning and cutting on the moors, are excellent nesting and brood-rearing habitat. That, together with the predator control umbrella provided by the shooting estates, results in fledging success beyond the wildest dreams of anywhere in England run by the conservation industry. Not only do the moors and farms of the North Pennines produce enough fledged curlew to sustain their population, many of the young move out to repopulate less successful areas.

This success stands in stark contrast to conservation industry failures elsewhere. RSPB reserves across England have watched curlew populations collapse despite massive expenditure. Yet here, gamekeepers working for shooting estates—unpaid by the state, often vilified by conservation groups—have created one of Europe's most successful wader breeding grounds.

The wider implications are profound. Curlew are now red-listed as Britain's most pressing bird conservation priority, with populations down 48% since 1995. Black grouse, of which the North Pennines holds 80% of England's population, are similarly threatened. The North Pennines represents their last stronghold in England, and that stronghold exists because of grouse moor management, not despite it.

So we have the first problem. There is a lot to lose. If the National Landscape Plan compromises this near-perfect conjunction, one of our most important curlew breeding locations could be lost, with a catastrophic impact on the bird's already perilous status.

The second problem is that the authors seem to have talked to RSPB, but they have never farmed or managed a grouse moor, nor discussed their plans with anyone who has—or if they did, they ignored what they were told.

They want more trees, more scrub, no burning or even cutting of heather. They want the pastures rewetted and the rushes cut. They want sheep removed or drastically reduced, and replaced by small numbers of hardy cattle. It should be made clear that they have no budget and can supply no payment or compensation for any of this.

Remarkably, they do want predator control. This is borderline miraculous, but they find the agony of having to accept that predator control is essential so unbearable that they tie the whole thing up in caveats and look forward to the happy day when the habitat will be so perfect that no one will ever be beastly to a carrion crow again.

This is what they say: "Wherever possible conservation objectives should be delivered without resorting to killing predators. Any predator control carried out to achieve conservation objectives should be justified through evidence of its need, targeted in its approach and scale, and regularly reviewed. As breeding wader populations are currently vulnerable targeted predator control is required to ensure that populations remain viable."

It is difficult to find a more mealy-mouthed endorsement of an essential rural task. There is nowhere in the British Isles where their longed-for nirvana exists. There is nowhere they can identify where the conservation objective of even maintaining curlew populations is achieved 'without resorting to killing predators'. These populations are currently way above merely viable. They are amongst the most productive in the world. Yet the authors' dislike of predator control is such that viable will do. No, it won't.

The bitter irony is that conservation organizations cannot replicate the success of traditional moorland management. The RSPB's own data from their Geltsdale reserve shows curlew productivity of just 0.13 chicks per pair—well below the 0.6 needed for population stability. Compare this to North Pennines grouse moors where gamekeepers routinely achieve 0.8 to 1.2 chicks per pair. The difference? Professional, year-round predator control by people who actually live on and understand the land.

All the hand-wringing and the total absence of money for predator control currently doesn't matter. The legal control of predators is carried out by gamekeepers working on shooting estates and is paid for by the owners. Those are the shooting estates that the authors are so prejudiced against, and whose activities they want to curtail to a point approaching extinction. If they succeeded, who would do the predator control? Who will trap the stoats, and kill the foxes and crows? Not this lot. They can't even pay for it. Tell us how this is going to happen when you have got rid of the people who do it so well that the hills of the North Pennines are England's premier wader factory.

It is bizarre that they seem to have based this on opinions of the RSPB, who found their curlew fledging results were actually worse than in adjacent areas where they had done nothing. The RSPB have published a peer-reviewed paper on the results. In there they speculate about why they are so bad, and why the grouse moor keepers are so good.

They will ban all cutting and burning. Why? This goes way beyond even Defra's extreme position. In almost the next breath they dodge the obvious issue of wildfire by saying that someone needs to produce a wildfire mitigation plan. Banning burning and cutting prevents the reduction of fuel loads. Getting rid of sheep stops them eating the fuel. They don't want any more access tracks that would allow firefighters to get to the blaze. So what is left? What is going to be in the plan? They don't say.

The wildfire risk is not theoretical. In 2018, Saddleworth Moor burned for three weeks, destroying seven square miles of moorland that hadn't been properly managed for years. Winter Hill in Lancashire burned for three weeks. In 2019, fires raged across Yorkshire and Greater Manchester moors where burning had been restricted. In every case, accumulated fuel loads from years of management restrictions imposed by conservation bureaucrats were the common factor. Firefighters confirmed that areas with recent controlled burning acted as firebreaks, while unmanaged areas burned intensively.

The plan has been written before the people who live and work there were consulted. They and their ancestors created this wonderful place. The plan does not represent their opinions, their generational knowledge of what is possible or practical, or their aspirations. It is the product of a tiny group of people who are members of the self-selecting conservation industry elite.

This plan represents another front in the systematic assault on rural Britain. Farmers face inheritance taxes designed to break up family farms. Environmental Land Management schemes pay a fraction of what's needed while demanding farmers stop farming. Planning restrictions prevent rural businesses from adapting. Livestock farmers are scapegoated for climate change while being undercut by imports from countries with lower standards. And now, conservation bureaucracies demand the removal of the very practices that created the wildlife they claim to protect.

The people targeted are those who know their land intimately—who can read weather in the sky, who understand seasonal patterns spanning decades, who have inherited knowledge refined over centuries. They are dismissed by salaried officials with environmental science degrees and no practical experience, who return to their urban homes after imposing restrictions that will never affect them personally.

Meanwhile, the endangered wildlife that rural communities have successfully protected for generations is put at risk by ideological experiments based on theoretical models rather than proven results. The North Pennines curlew population—England's most successful—faces being sacrificed on the altar of rewilding theology. The black grouse that survive here because of grouse moor management will disappear. The hay meadows maintained by traditional farming will be lost. All to pursue a "restoration" to a mythical past that never existed and cannot be recreated.

This isn't conservation. It's cultural warfare dressed up as environmental policy. And the casualties will be both the rural communities who created these landscapes and the endangered species that depend on them.

The plan is about as top-down as a document can be, and now that it exists, changing it will be almost impossible. It is based on the idea that hard-working, honest people who have created a near paradise will accept that they are doing almost everything wrong, and do as they are told by people who appear prejudiced against them, and who show little understanding of them or their communities. The final straw is that for all the words in 784 pages plus attachments, links and references the whole thing is completely and utterly unfunded and likely to stay that way. Do they never learn?