Before Peak District National Park boss Phil Mulligan asks taxpayers for more, he should explain where all the previous money went

The chief executive of the Peak District National Park Authority, Phil Mulligan, thinks the "easiest" and most "obvious" way to fund national parks is for the taxpayer to hand over more money. A 10 per cent uplift across all ten parks, he points out, would cost each of us a mere 8p a year.

That framing is revealing. It treats public funding as cost-free and assumes, without argument, that the bodies currently receiving it are doing a good job with what they already have. Neither is true.

Before anyone seriously entertains raising taxes to top up the budgets of national park authorities, the National Trust, the RSPB or Natural England, there is a prior question that deserves an honest answer. What, exactly, has the existing money delivered?

The The Peak District has been scarred repeatedly in recent years by catastrophic wildfires. Froggatt Edge, referenced in the very BBC article in which Mulligan made his pitch, is only the latest example. Marsden Moor, managed by the National Trust, has had more wildfires than almost anywhere. Saddleworth in 2018 required a military deployment and released moor carbon into the athmosphere than all the controlled burning combined.

PDNP Walking Group

These are not freak weather events. They are the predictable consequence of a policy direction, championed by many of the publicly funded bodies now asking for more money, which has sought to end controlled cool burning, block drainage, and allow fuel loads on moorland to accumulate unchecked.

The same organisations then express surprise when a single discarded barbecue or a dry summer ignites an inferno that releases decades of stored carbon, destroys ground-nesting bird habitat, and sterilises peat.

Privately managed moorland, by contrast, where keepers still carry out rotational burning and active vegetation management, has a markedly better record of surviving wildfire events and recovering from them. That is not opinion. It is visible on the ground, year after year, to anyone who cares to look.

The story on tree planting is scarcely better. Publicly funded schemes have repeatedly planted the wrong species in the wrong places, including on deep peat where trees have no business being, only for the saplings to die, be removed at further public expense, or actively damage the carbon sink they were supposedly installed to enhance.

Targets have been announced, photo opportunities staged, grant money disbursed, and the ecological outcomes have often been derisory. When private estates make planting decisions, they tend to live with the consequences. When publicly funded bodies do so, the consequences are socialised and the accountability evaporates.

Across the uplands of England, the heavy lifting on habitat maintenance, predator control, flood mitigation, curlew and lapwing recovery, and wildfire prevention is being done by private landowners, farmers, and gamekeepers. They do it at their own expense. They pay tax, rather than receive it. They do not issue press releases demanding an 8p levy on every taxpayer in the country.

The contrast with the publicly funded conservation estate is stark. One model delivers measurable outcomes for wildlife and landscape at no cost to the Exchequer. The other consumes ever larger sums of public money while overseeing declining bird populations, burning moors, and failed planting schemes, and then asks for more.

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Mulligan is not wrong that national parks face real pressures. Overcrowding, dangerous parking, and wildfire risk are genuine challenges. But the answer to poor stewardship is not a bigger budget for the same stewards. It is a serious, unsentimental look at what works, what does not, and who is actually delivering.

A sensible conversation about funding would begin by recognising that the most cost-effective conservation in the English uplands is already being carried out by the private sector, largely unsubsidised and largely unthanked. It would ask why publicly funded bodies consistently underperform the privately managed estate on the metrics that matter. And it would demand, before a single extra penny is raised in tax, a full account of how the existing grants have been spent and what they have achieved.

Until those questions are answered, the proposal to top up national park budgets by general taxation is not "obvious" or "fair". It is a request to reward failure.