Data, not opinions: finally a Wildfire Commission that listened to the experts

When the Wildfire Commission convened in London on 23 April, something quietly remarkable happened. For perhaps the first time in years, a major discussion about wildfire policy in the UK was dominated not by lobbyists, campaigners or self-appointed countryside commentators, but by fire service chiefs, operational commanders, fire behaviour scientists and the academics who actually study how moorland burns.

The conversation was about data. It was about facts. It was about fuel.That, more than any other single feature of the event, is why this Commission matters.

For the better part of a decade, wildfire policy in England has been shaped less by evidence than by opinion. Activist NGOs have set the terms of the debate. Press releases have outranked peer-reviewed research. Glossy campaigns have crowded out fire chiefs, who have had to repeat themselves in increasingly urgent language to be heard at all.

The result is the policy environment we now have: a record-breaking 2025 fire season, an EFRA Committee call for evidence into the rising threat, and uplands carrying fuel loads that fire services have been warning about for years.

The Wildfire Commission marks a deliberate break from that pattern. What was striking in the room was not the absence of opinion, but the discipline of the discussion. Fire chiefs spoke about what their crews encounter on the line. Scientists presented what the modelling and mapping show. Land managers described what works on the ground and what does not. As Richard Bailey, Coordinator of the Peak District Moorland Group, put it, the day brought together "practitioner expertise, professional fire service personnel, leading academics in fire behaviour and those with a genuine concern in the direction of travel of wildfire impact." Nobody was there to defend a brand, protect a fundraising appeal, or rehearse a press line.

The shared starting point was simple. Wildfire behaviour is governed by weather, topography and fuel, and of those three, fuel is the only variable we can actually manage.

That is not a controversial statement. It is the position of the National Fire Chiefs Council, which confirmed that 2025 broke UK records for the most reported wildfire incidents, surpassing the previous record set in 2022. It is the working assumption of every fire and rescue service that has fought a moorland blaze in the last five years. It is reflected in the operational doctrine of fire services in the United States, Australia, southern Europe and Scotland. The only place where it remains contested is in the UK policy conversation, where ideology has been allowed to override the operational reality for too long.

The Commission is doing something useful precisely because it refuses to pretend otherwise. It is asking how fuel loads are measured. How they are distributed across different moorland types. How fuel breaks should be designed and maintained. How regional plans should be tailored to the specific conditions of the Peak District, the North York Moors, the Pennines, the Cairngorms and beyond.

These are technical questions with technical answers, and they are best answered by people with technical expertise.

The voices speaking up at the launch made the point themselves. Iona McGregor, Regional Coordinator for the Angus Glens and Grampian Moorland Groups, drew the lesson from Carrbridge and Dava, Scotland's worst recorded wildfire, which devastated 11,827 hectares last year and required more than 100 people from 33 rural businesses to tackle alongside the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service.

Firefighters tackling the blaze at Langdale Moor in North Yorkshire last summer

Her conclusion was that the Commission works because it is "grounded in real-world experience," bringing together "those who manage the land, those who respond to fires, and those who study them."

That is what evidence-led policy actually looks like. It includes fire behaviour scientists who have spent careers studying combustion in heather, molinia and degraded peat. It includes fire and rescue chiefs whose crews have stood in front of fires advancing at speeds that the public would struggle to believe.

It includes gamekeepers and land managers whose practical knowledge of fuel structure and burn behaviour, accumulated over generations, is as close to first-principles fire science as any policymaker is likely to encounter.

It does not include people whose primary qualification is having an opinion. This is the point that needs to be reinforced. The Commission's real innovation is not the policy work it will produce, valuable though that will be. The innovation is the room. It is who was in it, and who was not. It is the decision to convene the people who fight fires and study fires, and to let them lead the conversation. It is the choice to treat wildfire as an operational problem with operational solutions, rather than a culture war proxy.

That choice should be the model for every conversation about land management going forward. For too long, the people most directly affected by wildfire risk, the rural communities who live alongside it, the fire crews who tackle it, and the land managers who work to prevent it, have been told that their experience is not relevant unless it aligns with the prevailing campaigning narrative.

The Commission has demonstrated that there is another way. Listen to the experts. Look at the data. Manage the fuel. Reduce the risk. It is not complicated. It has only ever been made to seem so.

If the Commission's work is allowed to proceed on the terms it has set itself, technical, evidence-led, rooted in operational reality, then the UK has a genuine opportunity to put wildfire policy back on the footing it should always have been on.

That means parliamentary scrutiny that takes fire chiefs and scientists seriously. It means a Defra and Natural England prepared to engage with operational evidence rather than retreat from it. And it means recognising, finally, that the people who manage the land and the people who fight the fires are not the problem. They are the solution.

The Wildfire Commission has set the standard. The rest of the policy conversation should be required to meet it.