It just keeps happening

Six years ago – back in February 2019 – there was a meeting in parliament to talk about wildfire, its prevention and mitigation. Several interesting points emerged. The 2018 Stalybridge fire – on land where NE had stopped rotational cool burning – and a fire which the moorland community considered massive, was not the biggest UK wildfire of 2018. It wasn’t even the second biggest; it was only the fifth.

That said, it was certainly bad enough. We were informed that at Stalybridge, the equivalent of 7cm of peat had been lost across the whole site: burnt, washed or blown away. We heard that if the moor did get back to accumulating peat again it could develop at a rate of approximately 1cm in every 20-30 years. So, it would take between 140 and 210 years for the lost peat to be replaced.

The moor had been subject to a similarly devastating wildfire about twenty years before, and a significant element that had been destroyed was ground that had been revegetated in 2002. As NE were unlikely to change their position on rotational cool burning, when the vegetation got rank again in 20 years or so there would be another wildfire and another few centimetres of peat would be lost, and so on and so on until eventually it got down to the bed rock.

To create an even greater sense of urgency, a senior Fire and Rescue Service representative said that they knew of more than a dozen major wildfires burning, from as far south as Dartmoor, north to Arthur’s Seat in the middle of Edinburgh. That was in February. So in 2019, everyone was well aware that wildfires were already a very serious issue. They posed, both then and now, existential threats to the survival of rare species, to biodiversity, water supply and quality, atmospheric pollution, and to human health and safety.

Following large wildfires which involve significant engagement from the Fire and Rescue Services, it is usual for them to report on causation and how the problem can be mitigated in future. The recommendations after Stalybridge were in line with views expressed at the meeting in parliament (and following many wildfires before and since).

They are: 1) better access, 2) reduced fuel load, 3) fire breaks, and 4) caches of water. The only thing more consistent than the regularly stated views of the professionals who have to battle these fire is the absolute refusal of NE or the conservation industry to listen.

In the Peak District, land managers were so concerned about the obvious wildfire risk generated by a combination of intentionally increased continuous fuel loads and 13 million tourists that they funded an independent report on wildfire risk and mitigation. This has been published, but it has had zero impact on the policies and practices of the conservation industry or NE. They continue to believe that if you stop up drainage grips, the peat will rewet and wildfire will become impossible.

After two wet years we have a dry spring, and the utter stupidity of Natural England's attitude is now very clear indeed. On the last day of April, the United Utilities land in the Goyt Valley could be seen burning from forty miles away. The land had, apparently, been made 'fire proof' by years of grip blocking and planting of sphagnum plugs.

A few days before the Goyt was incinerated a huge wildfire had swept through the National Trust's Marsden Moor, incidentally burning 14,000 plastic tubes and their little trees. The area had also been subject to all the standard conservation industry black magic to make it fire proof.

A few days before the Marsden Moor catastrophe the National Trust's Howden Moor burnt to a crisp. A decade of almost no grazing, no cool burning, grip blocking and sphagnum planting – which was supposed to fire proof a once biodiversity jewel – disappeared in flames overnight.

There are a lot more, but we won't labour the point. It is obvious that the concept of 'fire proof' has morphed into 'Light the blue touch paper and retire immediately'. At what point does this madness end? Well, not anytime soon, that's for sure.

NE have just persuaded the Defra minister Mary Creagh to extend the ban on rotational cool burning from peat with a depth of 40 cm or more to 30 cm. Even they don't know how much extra land that will entail, because they haven't bothered to measure it. But one thing's for sure: it will be far more than the existing estimate of 321,000 ha of blanket bog, and will make up most of England's peatland moors. They also propose extended the amount of dry heathland in England from 135,000 ha to 417,000 ha, with them controlling what happens over all of it. Taken together the plan is for NE to have regulatory control over million hectares. On the evidence of their current behaviour this will be a complete disaster.

It is also a combination of arrogance and ignorance probably unequalled in the history of British public service. They can't even get much of their own land into favourable conservation status. Their policies are turning the Peak District into an ash tray, whilst they periodically condescend to lecture smoke-blackened fire fighters about why fire breaks and reduced fuel loads are just not acceptable, because they might lead to an undesirable imbalance in the floral mix. For them, getting the right proportions of cottongrass to bog sedge is far more important than protecting an entire landscape from wildfire in a warming world.

It is a continuing disgrace that NE, whose decisions are the cause of these problems, are completely insulated from the consequences. That has to stop, or the madness will never end. What needs to happen immediately is that the costs of fighting wildfires should be transferred from the Local Authority minister Angela Rayner to the NE element of the Defra budget of Mary Creagh. If they had to pay for their stupidity, they might think again.