Moorland Association CEO, Andrew Gilruth, Delivers Stark Reality Check to Environmental Audit Committee Peatland Inquiry
- C4PMC
- Mar 6
- 4 min read
Andrew Gilruth's appearance before the Environmental Audit Committee's Peatland Inquiry on 4th March was a masterclass in evidence-based advocacy — calm, authoritative, and grounded in the realities that Westminster too often ignores.
As Chief Executive of the Moorland Association, representing those who manage one million acres of upland Britain, Gilruth arrived not just with a brief but with forensic command of the detail. From the physics of pyro-convection to the bureaucratic absurdity of a licensing system that has failed to produce a single workable permit, his testimony covered the full landscape of the crisis with the confidence of someone who has lived and breathed this issue for decades.
What set Gilruth apart from many who appear before select committees is that he was not speaking for an abstraction. Behind every technical argument about fuel loads and licensing failures stood the gamekeepers, land managers, and rural workers who depend on these moors for their livelihoods and their way of life.
When he told MPs that it was local gamekeepers — not the agencies, not the consultants — who had the skills and the courage to conduct back-burning operations during the catastrophic North York Moors fire, he was making a point that went well beyond land management policy. He was making the case for a community that successive governments have talked about protecting while systematically removing the tools that allow them to do their jobs.
These are people with generational knowledge of the uplands, whose expertise is irreplaceable once lost, and who are being rendered idle by regulations drafted in offices far from the moors they manage. Gilruth gave that community a voice in the room that matters most, and he did so with the kind of quiet conviction that comes from knowing exactly who he is fighting for.
His most powerful contribution was shifting the debate from the theoretical to the urgent. Wildfires that burn for six months. Trenches 29 kilometres long. Twenty lives lost across Europe in a single season. Thirty in Los Angeles. These were not statistics deployed for effect — they were a direct challenge to a committee that must decide whether to wait for a British coroner to make the case for reform. "Surely we should not be waiting in this country for a coroner to provide direction on this point," he told MPs. It was the kind of plain-speaking that select committee rooms rarely hear, and it landed.
Equally impressive was his handling of the rewetting question. Rather than dismissing it — which would have been easy and politically costly — he welcomed it sincerely and conditionally. His members, he said, are "thoroughly delighted to rewet their peat." But he then dismantled the assumption with precision: water cannot be kept on top of a hill; much of the North York Moors has few drains to block; and comprehensive mapping of what can genuinely be rewetted simply does not exist. It was a sophisticated, honest answer that demonstrated he was there to inform the committee, not perform for it.
His challenge to the science underpinning Defra's de facto burning ban was perhaps the most significant moment of the session. The claim that the supporting Natural England evidence review amounted to "rigorous peer review" — a phrase Defra itself quietly dropped on the morning of the hearing — was exposed with careful detail: no written brief for reviewers, no templates, no scoring systems, and reviewers who by their own admission could not read the document properly. Calling this a "house of cards" was not hyperbole. It was an accurate description of a policy built on procedurally inadequate foundations, and the committee now has that on the record.
Throughout, Gilruth struck exactly the right tone — serious without being combative, critical without being partisan. He gave the committee what it needs to act: clear evidence of a broken licensing system, a cogent public safety argument, and a ready-made frame for challenging Defra's scientific basis. His conclusion — passing on the message from European firefighters that what they need is "people back on the land managing the fuel loads" — was a fitting close to a session that confirmed his status as one of the most effective voices for upland communities in Parliament.
Ultimately, what Andrew Gilruth brought to the Environmental Audit Committee was something rarer than expertise — he brought genuine advocacy for the people of Britain's uplands. Not the romanticised version of rural life that occasionally surfaces in Westminster debates, but the practical, unglamorous reality of communities whose livelihoods depend on being allowed to manage land as they know how.
Every argument he made — about burning, about rewetting, about broken licensing, about firefighter safety — traced back to the same core truth: that policies designed without the input of those who live and work on the moors will fail the moors. In making that case with such clarity and force, Gilruth served not just the Moorland Association's members, but every family, every business, and every landscape that depends on the uplands being properly looked after.
It is well worth a watch in full, which you can see here.
