The £750,000 Fen fire in Cambridgeshire dwarfed by the real costs of this summer's wildfires in the uplands.
This week the taxpayer learned what one wildfire costs. Cambridgeshire’s fire authority has published papers showing that the Holme Fen blaze, 31 days on a Natural England nature reserve, will cost the service more than £750,000, all of which it expects to claw back from government through a wildfire grant. The BBC reported it. Ministers will read it. It will appear in the next Treasury spreadsheet on the cost of the summer.
Now try to find the equivalent figure for Tintwistle Moor.
You will not find it, because nobody is counting. Tintwistle was first called in on 24 June. It smouldered in the peat for three weeks, reignited in the July heatwave, was declared a major incident on 12 July and, by the time it was held, had burned through some 2,500 hectares, the Peak District’s worst fire since Saddleworth in 2018. Holme Fen is a single reserve. Tintwistle was, in area, the better part of a small national park.
And a large part of the bill for fighting it was paid by people who will never see a penny of it back.
The private fire service nobody funds
For ten days and nights from 12 July, between 15 and 20 gamekeepers from the Peak District Moorland Group worked the western flank of the fire with seven or eight Argocats and buggies carrying water-fogging units, around 15 leaf blowers, and a rota between estates so that no moor was left unmanned. One keeper arrived at 9.30pm on the Sunday and did not go home until 3.30am on the Tuesday. By early August local keepers estimated they had put in more than 1,000 hours on the summer’s fires. The group’s coordinator put it plainly to the Spectator: had the fire service done that work itself it would have cost the taxpayer millions.
None of that appears in any public account. It was not invoiced. It cannot be reclaimed. There is no wildfire grant for a keeper who has spent ten nights choking on peat smoke on land that is not even his employer’s.
Then there is the kit. One headkeeper near the Woodhead Pass keeps a £40,000 Argocat and fogging unit for no purpose other than wildfire; his estate has not burned heather on deep peat since 2018, so the machine exists purely as an emergency service the public gets for free.
Multiply that by the seven or eight vehicles on the hill at Tintwistle and you have more than £300,000 of privately owned firefighting plant deployed for ten days at no cost to anyone but the estates. Another keeper’s estate has spent more than £80,000 on a tractor and cutting gear to replace winter burns that used to cost £1,000 to £2,000 a year in labour and fuel, because the regulations now forbid the cheaper, more effective method. A third estate hired a two-man security team at £600 a day after its keepers were threatened with having their houses burned down for asking wild campers to put out their fires. As that headkeeper said: “Effectively, you’ve got estate owners funding a private emergency service.”
Set those numbers against what the state spends when the state has to do it alone. Marsden Moor, 2019: three days, 100 firefighters, more than £500,000. Saddleworth, 2018: Greater Manchester went to government for close to £1 million in additional costs, including £70,000 paid to the Ministry of Defence for soldiers. The helicopter water drops over the Dove Stone fires this year alone are likely to have cost £500,000. The Moorland Association’s benchmark for a serious moorland fire is £5,000 to £10,000 per hectare in firefighting alone, rising past £20,000 where deep peat burns. On the lower end of that range, 2,500 hectares at Tintwistle is a £12.5 million fire. On the Holme Fen measure, a reserve fire with no keepers on it, the cost to the public purse was roughly £24,000 a day. Tintwistle ran for five weeks.
The reason the Holme Fen number exists is simple: it fell on a public body, so a public body wrote it down. The reason the Tintwistle number does not exist is equally simple: a large share of it fell on private estates, and nobody in government has ever asked them what they spent. Not Defra, whose impact assessment for the 2025 burning regulations contained no line for the cost of fighting the fires those regulations make more likely. Not the National Fire Chiefs Council. Not the BBC, which covered the Holme Fen board papers this week and has never once asked a Peak District estate for its invoice.
The keepers know exactly why. One of them told Shooting Times: “If we had a different job title and we weren’t associated with toffs in tweed, I think we would be listened to more.” He has renamed himself “conservation manager” and reports that ears prick up in meetings where they used to close.
So here is the position the uplands are in. Since 2018 estates have been told, first voluntarily and then by law, to stop the winter burning that for two centuries kept fuel loads down and cut firebreaks across the moor. They have spent tens of thousands of pounds each on the government’s preferred alternatives, which the keepers who use them say cannot reach steep, wet or rocky ground and leave cut brash lying on the surface to burn. When the fire comes, as it did at Ashop in May and Tintwistle in July, the same estates supply the men, the vehicles, the water, the local knowledge and the winter training that Greater Manchester’s crews rely on. Then they pay for all of it, bury the dead leverets and the unfledged chicks, and watch a Cambridgeshire fire authority reclaim three quarters of a million pounds for a fire a fraction of the size.
The western flank of the Tintwistle fire stopped at the boundary of a managed grouse moor. Footage shows the flames dropping as they reached the uneven-aged mosaic of vegetation that management produces. That boundary is where the cost of prevention met the cost of response, and prevention won. Policy makers have spent eight years making that boundary harder to maintain and then relying on it to save the Stalybridge Estate.
Three things urgent things need to happen, and none of them are difficult.
First, count it. Every fire and rescue service that declares a major moorland incident should be required to record the hours, vehicles and equipment supplied by landowners and keepers, and to publish that alongside its own costs. If Cambridgeshire can produce a figure in ten weeks, Derbyshire can.
Second, fund it. If government will reimburse a fire authority through a wildfire grant, it can reimburse the estates that did the same work on the same fire. A keeper’s Argocat on the hill for ten days is not a private indulgence. It is public infrastructure that happens to have a private owner.
Third, stop making it worse. The Heather and Grass etc. Burning (England) (Amendment) Regulations 2025 took away the cheapest, most proven tool for reducing fuel load across the deep-peat uplands and replaced it with nothing that works on the ground Tintwistle burned over. Every keeper who fought that fire says so. Ministers who want to know what their regulations cost should stop reading Cambridgeshire’s board papers and start reading Derbyshire’s estate accounts.
