The gamekeepers keeping the uplands standing at no cost to the public purse

This week's Derbyshire Times story on Peak District gamekeepers being turned away from council tips while clearing public litter should be read twice. Once for the immediate absurdity of it, and again for what it reveals about how our uplands actually function.

The men and women loading those pick-up trucks with other people's fast food wrappers were not paid to do it. They gave up their weekends. They used their own vehicles, their own fuel, and in some cases their own money to rent commercial waste containers, just so that visitors to the Peak District could continue to enjoy a landscape free of the rubbish those same visitors left behind. For their trouble, the council's rules now threaten them with a penalty if they exceed their annual tip allowance.

You could be forgiven for thinking this was a one-off. It is not. The litter pick is simply the most visible, most photographable version of something that goes on every single day across the moors of northern England, quietly and without fanfare, and almost entirely at no cost to the taxpayer.

Consider what gamekeepers and moorland staff actually do between one litter pick and the next. They cut firebreaks and maintain the tracks that allow fire crews to reach a blaze before it takes hold of thousands of hectares of deep peat. They monitor and control predators so that curlew, lapwing, golden plover and other ground-nesting birds have a fighting chance of fledging a brood. They manage heather and vegetation in ways that hold water in the hills, slow its passage into the valleys, and reduce flood risk to the towns below. They keep footpaths passable, drystone walls standing, and grouse butts safe. They are the first responders when a walker is hurt, a dog is lost or a sheep is in trouble. They are, in practical terms, the caretakers of some of the most ecologically and culturally significant landscapes in the country.

None of this appears on a council balance sheet. None of it is funded by the visitor centres, the car parks or the tourism economy that depends on the landscape being there in the first place. It is paid for by the estates and, in many cases, subsidised by the goodwill of the people who work on them.

That is the context in which the tip rules land. A gamekeeper whose vehicle is taxed as commercial is permitted twelve visits a year to a household waste recycling centre. If he uses those visits to dispose of litter he has picked up from a public road running through an estate, he has no allowance left for his own bin bags at home. Moscar Moor Estate is already paying £1,300 a year for a commercial container, and its vehicles have still been turned away when arriving with sacks of tourist litter. The message from the system, intended or otherwise, is that the estate should simply stop picking up the litter.

If that is the outcome councils want, they should say so plainly. If it is not, the rules need to catch up with reality.

Derbyshire County Council's Cabinet Member for Net Zero and Environment has offered to speak to district and borough authorities about taking publicly collected litter to waste transfer stations. That is welcome. It is also the very minimum that should be on the table. The people doing unpaid public work on the uplands should not be classified alongside commercial trade operators simply because their vehicles are sign-written and their tax class reflects the job they do.

There is a wider point here, and C4PMC has made it before. The upland communities that manage these landscapes are constantly asked to justify their existence to an audience that has never set foot on a moor in February. They are told they are a relic, or a hobby, or a problem to be solved. And then, when the visitors arrive in July and leave their wrappers in the heather, it is those same communities who quietly clear up and put the place back together before the next coachload arrives.

A functioning country notices that kind of contribution. It certainly does not penalise it.

The gamekeepers of the Peak District did not set out to make a political point this month. They set out to pick up litter. But the story they have ended up telling is one worth paying attention to, because it is the story of how the uplands actually work, and of the unpaid workforce without whom they would not work at all.