The legislation that's making wildfires worse as the Peak District burns once more

Late last night, a wildfire broke out on Wessenden Head Moor, the stretch of high ground locals know as Goodbent. As was reported by the Peak District Moorland Group earlier today, the estate gamekeeper and his team were among the first on the scene, working alongside West Yorkshire Fire and Rescue Service as crews from Todmorden brought specialist equipment to bear on a fire that had every advantage over the people fighting it.

Steep terrain, strong winds and a hillside carpeted in continuous, unbroken vegetation with no age structure to slow the flames. The fire crested the hill before conditions finally eased. Even as this update was written, fresh plumes of smoke were rising across the surrounding area several more wildfires burning simultaneously on molinia-dominated moorland.

This is not a freak event. It is a foreseeable consequence of policy.

Traditional moorland management creates a mosaic: patches of heather and grass at different stages of growth, burned in rotation, that deny a wildfire the continuous fuel bed it needs to travel fast and far.

An uneven-aged landscape is, by its nature, a more resilient one. Research cited by the Moorland Association has found that doubling ground biomass can quadruple fire intensity, and that many of the major wildfires of recent years began on land without a policy of prescribed burning.

When rotational burning is restricted or removed, the mosaic disappears. Vegetation accumulates. And when ignition comes, from a dry spell, a discarded cigarette, or a lightning strike, there is nothing to interrupt the spread.

The Heather and Grass etc. Burning (England) Regulations 2021 introduced the first statutory ban on burning vegetation on protected blanket bog peatland, specifically, on peat over 40cm deep within Sites of Special Scientific Interest that are also Special Areas of Conservation or Special Protection Areas. Burning in these areas without a licence from the Secretary of State became illegal from 1 May 2021, covering around 142,000 hectares of England's upland peat.

The legislation did make theoretical allowances for wildfire prevention: a licence could be granted where burning was deemed necessary to reduce wildfire risk and where no practicable alternative existed. In practice, however, the burden of proof placed on applicants, and the government's stated preference for peatland restoration over active management, made the exemption a narrow one.

Now those restrictions have been tightened further. The Heather and Grass etc. Burning (England) (Amendment) Regulations 2025, which came into force on 30 September 2025, extend the ban beyond protected designated sites to all upland areas within Less Favoured Areas across England. They also reduce the peat depth threshold from 40cm to 30cm. The combined effect increases the total protected area from 222,000 to over 368,000 hectares - an area larger than Greater London, Greater Manchester and the West Midlands combined, in which controlled burning now requires a Defra licence.

The licensing application process only became available on the day the regulations came into force. Land managers operating on these landscapes are, in the plainest terms, being asked to manage wildfire risk with one hand tied behind their backs.

Through a FiPL bid led by the Peak District Moorland Group, gamekeepers and fellow stakeholders in the Peak District Fires Operation Group have recently received Flame Pro Wildland Protective Suits and access to specialist wildfire training. It is a genuine and welcome investment in the people doing this work.

It is worth sitting with that fact for a moment. We are equipping moorland professionals to fight wildfires at greater scale and frequency while simultaneously restricting the management practices that would prevent those fires from reaching that scale. The suits and the training are a response to a problem that good land management, properly supported, would do far more to contain.

The gamekeeper at Goodbent did not wait to be asked. He and his team were on the moor before most people knew there was a fire. That is not unusual, but what gamekeepers do continuously across the uplands, because these are landscapes they know intimately and care for professionally.

The same expertise and local knowledge that makes a gamekeeper effective at wildfire response is precisely what makes him effective at preventing wildfires from reaching that point. What has changed is the legislative environment in which that expertise is allowed to operate. The 2021 regulations, and their 2025 extension, were designed and defended on environmental grounds. Natural England's position, repeated in its support for the consultation, is that managed burning is damaging to peatland formation and should be treated as a last resort. That argument cannot be made honestly without also accounting for what happens to those landscapes when the management stops.

Last night's fire, and the others burning across the South Pennines as we write, are part of that accounting. The gamekeepers were there. They will be there again. The question is whether the policy environment will ever be honest about what it is costing them — and the landscapes they manage.