The wrong half of the Peak District is closed

On 14 August the Government sent an emergency alert to every phone in the country warning of extreme wildfire risk. Four days later, the Peak District National Park Authority's website carries a notice that access land in the White Peak is closed because the fire severity level is exceptional. The Dark Peak, where every major fire of this summer has burned, remains open.

Anyone who has walked the Peak will see the problem at once. The White Peak is the limestone plateau in the middle of the park: Bakewell, Hartington, the Dales, close-cropped pasture and dry stone walls. The Dark Peak is the gritstone horseshoe wrapped around it: Bleaklow, Kinder, the Derwent moors, the eastern edges above Hathersage and the western moors above Glossop and Buxton. It is peat, heather and cotton grass. It is where Tintwistle, Arnfield and Crowden burned in June and July, where crews and gamekeepers spent days on the fireline, and where the fuel load now stands tinder dry after the hottest, driest summer in living memory.

So why is the plateau shut and the moor open? The answer lies in how closures are triggered. The National Park Authority holds standing fire prevention directions under the Countryside and Rights of Way Act 2000 which switch on automatically when the Met Office Fire Severity Index reaches level 5, "exceptional", in a given forecast area.

Public rights of way stay open; the right to roam across open access land is suspended until the index drops.

The Fire Severity Index is a meteorological product. It combines temperature, humidity, wind speed and rainfall deficit to estimate how severe a fire would be if one started. It says nothing about what is on the ground. It does not know how deep the peat is, how much dead heather is standing, whether the ground burned last month, or how many ignitions the fire service has attended this year.

The White Peak sits lower, warmer and drier, on shallow soils over limestone that drain in hours. In a heatwave its forecast area tips into level 5 first. The Dark Peak plateau is higher, a degree or two cooler and often a shade more humid, so its area can hover at level 4 all week even as the moors around it carry the country's most combustible fuel. The result is the map we now have: the safer ground closed, the dangerous ground open.

The law already allows better. This is not a gap in the legislation. Section 25 of the CRoW Act allows the relevant authority to exclude or restrict access where there is a particular risk of fire. The statute refers both to exceptional weather and to an exceptional change in the condition of the land, and that either limb should be enough. After a summer like this one, that second limb matters. Ground can be bone dry, with a heavy fuel load standing, on a day when the index has not crossed its threshold.

Natural England disagrees. It has told the Moorland Association that a restriction can only lawfully be activated once the index reaches level 5, whatever the state of the ground. Its chief executive has advised landowners to apply in advance for an outline fire prevention direction so that the paperwork is ready when the number arrives.

That is exactly the situation on the Dark Peak. Estates have applied. Their applications sit unprocessed, waiting for a weather reading that the high moor may never register in the same week that it burns. Meanwhile the emergency alert on everyone's phone has no legal effect on access land at all. It is a message, not a mechanism.

We are not calling for the moors to be locked up every dry weekend. We are calling for a closure system that follows the fire risk rather than the thermometer. That means three things.

First, Natural England should recognise the "condition of the land" test in section 25 and process the estates' applications on that basis, rather than insisting on an index designed for a different purpose.

Second, the National Park Authority and the Fire Operations Group should be able to activate directions on the Dark Peak on the evidence in front of them: fuel moisture, recent fire history and fire service advice, not a single Met Office grid value.

Third, Government should agree a national protocol so that the moorland groups who are first on the scene of every fire, and who know the ground better than any model, have a role in deciding when the public should be asked to stay off it.

Until then the map speaks for itself. The fires are on the dark. The closures are on the light.

Map caption: illustrative boundary between the White Peak limestone plateau and the Dark Peak gritstone horseshoe. Access land in the White Peak closed under FSI level 5; Dark Peak access land open with section 25 applications pending.