Turns out the PDNPA Were Listening All Along. That's The Problem.

This week the Peak District National Park Authority deleted a social media post about wild swimming, took the criticism on board, and replaced it within 24 hours with something better. We said so at the time, and we meant it. Owning a weak post and improving it under public pressure takes a degree of nerve, and we would rather acknowledge that than pretend it didn't happen.

But the episode tells us something the Authority might prefer we didn't notice.

For years the line from the National Park has been that social media is noise. That the comments are not the place for serious engagement. That the people shouting on Facebook are not the people the Authority answers to. And yet here is the same Authority reading a swimming post closely enough to spot that it had gone wrong, sensitive enough to several hundred angry replies to act, and organised enough to delete, redraft and republish inside a single day.

That is not an organisation that ignores social media. That is an organisation that monitors it carefully and responds quickly when it decides the issue warrants it.

We are glad they can do this. We would simply like to understand the rule that governs when they choose to.

The Authority's own chief executive Phil Mulligan has been clear in public that social media matters to it. He has described it as vital for reaching new visitors, and noted that large numbers of people now decide whether to come to the Peak District based on what they have seen online. That is not a passing remark. It is a statement of strategy. The National Park watches these channels because it understands they shape who turns up, where they go and what they do when they get there.

So the question is not whether the Authority listens. We now know that it does. The question is who it listens to, and on whose behalf it acts.

When a viral post about swimming generated enough heat, the response was swift and visible. When gamekeepers, moorland managers and the upland communities who actually maintain this landscape raise concerns, the same responsiveness is harder to find.

If you want to see how the Authority treats the moorland community, look at where it has chosen to plant its flag on wildfire.

The Authority's own position, set out plainly on its website, is that it supports the 2021 legislation banning the burning of vegetation on protected blanket bog except under licence. By its own account that ban now covers virtually all the blanket bog within the National Park. On the small fraction of land it owns directly, less than five per cent of the Park, it tells us it stopped using burning as a management tool some years ago and switched to alternative methods.

The direction of travel could not be clearer. The Authority has aligned itself, publicly and deliberately, with ending controlled burning on the moors.

The people who actually manage those moors do not all agree that this makes the landscape safer. A habitat manager on the Fitzwilliam Wentworth Estate's Bradfield Moor has said openly that cutting and the other favoured alternatives have their place, but are no substitute for managed burning when it comes to reducing wildfire risk. The argument from the keepering community is consistent and long standing. Rotational cool burning removes the fuel load. Take it away and the dead vegetation accumulates. When ignition comes, and on a moor full of summer visitors it eventually does, there is far more to burn and the fire goes deeper into the peat.

This is not a debate the Authority can claim to be neutral on, because it has already taken a side. It backed the restriction. And the moors have kept burning. The Peak District and South Pennines have seen dozens of wildfires tear through thousands of hectares in recent seasons.

Saddleworth in 2018 needed a military deployment and, by some estimates, released more carbon than all the controlled burning it was meant to replace. Peat is roughly half carbon. A fire on dried out moorland is not a seasonal nuisance, it is the destruction of a habitat and a carbon store that can take decades to recover.

So here is the contrast in its sharpest form. On a swimming post, the Authority listened to the public within 24 hours and changed course. On wildfire, where the people who manage the land are telling it that the policy it has endorsed is making fires worse, it has not shown anything like the same willingness to listen, let alone to move. The reflexes it deployed for a Facebook pile-on are nowhere to be found when the criticism comes from the keepers.

We want to be careful here, because the swimming debate is genuine and people have died in open water. We are not saying the Authority was wrong to take the swimming criticism seriously. We are saying it proved, in public, that it can take criticism seriously and respond well when it chooses to. That makes the selective application of that energy harder to excuse, not easier.

The same Authority that can redraft a post in 24 hours could choose to engage with moorland managers as partners. It could amplify the firebreak work, the fuel load management and the wildfire response that keepers carry out. It could treat the upland community as people who live, work and look after this landscape, rather than as an awkward inheritance to be tolerated.

It has shown us it has the reflexes. We are asking it to point them in more than one direction.

We are interested in consistency.

If social media is vital, then it is vital for everyone, not only for the audiences the Authority is comfortable courting. If the Authority can listen and act within a day, then the people who manage the moors deserve the same responsiveness as the people who swim in them.

The Peak District National Park Authority has shown this week that it listens. The next test is whether it listens to the people who keep the moorland standing, and whether it acts as quickly for them as it did for a swimming post.