Agency failures attacked over moorland fires

The Moorland Association says the Met Office and Natural England, environmental arm of the Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs, are running a fire precautions system which is “not fit for purpose”.

Some farmers and landowners are also claiming it is partly Natural England’s fault that moor fires are so fierce when they do start, because it has stopped some of the burning and grazing which used to keep vegetation under control.

The Moorland Association went on the attack following several grass and moor fires in Yorkshire. West Yorkshire Fire Service is still recovering from a devastating fire on Ovenden Moor, near Halifax.

The association has two complaints. The first was that the Met Office’s Fire Severity Index, based on a Canadian formula, took too long to get to Level Five, which would trigger a legal right for landowners to stop access where it is normally guaranteed under the Countryside & Rights of Way Act of 2000.

The second was that Natural England was reluctant to use a provision in the legislation for authorising access bans in “exceptional circumstances” short of a Level Five alert.

Moorland Association chairman Edward Bromet, a Leeds solicitor with a share in the Bingley Moor Partnership, which runs several shoots, said: “Scotland is on fire, Lancashire is on fire, parts of Yorkshire are on fire, but we cannot get permission to stop public access to land which is tinder dry.

“We need a Level Five alert and large parts of the country are still stuck at Level Three, which is nonsense. It’s like having a fire alarm that goes off once everything has been destroyed. We have been lobbying to get the trigger point lowered and I have spoken to people in Natural England and other authorities who agree the system is not fit for purpose.”

Yesterday, the Met Office said it had issued Level Five warnings for some parts of England and Wales on Monday and Tuesday this week but they had been downgraded again after rain began to fall.

The system had been tested against alternatives in the dry summer of 2003 and had proved the best available. It was designed to predict the risk of fires starting, not their severity “which would be impossible to predict”.

Mr Bromet said that even while Level Five warnings were in place in some areas, immediate neighbours were on Level Three. And although in theory landowners could ban the public under “exceptional circumstances”, Natural England had to give permission and hardly ever agreed to it.

Meanwhile, farmers have been calling the Yorkshire Post to suggest Natural England’s preoccupation with stopping “over-grazing” has allowed grass to grow and get old, fuelling the fires which did start.

A moor manager in the North Yorkshire Wildfire Group, Adrian Thornton-Berry of the Swinithwaite Estate, near Leyburn, said yesterday that they had complained repeatedly to Natural England about the consequences of restrictions on heather burning. The grouse managers say new heather is essential for their birds but Natural England says other wildlife needs older and more wood-based growth.

A Natural England manager for North Yorkshire, Peter Welsh, said: “In the small areas where we think grazing or burning restrictions are required, we do talk to all interested parties and try to come to the best compromise. Grazing restrictions are almost always imposed in combination with winter burning, for one thing. As for agreeing to stop public access, of course we do not do it lightly and it is hard to say how much difference it would make anyway.”

A conference on the dispute, involving Moorland Association, Natural England and the Met Office, was already scheduled for May 26, in Manchester, before this week’s fires.

Royal Berkshire Fire and Rescue Service was still fighting heathland fires in the Swinley Forest area yesterday and police investigating one of the fires confirmed they had arrested two 14-year-olds on suspicion of arson and bailed them pending further inquiries.

The Greater Manchester service was still monitoring a fire site near Saddleworth, on the Yorkshire-Lancashire border. But rain on Thursday and yesterday was cooling the situation generally, after the hottest April on record, and heavy rain is predicted across the country this weekend.