Controlled Burning

The chairman of the EFRA Committee has written to Defra, asking how it is addressing concerns about managed burning licences and the evidence base behind the 2025 burning regulations.

Research shows managed burning and grazing cut wildfire severity by up to 70%. So why is Britain restricting it? What the moors told Parliament's fire inquiry.

Rewetting protects peat carbon but leaves flammable heather and gorse intact. Effective wildfire prevention needs cutting, burning and firebreaks too.

Fire chiefs, crews and Yorkshire Water told Parliament's wildfire inquiry the same thing: unmanaged fuel load makes moorland fires far harder to contain.

Natural England and Defra still can't show the audit trail behind NEER155's “rigorous peer review” claim — and why that matters for moorland management.

A wildfire burned around 200 hectares of moorland near Glossop. Land managers say new limits on controlled burning leave England's uplands primed to burn.

MPs heard evidence that cutting wildfire risk means managing upland fuel loads — through prescribed burning, cutting and grazing — not rewetting alone.

A Teesdale survey found roughly twice as many curlews on blanket bog managed by burning or cutting as on unmanaged bog, while numbers stayed stable.

Record wildfires are now a threat to Britain's electricity supply. The evidence on fuel load points to a remedy that policy is moving away from: controlled burning on the uplands.

A Stanford study in Science finds low-severity fire cuts the worst wildfires by 92% — and saves more smoke than it produces — which is significant for the UK burning debate.

UK contributors shaped a new global ranking of the 50 biggest unanswered questions in peatland science, from fire management to carbon-credit integrity.

The Court of Appeal refused our challenge to the 2025 heather burning regulations. We now need members to test the licensing system to prove its flaws.