A Wildfire Plan Worth Backing For Our Moors

By Richard Bailey, Coordinator of the Peak District Moorland Group

A new cross-border body has brought practitioners, fire services and scientists into one room, and it could finally turn the tide on upland wildfire.

For those of us who have spent years working on the hill, last Thursday felt like a turning point. On 23 April, in a meeting room in London, the UK's Regional Moorland Groups convened the inaugural meeting of a new Wildfire Commission.

Around one table sat land managers like me, senior fire and rescue officers, and some of the country's leading academics in fire behaviour. I have been to many meetings about wildfire over the years. This one felt different.

A Shared Focus on Fuel Load Management

It felt different because the Commission has done something that should have happened long ago: it has put the people who actually have experience in the flames from wildfires alongside FRS on moorland, and the scientists who study how those fires behave, in the same conversation, with a shared, practical purpose. That purpose is fuel load management.

Fuel load - the combustible vegetation, deep heather and accumulated dead matter that determines how a fire spreads - is the single most controllable factor in a wildfire's behaviour.

How much there is, where it sits, how it is managed: this is the difference between an incident contained in an afternoon and a week-long emergency. The Commission has wisely chosen to focus its work here, where practical action can make the biggest difference.

Learning from the Record-Breaking Fires of 2025

The timing could not be more important. The National Fire Chiefs Council has confirmed that 2025 broke UK records for the most reported wildfire incidents, surpassing the previous high set only three years earlier. Last summer's Carrbridge and Dava Moor fire in Strathspey, believed to be the worst Scotland has ever seen, devastated 11,827 hectares of moorland and woodland.

We were given detailed insight, from FRS and practitioners that were involved, about how the fire took more than a hundred people from 33 rural businesses, working alongside Scottish Fire & Rescue, with at least 110 ATVs, fogging units, tractors, diggers and water bowsers contributed by land managers, kit conservatively valued at £4 million.

The lessons from that response are exactly the sort of practical knowledge the Commission is determined to gather and put to work.

Regional Solutions and Scientific Partnerships

What encourages me most is the Commission's approach. Rather than producing yet another national framework, it is committed to a series of regional workshops in the coming months, building evidence-based, locally tailored fuel management plans.

A blanket bog above Barnard Castle is not the same as a heather moor above Glossop, and the response cannot pretend otherwise. Tailoring matters, and the Commission has grasped that from the start.

Just as encouraging is the Commission's recognition that practitioner expertise and modern science are not rivals but partners. The insight of those who have stood on burning ground, paired with the mapping and modelling capabilities of recognised academics, is the combination our uplands have been waiting for.

Together they can produce something neither could deliver alone: practical, deliverable plans that fire and rescue services can actually use.

Building Momentum for Resilient Uplands

The Commission's first meeting also coincided with the Commons EFRA Committee opening a call for evidence on wildfire, a sign that Parliament, too, is paying proper attention. Momentum is building in the right direction at last.

If the Commission succeeds, and I believe it will, those living and working in the uplands will see the results in landscapes better protected, communities more resilient, and the firefighters and land managers who run towards the smoke given the coordinated, evidence-led backing they deserve.

After years of abstract debate, this is the right body, with the right people, at the right time. The hard work of those regional workshops begins now, and for the first time in a long while, I am genuinely optimistic about what they can deliver for our moors.

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