Fuel, Fire and Peat: The Wildfire Question MPs Put to Ministers

In summary

• Ministers gave their annual climate and nature statement to the Commons on 13 July 2026.

• Robbie Moore MP warned that restricting rotational burning leaves fuel building up across England's moors.

• Minister Mary Creagh rejected the argument, saying wetter peatlands are more resilient to wildfire.

• Both sides want wildfire resilience. They disagree about how fast rewetting can deliver it.

England spent the first half of July under its third heatwave since late May, with fire and rescue services responding to multiple large moorland fires at the same time.

Against that backdrop, Mary Creagh, the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State at Defra, came to the House of Commons on 13 July to give the Government's annual statement on the state of climate and nature.

Most of the statement covered expected ground: peatland restoration funding, environmental land management schemes, the 30 by 30 target. But one exchange went straight to a question the uplands have been asking for two years. If you stop land managers burning heather, what happens to everything that would have been burned?

The argument that was put to ministers

The fuel-load case was made by Robbie Moore, the Conservative MP for Keighley and Ilkley, responding for the Opposition. He turned to the Government's September 2025 decision to extend restrictions on burning heather over deep peat, and said ministers had ignored warnings from the National Fire Chiefs Council, the National Farmers' Union and environmental scientists.

By blocking land managers from carrying out what he called traditional, heavily regulated rotational burning, he argued, the Government are "letting massive fuel loads build up across our moorland, effectively creating a tinderbox and vastly increasing the risk of devastating wildfires that destroy the very peatlands and biodiversity that this Government claim they want to protect."

The Minister's answer

Mary Creagh did not accept the premise. Her reply set out the Government's position clearly, albeit using some unsupported claims and seemingly ignoring the extent of wildfire emissions compared to the far smaller emissions from controlled burning:

"Rotational burning is a contributory factor to 80% of peatlands being degraded (the MA's fact check brings this oft-quoted statistic into serious question). It makes it difficult to restore peat to its natural hydrology and impossible to return it to its natural state. It is also really bad for air quality locally. It damages peatlands, shifts species composition, disrupts the hydrology of peat and, crucially, releases stored carbon, increasing vulnerability to wildfire. Wetter, healthy and functioning peatlands are much more resilient to the impacts of wildfire."

She pointed to £85 million committed to peatland restoration by 2030, around 10,000 hectares brought into restoration since the Government took office, and a target of 40,000 additional hectares by 2030. Later in the session she described peatlands as "this country's Amazon rainforest."

Where the disagreement actually sits

The split is about mechanism and, above all, about time.

• The Government's case is hydrological. Raise the water table, restore Sphagnum, and the peat itself becomes hard to ignite. On a fully functioning bog, this is correct.

• The land management case is about fuel. Rewetting a degraded blanket bog is a project measured in decades. In the meantime, standing vegetation is what carries a summer fire across a moor.

The Moorland Association's position is that rewetting is necessary but not sufficient on its own schedule. A bog that will be functioning in 2050 still has to survive the summers between now and then, and what burns in those summers is the fuel sitting on the surface today.

The published research supports taking fuel seriously. Work on fire severity in Scottish heathlands and blanket bogs identifies fuel load, alongside topography and fuel type, as a driver of how severely a site burns.

A 2026 study of experimental burning and cutting on blanket peat in northern England found that all the management treatments tested reduced fuel loads, while noting that cut brash left in place adds to the litter layer and may itself raise ignition risk.

And 22 years of aerial monitoring in the Peak District found that over 70% of the burnable area was never burned, with the authors warning that the resulting fuel accumulation carries an increased wildfire risk.

What happens next

Anna Dixon, the Labour MP for Shipley, asked about wildfires on Baildon, Harden and Rombalds moors in her constituency. The Minister replied that she would be travelling to Fylingdales to announce support for farmers on the wildfire frontline.

Tim Farron, the Liberal Democrat MP for Westmorland and Lonsdale, raised the Peak District fires and made an important point: "we do not protect nature if we completely remove livestock and the human beings that manage nature."

Outside Parliament, the head of the EFRA Committee, Alistair Carmichael, has written to Defra Secretary Emma Reynolds to ask how the department is handling worries about burning licences, and whether there is enough evidence to support the 2025 burning rules.

Why this matters

The fuel on England's moors does not wait for the water table to recover, and neither does the weather. Fuel load is the one factor we can control to help reduce wildfire risk and severity.