Has Natural England’s Wildfire Message Been Punctured?

Andrew Gilruth
5 hours ago
3 min read

✅ KEY TAKEAWAY: Natural England concedes rewetting does not prevent wildfires. With prescribed burning severely restricted, Ministers must urgently rewrite the England Peat Action Plan to deliver a credible, practical wildfire strategy.

Natural England’s Chief Scientist promoted rewetting as the long-term answer to wildfire risk. Now one of the authors of its burning report (NEER155) has concede that rewetting does not prevent wildfire at all, only reduces its severity. That is a striking admission - and it raises difficult questions for current policy.

Natural England’s message is unravelling

There is now a serious gap between Natural England’s public messaging on wildfire and the reality of the policy now being imposed on the ground.

In September 2025, Natural England’s Chief Scientist, Professor Sallie Bailey, described nature recovery as Natural England’s “best tool against heightened wildfire risk”, said that rewetting peat would reduce “both the risk and severity of future wildfires over the long term”, and called nature recovery “a long-term solution to fires”.

Public comment by Alastair Crowle, one of the authors of Natural England’s 2025 evidence review on heather burning (NEER155):

Why this admission is so important

Why is that so significant? Alastair Crowle is one of the named authors of NEER155, the Natural England evidence review on heather and grass burning. Defra relied on that review when tightening the burning regime in 2025, while saying that prescribed burning may still be necessary only in very limited circumstances, including where there is evidenced wildfire risk and no feasible alternatives exist.

So if one of the review’s own authors is now saying openly that rewetting does not prevent wildfire, only reduces its severity, then Natural England’s public message is visibly fraying.

Last year the public impression was that rewetting was the answer. Within months, one of the authors of the evidence base underpinning Defra’s policy appears to have conceded the narrower truth: rewetting is not wildfire prevention.

Reducing severity is not prevention

This goes to the heart of how wildfire policy is being sold. Natural England’s own case studies in the Chief Scientist’s blog do not show rewetting magically preventing fire. They show wetter areas acting as firebreaks, slowing spread, and reducing flame height and heat sufficiently for human action to bring the fire under control. That is a much more limited claim.

Meanwhile, the toolkit has been cut back

And this matters even more because the legal and policy framework has moved in the opposite direction. Defra’s 2025 changes extended protection across all upland deep peat in Less Favoured Areas and lowered the peat threshold from 40 cm to 30 cm. The Government says prescribed burning may still be used only in very limited or exceptional circumstances.

Why the Peat Action Plan needs rewriting

The 2021 England Peat Action Plan itself was built on a broader conception of wildfire control. It spoke of protecting peat from fire both by phasing out managed burning and by reducing wildfire risk, and it contemplated restoration, mapping, wildfire planning and limited intervention as part of the wider toolkit.

But the position now being admitted is different. Rewetting does not stop fires. Burning has been pushed into a tightly constrained, exceptional category. Last year the Climate Change Committee told Parliament that climate change is making wildfire-conducive conditions more likely and more extreme.

That is why the England Peat Action Plan now plainly needs rewriting if Ministers want to maintain a credible wildfire policy. A plan built around a mixed toolkit cannot simply be carried forward unchanged when one of its practical tools has been all but removed and the favoured alternative is now being publicly described in narrower terms by one of the authors of the evidence review used to justify the shift.

This is the point MA members have made throughout. Restoration may help reduce severity in some places, and it may bring important long-term benefits, but it is not a complete operational answer to wildfire.

If England is entering a period of greater wildfire danger, as the Climate Change Committee warns, then it needs a practical solution fast, not a crumbling slogan.

What is England’s strategy now?

Ministers should now answer a simple question. If rewetting does not prevent wildfire, and burning is now only barely available, what exactly is England’s credible wildfire strategy?