"It MUST Be Managed": A Fire Veteran's Warning to Parliament

Photo by Scott Wicking

Quick summary

• Most wildfires are started by people, and accidental ignitions cannot be prevented outright.

• What a spark finds is a choice: managed burns as a grass fire, unmanaged burns as a disaster.

• Research shows managed burning, thinning and grazing cut wildfire severity by 60–70%.

• 676,000 ha are now restricted from controlled burning, up from 246,156 since 2021, as other countries reintroduce burning.

The next major moorland fire is already coming.

On a small, crowded island, with more people on the moors every year and a warming climate drying the ground, some of them will light a barbecue where they shouldn't, or drop a cigarette, or lose control of a campfire.

That much is fixed. What is not fixed — what policy still decides — is what the spark finds when it lands.

If it lands on managed ground, where the fuel has been kept down by grazing, cutting and controlled winter burning, it has a fair chance of staying a grass fire that a crew can put out in an afternoon.

If it lands on a moor left to grow tall and continuous, it becomes Fylingdales. This is the whole of the argument, and the people who manage upland Britain made it to Parliament's wildfire inquiry in plain terms.

"It MUST be managed"

Mike McKendry has spent more than thirty years managing land and fighting fire in the private and public sectors. He asked the Committee to take away a single point.

"If land is to be wildfire resistant it MUST be managed," he wrote. "I am fully aware that this is an unpopular statement, particularly in the current climate".

He backed it with three decades of observed pattern: "Over the last 30 years virtually every site that I am aware of where vegetation management has been removed has resulted in a wildfire."

And he named the forgetting that lets it keep happening. After an earlier devastating fire on the North York Moors, he recalled being told at a meeting "it would never happen again."

Management was restricted, the fuel returned, and in 2025 Fylingdales burned again. "How quickly these events are forgotten," he wrote, "vegetation management either removed or restricted and same result."

Thirty years at the sharp end have left him more worried about people than landscape: "I am amazed that lives have not been lost fighting wildfires in the UK."

"Conserve, not preserve"

Tim Welford watched the 2025 Fylingdales fire spread across the moor east of his home. His account to the Committee is short yet powerful.

The fire took hold, he wrote, in heather left around a metre tall on ground its managers had stopped maintaining. His conclusion is clear: "If fires are to be prevented we must conserve moorland not preserve it. Management is essential to all species and to prevent such despicable destruction that may now never recover".

Preserving a moor means leaving it untouched and hoping. Conserving it means working it — keeping the fuel load low enough that when the spark comes, and it will, the moor survives the meeting.

The evidence base is not thin

This is sometimes framed as tradition against science. It is not. The science points the same way.

Managed burning, thinning and grazing reduce wildfire severity by up to 60–70%, Dr Richard Byrne of Harper Adams University told the inquiry.

A separate study led by Dr Kerryn Little, examining fire risk on English heather moorland, found that managed firebreaks cut wildfire severity by over 70% in treated areas.

The National Fire Chiefs Council described the mechanism from the fire ground: where vegetation is allowed to grow across natural fire breaks, the result is "larger wildfires that are more difficult to contain".

Against that evidence, policy has moved the other way. Since 2021, Defra's Heather and Grass Regulations have increased the area of deep peat where burning is restricted from 246,156 hectares to over 676,000 hectares.

As McKendry noted, this runs against the international grain: while countries facing worsening fire seasons work to reintroduce controlled burning, "the UK appears to be on a mission to remove this vital tool in the management of wildfire risk" — and the skills and experience to do it are being lost in the process.

Manage it, or it manages you

The Moorland Association's submission to the Committee makes the evidenced case that wildfire policy should be built around reducing the severity of fires before they ignite, through active fuel management, and that where prescribed burning is restricted the evidence for restricting it should be published and open to challenge.

We do not argue that management prevents ignition. We argue that it decides the outcome once ignition happens — which, on the numbers above, it plainly does.

The Committee's report can draw one practical line. It can ask Defra and Natural England to treat fuel-load reduction as a frontline wildfire measure, to keep prescribed burning available as a managed tool on the highest-risk ground, and to publish the evidence behind any restriction that takes that tool away.

A moor is going to be managed one way or another. Either people manage the fuel deliberately, in winter, on their own terms, or a wildfire does it for them in July, on the worst possible day, at a cost measured in ruined ground, public money and — as McKendry warns — eventually lives. Manage it, or it manages you.