Moorland Association Responds to West Pennine Moors Consultation

✅ KEY TAKEAWAY: The West Pennine Moors project must treat land managers as central partners. Success requires prioritizing active upland stewardship, practical wildfire resilience, and tangible outcomes over bureaucratic processes.

The Moorland Association has submitted a formal response to the West Pennine Moors Stakeholder Engagement consultation. Our response is available to members and interested readers, while the project’s own Stakeholder Engagement Plan is not, in effect, a publication document in the normal sense, having been prepared primarily for Defra teams and project stakeholders.

What is the West Pennine Moors project?

The consultation relates to the West Pennine Moors Landscape Recovery Scheme, a long-term project intended to shape how a large upland landscape is managed, understood and discussed over many years.

The project documents describe a scheme affecting those who live in, work in and visit the West Pennine Moors, with stakeholder structures spanning community groups, landowners and land managers, emergency services, local authorities, educators, utilities and others. The summary document says the area faces growing fire and flood risks, frequent moorland fires, and very high visitor pressure from surrounding towns and cities.

This matters because the West Pennine Moors are not an empty landscape or a blank canvas. The project documents themselves recognise a long history of human use and management, including farming, grazing, grouse shooting, quarrying and water infrastructure, and they acknowledge that human activity has played a significant role in shaping the ecology of the area.

Why the consultation matters to MA members

For Moorland Association members, this consultation matters because stakeholder plans of this kind can influence the tone, assumptions and priorities that shape future decisions.

Even where such plans are framed as collaborative rather than regulatory, they can still affect how land management is interpreted, how responsibilities are allocated, and whose voice carries weight in long-term delivery. That is why it is important to engage early, clearly and constructively. Our response makes exactly that case.

At its best, this project could help improve public understanding, reduce conflict and support practical cooperation across a heavily used working upland landscape. But that will only happen if those managing the land are treated not as a peripheral interest group, but as central partners in delivery.

What we welcomed

Our response was constructive as well as critical. We said there is much in the draft approach that is positive and worth building on. In particular, we welcomed the effort to engage a wide range of people, the recognition that the moors are a working landscape, the inclusion of land managers in the engagement structure, and the welcome focus on practical pressures such as wildfire and antisocial behaviour. We also welcomed the attempt to improve public understanding of how this landscape is managed.

The project could provide a useful platform for better relationships between communities, visitors, delivery bodies and land managers. It could also help build a more mature public conversation about how upland landscapes function and why active stewardship matters.

The main points we made in our submission

Land managers must be recognised as core delivery partners

A central theme of our response was that land managers should not simply be treated as one stakeholder group among many. In a landscape like this, they are often the people with the day-to-day knowledge, responsibility and practical capacity needed to make delivery work on the ground. We argued that the Plan should reflect that more clearly and explicitly.

Active management should be presented honestly

We also said the project should be more open about the fact that many of the qualities people value in the uplands depend on active, ongoing management. Our response made clear that stewardship is not just part of the landscape’s history. It remains part of its present reality. That includes grazing management, habitat work, fire awareness, access maintenance, wildlife monitoring and, in some contexts, predator control.

Wildfire resilience needs practical delivery, not just awareness-raising

The consultation documents rightly identify wildfire as a serious issue. We supported better public awareness, better communication and more responsible access, but we also stressed that wildfire resilience cannot be built on messaging alone. A credible approach must recognise practical fuel-management tools and operational readiness on the ground. Our response said this may include cutting, grazing, restoration, firebreak creation and, where lawful and appropriate, controlled burning.

Governance needs to be clearer

The project proposes a wide range of meetings, forums, workshops and feedback routes. While that shows ambition, it also creates a risk of complexity without clarity. We argued that the Plan should say much more clearly who decides what, how conflicts will be resolved, and how stakeholder input will be translated into real operational decisions.

Participation should not rest on unpaid goodwill

Another important point in our response was that serious engagement with land managers cannot be built indefinitely on unpaid goodwill. If the project expects regular participation in governance and delivery, it should think more carefully about proper support for representative roles and practical involvement. Otherwise, participation risks favouring organisations with salaried staff over those carrying direct land management responsibilities.

The project must avoid “soft regulation”

We also raised a wider concern familiar to many MA members: the risk that collaborative language gradually hardens into informal pressure against lawful land management. We made clear that stakeholder engagement should not become a route to creating new unofficial tests, presumptions or quasi-obligations. It should support better relationships and better decisions, not become a substitute for proper statutory process.

Success should be judged by outcomes, not activity

Finally, we argued that the project should be judged by whether it improves trust, reduces damaging behaviour, strengthens practical delivery and supports better outcomes on the ground - not simply by how many meetings are held, how many people are consulted, or how many volunteers are recruited. Counting activity is easy. Delivering results is what matters.

Our overall view

The Moorland Association supports constructive engagement and recognises that there is real value in improving communication and cooperation across the West Pennine Moors. But this will only succeed if the project remains grounded in the realities of a working upland landscape and respectful of the people who manage it every day.

Our submission therefore welcomed the constructive foundations in the draft plan while also setting out some clear tests for improvement: proper recognition of active management, a realistic approach to wildfire resilience, clearer governance, fairer participation, and firm safeguards against policy drift.

Those are not peripheral concerns. They go to the heart of whether this project will build trust and deliver lasting value, or simply add another layer of process to an already demanding landscape.

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