No Child Should Lie Awake Waiting for Their Parent to Come Home: How Britain's Wildfire Strategy Fails Moorland Families

Photo by Scott Wicking

"When my dad has been called to go and help my heart drops."

A twelve-year old girl, whose father is a moorland gamekeeper, wrote those words to a committee of MPs. When the call comes that a wildfire has broken out, he goes, often through the night, and she lies awake. "Worries get so big," she told the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee, "that I'm crying non-stop."

She was one of dozens of people from moorland communities who submitted written evidence to Parliament's inquiry into wildfire this year. Most of those submissions came from the keepers, farmers and estate managers who fight these fires. A handful came from the people who wait at home for them.

The night-time wait

The accounts from the partners and children left behind share the same shape: the call, the immediate departure, the silence that follows.

"When a wildfire call comes in, everything stops," wrote Lisa Rund, whose partner has kept moorland for thirteen years. "My partner leaves immediately. Meals are left, plans change, and I am left hoping he will be safe."

Leeanne France remembers her husband leaving to fight the fire on the Snake Pass on a Thursday evening "without any way of knowing when he'd return." There was no phone signal. She did the school run and went to work while smoke hung over the town.

"When you get to work you realise you are running on nervous energy, your hands are shaky… every ambulance sounds louder and eerier than ever." The strain does not end when the fire does.

For days afterwards, she wrote, her husband is "a different version of himself, tired, can't switch off, his body in shock from so much adrenaline and smoke inhalation."

These families are not spectators to the emergency. Lisa Rund's daughter, writing her own submission as the stepdaughter of a keeper, described loading the car: "My mum and I take food and drinks to the people fighting the fire. They work so hard, and you can see how much they care about protecting the land."

What stays with her is the morning after. "The moor looks destroyed. Everything is black and burnt. Grouse stay with their nests even when fire comes, and seeing that is really upsetting."

For the youngest, the fear has become routine. One mother, a nurse who asked not to be named, described her three-year-old now watching the horizon for smoke. Passing a man with a barbecue beside woodland, the child said: "Mummy, that man's having a fire! We need to tell the firemen."

Her mother's question to the Committee was sharp: "If my young daughter already knows the dangers, where is the education for other generations?"

This is a policy outcome, not bad luck

It would be a mistake to file these letters under "moving" and set them aside. The families themselves are explicit that what they are describing is the predictable result of decisions taken in Whitehall, not an act of God.

For generations, upland keepers and farmers held down the fuel load on the moors — the build-up of old, woody heather that feeds a fire — by grazing, cutting and controlled winter burning.

Since 2021, that work has been curtailed. Defra's Heather and Grass Regulations, administered through Natural England's licensing regime, increased the area of deep peat where burning is restricted from 246,156 hectares to over 676,000).

On the ground, keepers report the consequence plainly: heather left to grow tall and continuous, and fires that now run hotter and deeper than the ones they remember.

That is not only their account. Dr Richard Byrne of Harper Adams University told the same inquiry that managed interventions — burning, thinning and grazing — have been shown to reduce wildfire severity by up to 60–70%.

The National Fire Chiefs Council went further, warning in its own evidence that rewetting and rewilding moorland without managing the resulting vegetation "can actually have a detrimental impact on wildfire risk due to the associated increase in the amount of vegetation and the resultant fuel loads".

Yorkshire Water, the country's sixteenth-largest landowner, said the same from a landowner's perspective, naming "the increased fuel load that is being created on moorlands" as a basic driver of the fires it now contends with.

The firefighters, the academics, the utilities and the families have reached the same conclusion from four different directions. The vegetation has to be managed. Where it isn't, the fires get worse, and it is keepers and their neighbours who walk into them.

Julia Bailey, whose husband kept moorland in the Peak District for sixteen years, watched this play out through two serious fires on his patch. Each time, she wrote, officials agreed policy had to change, then introduced tighter restrictions instead.

Her verdict is this: "The land managers might not always be the best at articulating their knowledge, but only fools would keep ignoring their warnings."

What we are asking for

The Moorland Association represents the communities behind these letters: the people who manage close to a million acres of upland England and Wales, who hold the trained staff, the equipment and the local knowledge that rural wildfire response depends on, and who are very often first to the fire.

Our submission to the Committee makes the evidenced case that policy should be built to reduce the severity of fires before they ignite, through active fuel management, rather than staking everything on suppression once a moor is already alight and on unproven claims that rewetting alone will keep it safe.

That is the argument the Committee will weigh as it writes its report. The families have already given it the part no statistic can: the cost of getting this wrong, measured in interrupted childhoods and sleepless nights.

Young families should be able to relax and enjoy warm bank holiday weekends, not spend sleepless nights watching the door. Whether they can depends on decisions being taken now — by Defra, by Natural England, and by this Committee — about whether the people who know these moors are trusted to manage them.

Their evidence is on the record. The only question left is whether anyone with the power to act will read it.