The Battle Over Burning

Defra’s legislation to treble the land on which prescribed burns are effectively banned creates immense risks to rural lives and livelihoods.

We are fighting it with huge energy and on all fronts.

In the media we are delighted that we have found the Daily Mail and the Telegraph to be very open to our suggestions. Lord Botham is being as supportive as ever. This is his latest article published in the Sunday Telegraph.

On the political stage, we are working in Parliament to both challenge the Government through the legislative process and scrutinising the failure of its reckless civil servants. We will be sharing with you the results of this process.

We have also launched a judicial review pre-action letter in which we have forensically dismantled the legal flaws in DEFRA's consultation and decision making in their attempt to ram through this legislation.

For instance, at the end of the UK’s worst ever year for wildfires these officials decreed that, since in their view, banning precautionary burns would cause negligible risks they would not need to bother with the hard work of doing an impact assessment.

This is despite officials having felt that back in 2007 the issue was worthy of an impact assessment. That document spelt out the dangers that:

“if burning were to cease on traditionally burned heather moorland [young heather] would be replaced by swathes of old, woody heather… [with] a much increased risk that if a wildfire were to start, it could be very destructive over a large area… Severe wildfires can damage habitats and soil on a far worse scale than controlled burns… land may take many decades to recover economically and environmentally., a wildfire on Bleaklow Dark Peak in 1957 resulted in bare peat which endured for nearly fifty years.”

It gets worse. Our lawyers have also asked DEFRA to explain how and why it has failed to respond to criticism of their policy and serious concerns raised from the country’s top wildfire scientists and the National Fire Chiefs Council. Nor have they published these consultation responses. Clearly, because they were so critical of the policies that Defra officials were embarrassed. This is unacceptable arrogance.

The pre-action letter is a necessary precursor to issuing judicial review proceedings, and has the benefit of explaining all the flaws in DEFRA's consultation and decision-making processes to them upfront, so that they have a chance to change the regulations without waiting for a court hearing.

If they reject the legal grounds we have put to them, we will pursue the matter to a court hearing.

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