What the Fire Service Told Parliament: Unmanaged Moorland Burns Worse

Quick summary

• The fire services and a major water company gave Parliament's wildfire inquiry independent evidence on what makes moorland fires worse.

• The National Fire Chiefs Council warned that rewetting and rewilding without managing the vegetation can increase wildfire risk.

• Greater Manchester Fire & Rescue backs fuel breaks and managing the highest-risk ground; firefighter numbers are down 25% since 2008.

• Yorkshire Water, the UK's 16th-largest landowner, blames rising fuel load from restoration and reduced grazing.

When Parliament's Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee opened its inquiry into wildfire this year, it heard from the people whose job is to put these fires out, and from one of the largest landowners in the country.

They have no stake in grouse shooting and no reason to flatter upland estates.

They were asked a practical question: what turns a moorland fire from a manageable incident into a disaster. Their answer was the same one upland keepers have been giving for years.

What the fire chiefs said

The National Fire Chiefs Council is the professional body for the UK's fire and rescue services. Their submission to the inquiry stated:

"FRS experience has shown that efforts to improve biodiversity and environmental resilience, such as through rewilding and rewetting peat bogs, can actually have a detrimental impact on wildfire risk due to the associated increase in the amount of vegetation and the resultant fuel loads".

The mechanism it described is the one land managers know first-hand. "Nature-based solutions have also resulted in vegetation being allowed to grow across natural fire breaks which had previously helped prevent the spread of wildfires," the Council wrote, producing "larger wildfires that are more difficult to contain."

The NFCC backs restoration even as it flags this risk. It supports improving biodiversity, and it is clear that most fires are started by people, not by how a moor is managed. Its point is narrower and harder to dodge: once a fire starts, the fuel on the ground decides whether crews face a grass fire or a landscape emergency.

"Proper land management is key to ensuring that the wildfires that do occur are more easily contained and do not spread as easily."

The Council also counted the cost of getting this wrong. Firefighter numbers, it noted, "have already fallen by 25% since 2008 – equivalent to 11,000 wholetime firefighter posts at a time when incident numbers are climbing."

Fewer crews, bigger fires, more fuel: that arithmetic does not hold.

What the crews on the moor said

Greater Manchester Fire & Rescue Service fights wildfire on the moorland fringe above one of England's largest conurbations — the Pennine ground where the 2018 Saddleworth Moor fire burned for days. It wrote from direct operational experience.

Its recommendation was to manage the riskiest ground on purpose: "maintained fuel breaks and anchor points (tracks, paths, moorland edges), vegetation management around the urban–moorland fringe, and maintaining/marking emergency access and water points”.

On burning itself, GMFRS stayed practical. Where techniques "such as managed burning, grazing, and mechanical cutting are used," it wrote, the aim should be to "reduce continuous fine fuels in the highest-risk areas while protecting peat, biodiversity, and water quality," with proper assurance, monitoring and landowner accountability.

That is the evidence-led, "right place, right method" position the Moorland Association argues for: keep the tool available and use it where the fire risk is greatest.

What the water company said

Yorkshire Water comes to this as a commercial utility. It is the sixteenth-largest landowner in the United Kingdom, and it manages catchment moorland because that is where much of the region's drinking water originates. Wildfire threatens its land and its water supply, so it has a direct commercial reason to get the diagnosis right.

Its diagnosis was unambiguous. The "basic strategic issues that might lead to wildfires," it told the Committee, are "climate change and the increased fuel load that is being created on moorlands (increased vegetation from restoration and removal of grazing)".

The company backs restoration; it noted that some rewetted ground has resisted flash fires better, and it has invested in the approach. It has also put money into the response, funding specialist moorland firefighting equipment "in recognition of the potential cost in terms of lost investment in protected sites."

That is how an organisation behaves about a risk it considers real.

Three witnesses, one finding

The fire chiefs, the crews on the urban fringe and the company that supplies Yorkshire's water were asked the same question from different positions. None of them speaks for the shooting community.

All three identified the same culprit — fuel load left to build up as grazing falls and vegetation grows unchecked — and all three called for that fuel to be actively managed rather than allowed to accumulate.

That is the Moorland Association's case, made by people with no reason to make it for us.

Our submission argues that wildfire policy should reduce the severity of fires before they ignite, through active fuel management, and that where tools like prescribed burning are restricted, the evidence for restricting them should be transparent and open to scrutiny.

The operational witnesses can say something we cannot: they have watched, in real incidents, what unmanaged fuel does to a fire and to the crews sent into it.

The Committee should write that warning into its recommendations. Specifically, it should press Defra and Natural England to treat fuel-load reduction as a frontline wildfire measure, keep prescribed burning available as a managed tool on the highest-risk ground, and require the evidence behind any restriction to be published.

The fire service has told Parliament which way the risk is moving. The test of this inquiry is whether anyone acts on it before the next major fire.