Who Pays to Look After the Uplands?

✅ KEY TAKEWAY: Private investment provides £1 million weekly for moorland conservation. Replacing this model creates a £190 million annual taxpayer liability and ensures worse results for biodiversity, carbon, and rural economies.

Strip away shooting and ask a simple question: who picks up the bill for managing 800,000 hectares of English moorland? Right now, the answer is overwhelmingly private.

Roughly £1 million of private money flows into heather moorland management every week - funding peatland restoration, wildfire prevention, predator control, and the wages of the gamekeepers who do the work.

That arrangement is rarely acknowledged in public debate, yet it underpins almost everything we claim to value about the uplands: their carbon, their biodiversity, and the communities that live among them.

The headline economics are well established. The shooting sector contributes £3.3 billion in gross value added to the UK economy annually and supports 172,700 full-time equivalent jobs, 152,200 of them in England.

In the Uplands, those numbers are not abstractions. They are the keeper's household, the hotel that fills in August, the garage that services estate vehicles year-round.

As moorland owner Bernard Moss has noted, a single grouse day employs around 35 people drawn from the local community, adding up to roughly 4,500 work days a year on the shoots alone - before hospitality is counted.

But the figure that matters most is the one that rarely appears in newspaper columns: the exposed cost if that private funding disappears.

Where the money goes

Follow the spending and you find it locked into conservation outcomes that government policy actively demands but does not itself fund at anything like the necessary scale.

Start with peatland. England's blanket bogs are the country's largest terrestrial carbon store, holding more carbon than all the forests in the UK and France combined. Centuries of drainage - much of it historically grant-aided by government - left vast areas degraded and emitting carbon rather than sequestering it.

Today, moorland managers are using private resources to reverse that damage: blocking old drainage grips, rewetting the peat surface, and applying traditional cool burning to manage heather without heating the underlying peat. This is not peripheral to Net Zero. It is essential to it.

Then consider wildfire. Unmanaged moorland accumulates fuel. When dense, leggy heather dries out in spring, a single ignition event can release decades of stored carbon in hours. The 2018 Saddleworth Moor fire released an estimated 40,000 tonnes of CO₂.

Managed burning and cutting reduce that fuel load, creating a mosaic of vegetation heights that acts as a natural firebreak. Gamekeepers are the first responders when fires do break out - equipped, on the ground, and costing the public purse nothing. The alternative is not cheap: wildfire costs reached nearly half a billion pounds in 2025 alone.

The gamekeeper effect

Nowhere is private investment more visible in its results than in breeding wader populations. On managed grouse moors, ground-nesting birds such as curlew, lapwing, and golden plover are four times more likely to fledge chicks successfully than on unmanaged land.

The mechanism is straightforward: legal predator control - principally of foxes and corvids - gives vulnerable ground-nesting species the breathing space to breed. Managed moors hold an estimated 53% of England's breeding curlew population. Lapwing are twice as abundant on keepered ground. Merlin, too, benefit from the prey abundance and reduced ground-predator pressure that active management sustains.

These are not marginal gains. For curlew especially, a species in steep national decline, managed moorland is now the stronghold - not despite shooting, but because of the management it funds.

The cost of walking away

If the case for private investment still seems theoretical, look at what happens when it is withdrawn. Lake Vyrnwy in Wales was once a productive grouse moor. It is now managed by the RSPB and sustained by public subsidy. Curlew have virtually disappeared from the estate.

Bracken and scrub encroachment have advanced. Wildfire risk has increased. The annual cost to the public purse exceeds £1 million - and the conservation outcomes are, by any honest measure, worse.

Scale that lesson nationally. Estimates suggest that removing driven grouse shooting across England would transfer a liability of up to £190 million a year to the taxpayer, while delivering poorer results for the species and habitats that policy claims to prioritise.

A practical question

None of this is to say that moorland management is beyond scrutiny or improvement. It is to say that the economics are real, the conservation outcomes are measurable, and the alternative - expecting the state to replicate this work at equivalent scale - has never been credibly costed, let alone delivered.

The uplands need skilled people on the ground every day of the year: restoring peat, managing vegetation, controlling predators, responding to fire. At present, private investment makes that possible. Before anyone proposes dismantling that model, they ought to explain, in detail, what replaces it.

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