Heather and Grass etc. Burning (England) Regulations 2021

Baroness Mallalieu Excerpts

Thursday 18th March 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Mallalieu (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, I am sorry that I am unable to support my noble friend Lady Jones. The Government have been caught in the middle between those who want all rotational burning stopped and those who believe that no additional restrictions are necessary or supported by the most recent research, and I think they have produced a not unreasonable compromise.

I will offer a caution: living in Exmoor national park, I have seen the adverse consequences of the over-restriction of rotational burning. Swaling, as we call it, has been used since medieval times over large areas of moorland to encourage the growth of young heather and grasses to the benefit of grazing animals, both domestic and wild, and evidence shows that curlews and golden plover benefit from it too—not grouse, because there are none. In the 1980s, SSSIs and stricter controls on both the timing and extent of the burns were introduced. It is now clear that the amount of burning that took place afterwards was wholly insufficient.

Heather needs to be cleared, ideally every 20 years or so. If not, as we have seen, there are large expanses of over-mature plants, a lot of them dead or dying. Heather and mosses have now dramatically declined in some areas, and instead Molinia grass, bracken, gorse and scrub have taken over. So have ticks, Lyme disease and tick-borne diseases of livestock. There have also been damaging wildfires, which, unlike carefully controlled and limited swaling, are not superficial but burn hot and deep, with very serious carbon-loss consequences. The noble Earl, Lord Caithness, pointed to the major one in Scotland.

There is plenty of peat on Exmoor but no blanket bog, so these regulations will not affect us, but calls for further restrictions may well. On the evidence I have seen, the consequences would not be good for wildlife, carbon capture or those who love the heather-clad moors.