Heritage Sites: Sustainability

Tim Farron Excerpts

Tuesday 20th June 2023 Westminster Hall

[Tim Farron (Westmorland and Lonsdale) (LD)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your guidance this afternoon, Mr Dowd. I pay tribute to my right hon. Friend the Member for Orkney and Shetland (Mr Carmichael), who I am delighted to follow, and my hon. Friend the Member for Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross (Jamie Stone), who secured this debate and made a wonderful opening speech. I commend the other speeches made in this debate.

UNESCO granted world heritage site status to the 1,000 square mile English Lake District in 2017. The document that UNESCO released on that proud announcement gave as much credit to the farmers and land managers as to the glaciers that first shaped its environment. World heritage site status was hard won by the Lake District National Park Authority and the many communities within it. The status is richly deserved and precious, but it is not without being at some risk.

I will identify a handful of the risks to the world heritage site status that we enjoy in the Lake district, starting with the environmental risks. The great risk we face at the moment relates to the transition from the old farm payments scheme we had under the European Union, the common agriculture policy, to the new environmental land management scheme being designed by this Government. In theory and principle, I am fully in favour of the scheme; in practice, the Government are botching the transition and risking our landscape.

Why is that the case? This year, all my farmers will lose at least a third of their basic payments. Last time I checked, not very long ago, a grand total of 27 of the 1,000 farmers in my constituency alone—there are many more in the broader Lake district—had signed up to the new sustainable farming incentive. What will the farmers outside the new environmental schemes do? I suggest they will either go broke or go backwards. Many will go out of farming altogether, which means our landscape will rapidly change, damaging both the environment and our tourism economy, or they will go backwards. I have talked to many farmers who are desperate to work out how on earth they will make ends meet. What are they going to do? They are already increasing their livestock numbers, over-intensifying their farming and undoing the good environmental work they have done over the past few decades.

Meanwhile, badly put-together schemes are effectively giving landlords vast sums of money. What are they being compensated for? For evicting their tenants and creating valleys that are completely lost to farming and wildlife protection, which many of us have termed a Lakeland clearance. The landscape will look very different in a few years’ time if the Government continue on this trajectory. We have a tourism economy worth £3.5 billion a year in places like Bo’ness, Windermere, Ambleside, Grasmere, Grizedale, Langdale, Coniston, Hawkshead, Staveley, Glenridding, Patterdale and all the lakes and fells that people come to visit.

The tourism economy from which we hugely benefit will be damaged if we do not have the protection for which I am calling. We have 20 million visitors to our community, underpinning 60,000 jobs. It is important that we recognise how precious it is to the life of our community that we protect our world heritage site status. The national parks were originally founded on the Sandford principle, the idea that, all other things being the same, priority must be given to the conservation of the national parks.

We need to conserve our landscape, as I have already set out, but we also need to conserve our communities. The massive unrestricted growth of second home ownership in many of our communities means that I can name many villages where almost 90% of the housing stock is not lived in all year round. So you lose your school, you lose your bus service, you lose your pub. You lose everything there is that held the community together. We also see a growth in the ownership of the landscape falling into private hands. I trudged my way around Windermere lake a few weeks ago, when I ran the Windermere marathon. Apart from the fact that it was very uncomfortable and quite hot, it struck me how much of the frontage of the lake is privately owned. At the moment we are campaigning to stop YMCA Lakeside North Camp being sold off to a private owner who would permit no direct public access to the lake. I want the Lake district to be available to everybody, not just those of us who live there—I am so lucky to do so—but the country as a whole.

Our environment, our tourism economy and the communities that make up our national park—these things are hugely important. World heritage site status was tragically and sadly lost by Liverpool just two years ago, a reminder that all of us can lose this precious status. I ask the Government to take the action needed to protect world heritage site status for our wonderful communities in the Lake district.