Changing priorities make countryside funding much more vital

WHEN public spending priorities need to be weighed up, there are things that are essential and there are things that are nice to have. By tradition, investing in visitor centres in our national parks, keeping rights of way clear of obstacles and employing staff to work on conservation projects in protected landscapes have come under the ‘nice to have’ banner.

That is why, as the WMN reports today, the Westcountry’s two national parks, Dartmoor and Exmoor, are looking at combined spending cuts of some £1.3 million over three years. The impact will be significant, with proposals including the sell-off of national park-owned land on

Exmoor and the closure of Dartmoor’s hugely popular visitor centre at Princetown. Yet surely priorities have changed since the ideas of what constitutes essential public spending were first established? The environment, once seen as a kind of fluffy addition to real life in the countryside, now sits centre stage.

Our understanding of the importance of open spaces, from their value as habitats for wildlife, sinks for carbon and places to people exercise and recharge their batteries, has grown immeasurably over the past half-century and more. And as the climate crisis and the impact of dwindling wildlife has taken hold in people’s consciousness, so the need to invest in making our wild places more sustainable and more accessible has grown.

That is why it is time to take another, closer look at national park funding and review whether or not the right choices are being made, as organisations that provide so much of what politicians say they know people want are starved of funds.

The Government-commissioned Landscapes Review, undertaken by Julian Glover and starting in 2018, produced bold visions for a less fragmented approach to protected landscapes in England.

Mr Glover made a number of recommendations but underscoring his report was a call for the nationally important landscapes of Britain to be given a higher priority in the life of the nation, and – crucially – the funds to make a difference.

Yet, now we are in the grip of a cost-of-living crisis, the old way of measuring the work of the national parks has come back into play. Funding has been parked under the heading ‘not a priority.’ Claims on limited amounts of taxpayers’ money can be made by every Government department, but an approach which puts investing in the landscape close to the bottom of the league table is short-sighted and lazy.

That does not mean the people who run our national parks should simply give up and start wielding the red pen, cutting services and selling off land to balance the books.

Innovative approaches to raise money, perhaps through sponsorship or by finding ways to get visitors to contribute without damaging the essential open and free nature of access, must be tried. But the starting point in this debate should not be that funding cuts are simply inevitable, when times are hard. We need a new approach that gives our wild uplands and wide open spaces the importance that they deserve, and fund them accordingly.