OPINION Search for new national park is a diversionary waste of time
As the government admits there’s been no progress towards the promise of green or blue space within a 15-minute walk of all homes, we need to stop wasting our time on blatant diversions, says Jon Moses
WE’VE ALL BEEN THERE. Your popularity is rock bottom. Everything you touch turns to shit. Your pal calls round, invites you out to take your mind off it all. “Take this,” they say, handing you a small roll of paper that suspiciously resembles a civil service memorandum. “It’ll make you feel better.” You feel a strange, rushing sensation. “Access reform,” you think. “I’ve got it!”
Bold, visionary ideas race through your cortex, like salmon chasing eels.
Then, you awake, temples throbbing. A notebook full of meaningless scribbles and bad poetry lies next to you, and a press conference you announced at 3am is going live in the next ten minutes.
I imagine this was the scene when, last January, the then Environment Secretary Thérèse Coffey announced the government’s long-awaited proposals for access reform. “Everyone will live no more than a 15-minute walk from a green space or water,” she declared, dreams of terra-forming half of Birmingham reverberating in her mind. Mic drop. Stage exit. No more details provided.
Smelling a rat, Right to Roam FOI’d the government to find out more. Could we have any briefings, submissions or statistics informing Defra’s thinking? Any assessments provided to ministers for how their access target could actually be met?
We got our answer. “No assessment has yet gone to ministers on options for how to progress towards the commitment”. The sum total of two years of purported work amounted to three sides of A4 with a few cobbled stats and some fag-packet maths. It confirmed ministers had pushed back on any idea of a legal target. Government gets awkward when you actually have to mark your homework. They branded it a “commitment” instead, which politicians love because nobody knows what it means.
The memos contained a further clue as to why Defra seemed to be nowhere on access: they were all addressed to Lord Benyon.
The latest scion of a dynastic family of
West Berkshire landowners who have held political office for much of the past 200 years,
Benyon was, until recently, the unelected Minister for Access to Nature. (Defra likes recruiting unelected landowners so much it has just done it again). In one sense he was well qualified for the role: his own access to nature is exceptional.
Benyon lives in an Elizabethan mansion on the 14,000-acre Englefield Estate, which includes a rather pleasant deer park, created in the 19th Century by moving the nearby village out of the way (it spoiled the view). Victorian newspapers recounted the annual occasions when local residents would be permitted entry to the grounds for a day before being kicked out again.
Perhaps that benevolent legacy was on Benyon’s mind when, in the House of Lords, he reflected on his “...experience of providing public open space – in my case much closer to a large urban centre – and I understand how people want to access the countryside.” This was an interesting contribution to make whilst defending the decision to reintroduce the 2026 cut-off for recording 49,000 miles of lost rights of way. What did he mean? Well, there are two permissive paths on the Englefield Estate. These permit you to wander up his lengthy tarmac drive, peer at the great house in the distance before being sent on your way back to the A340.
Such benevolence is not exactly gratis. Instead, it falls under HMRC’s Conditional Exemption Scheme, which means that if you’ve got loads of expensive stuff you can get inheritance tax relief for theoretically providing public access to it: like a modest track somewhere on the edge of your vast estate. Of course, being permissive, such provision is liable to be withdrawn at any moment. When Right to Roam led a “trespass” of Englefield last summer, accompanied by Morris dancers dressed as psychedelic owls, Benyon was quick to point out such magnanimous arrangements.
Not to be cowed by Coffey’s departure, the government has just announced another raft of non-proposals, including notional handouts of taxpayer money to landowners in exchange for access to some woodlands. They also declared they were “searching for a new national park”. Why? Have they lost one?
We should not waste our time with such blatant diversions, and instead focus on reasserting some fundamental truths. No one should have to ask permission for the simple act of existing in their environment. Access to nature should not be at the behest of some Lord. We should not have to fear being turfed from our sleep whilst spending a night under the stars.
We have been a democracy for nearly
200 years now – it’s time for our access laws to reflect that basic fact too.
Jon Moses is a writer, campaigner and organiser for the Right to Roam campaign