CSM EDITORIAL
The admission slips out with increasing regularity from those responsible for prohibiting rotational cool burning on England’s uplands. Yes, they concede, it may take years for rewetted land to reach a state where it is naturally protected from wildfire. The honesty is welcome, if somewhat late. What they omit is that any such transition remains entirely speculative. There is no evidence base demonstrating that rewetting, however desirable in principle, will render moorland fireproof. There is no fireproof moor. The risk and consequences of wildfire must be managed; they cannot be abolished by wishful thinking.
What we have, instead of management, is ideology dressed as science. Natural England and Defra plotted for years to ban cool burning. They now preside over one wildfire after another. Tintwistle. Dove Stone. Abernethy. Saddleworth. Sites where cool burning has been abandoned continue to burn, often catastrophically, burning deep into the peat that the regulations were supposed to protect. In July, fires across Greater Manchester and Derbyshire burned for more than a fortnight, consuming hundreds of hectares—equivalent to 1,250 football pitches—and requiring over 100 firefighters and specialist crews from across the UK.
The government’s response has been to construct a licensing system that is not fit for purpose. The 2025 amendments lowered the peat depth threshold from 40cm to 30cm and removed the licence ground covering land inaccessible to mechanical cutting, all while insisting that burning remains available to reduce wildfire impact. Yet the practical effect is clear: land managers know they will not receive licences. The application process demands restoration plans and wildfire management plans that presume the very outcomes the policy is meant to deliver. How can ministers be surprised that people cannot be bothered to apply for licences they know they will not get?
The National Fire Chiefs Council, no friend to unrestricted burning, warned explicitly that further restricting prescribed burning could compromise fire service preparedness and increase danger to firefighters and the public. Northumberland Fire and Rescue Service echoed the concern, stating that reducing the threshold could have the perverse effect of causing more severe summer wildfires by leaving landscapes unmanaged. These are not the protests of shooting estates. They are the warnings of professional fire officers who understand what happens when fuel loads accumulate unchecked.
The intellectual foundation of this policy is rotten. Natural England’s evidence review, NEER155, devotes just five pages of a 284-page document to wildfire—and even that treatment is partial. It cites a 2004 survey claiming that 29% of wildfires were caused by muirburn while ignoring a 2019 Scottish Fire and Rescue Service study showing that 0% of 153 fires were attributable to muirburn. The consultation that preceded the ban was, by the admission of peers who examined it, constructed to produce the desired answer.
Meanwhile, the consequences are borne by those who warned against this course: the gamekeepers, farmers and land managers whose skills in controlled burning have been honed over generations and whose expertise in fighting wildfires was acquired precisely through that practice. The Saddleworth Moor fire alone cost £20 million in health impacts. The cost of the 2025 amendments to the economy is estimated at £1.3 million per year. The cost of the wildfires they have encouraged is not yet counted, but it will be paid in carbon, biodiversity, water quality and human health.
Defra and Natural England have no operational, financial or legal responsibility for the consequences of their decisions. If their regulations lead to catastrophic wildfire, nothing happens to them. This absence of accountability has fostered an institutional disinterest in the very problem they have created.
The ban on rotational cool burning was their idea. They were warned. They proceeded anyway. They can live with the consequences—though the moors, and those who depend on them, will have to live with them longer.