Why we should mourn for our national parks

Malcolm Smith

It shouldn’t come as any surprise that our National Parks aren’t “national”.

Nearly all of the land in them is privately owned. Mostly by farmers. And, for the last half century, the very same EU Common Agricultural Policy has funded more intensive, nature depleting farming inside them just as it has in the rest of our countryside.

A report earlier this year revealed that a paltry 6% of national park land in England and Wales is being effectively managed for nature.

More powers

Now the Campaign for National Parks – the authors of the report, a charity dedicated to securing their future – is calling for the authorities overseeing these protected landscapes to be given more powers to buy private land under what they call a ‘People’s Charter’ so they can do more to boost biodiversity.

Not the best of economic times for UK Governments to warm to any suggestion of financial largesse.

Our National Park Authorities are starved of cash. They act as planning authorities, run visitor centres, repair public access routes and much else.

Spare cash

But they have no spare cash to start buying up private land on any serious scale. And they remain virtually powerless to influence the private landowners who own the vast majority of it.

What happens to our most cherished landscapes remains in the hands of a myriad of farmers. It has always been so.

Yet new National Parks are being considered in several parts of the UK, including the Clwydian Range and the Dee Valley in Wales.

What is the point? Putting designation lines on maps, funding and staffing another new National Park Authority (to add to Eryri, Bannau Brycheiniog and the Pembrokeshire Coast Parks) without being able to properly conserve its landscapes and address the decline in nature, only re-emphasises their impotence in trying to fix our nature crisis.

What would be far more effective in addressing the appalling depletion of Welsh wildlife over decades is to get the proposed new Welsh farming support scheme up and running urgently.

We have long left the EU but farmers are still receiving EU style area payments to subsidise them with virtually no environmental strings attached.

This needs to stop. As many farmers as possible need to be incentivised to enter the new farming scheme which will pay them to conserve what fragments of wildlife habitat remain and re-create some of what’s been lost.

The scheme is the only game in town if we are to reverse our wildlife declines, both within our fabulous landscapes designated as National Parks and outside them.

Dr Malcolm Smith is former chief scientist at the Countryside Council for Wales