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National Parks in England

It is good to serve under your chairmanship, Mr. Martlew. I am grateful for the opportunity to debate this subject and in particular to talk about my local national park. This short debate could not be more topical. About an hour ago, the elders of Exmoor national park began a public meeting at their headquarters in Dulverton, just outside my constituency. They summoned the locals—I use that word deliberately—to hear a momentous decision. I suspect it was like a deferential scene from a Thomas Hardy novel with the toffs in charge and the madding crowd just waiting for the word from the room. Perhaps there was a waft of white smoke—I do not know. The elders of Exmoor have generously changed their minds and turned one of their own ridiculous policies upside down in the face of enormous and immense public anger. A panel has been set up to sort out the situation with the property in question for the long term, as the Minister and I have discussed. I hope that that will benefit not only local people, but the wider population. It is lunchtime and I suspect that the whole moor will be talking about this matter. There is no such thing as a secret on Exmoor. I suspect that the elders are working up quite an appetite. They should be ordering large helpings of that rare local delicacy known as humble pie. The park authority that—to put it crudely—governs Exmoor is reversing a decision to demolish an ordinary-looking bungalow and the barn that sits next door to it. This homestead, commonly known as Blackpitts, has become the recruiting and rallying ground for the park's opponents. The decision to try to buy the house to knock it down turned not just a few, but hundreds, of ordinary and decent Exmoor folk into revolutionaries. They call themselves Exmoor Uprising. A few weeks ago, I presented a petition to the House containing just over 2,000 names. That is over 50 per cent. of the population of my side of the moor. Only 1 per cent. of those people came from outside that area. That indicates the strength of feeling among local people. Why on earth should people sign up to defend a bungalow? Blackpitts is not special and I do not think that it ever has been. It was built a few decades ago as an ordinary working farmer's cottage. Interestingly, the tin-clad barn is the last surviving herding house for shepherds from the great reclamation of Exmoor in the early 19th century. That little bit of history is thrown in at no extra cost. There is no mains water or electricity. The bungalow is pretty basic and not very pretty, but so what? It remains a genuine example of how life has always been on that beautiful but often bleak landscape. Without saying anything, Blackpitts tells us a truth: it is no picnic for farmers, it never was and it never will be. I am embarrassed to say that the elders of Exmoor national park take a loftier view. They are not, by and large, ruddy-faced folk who get their hands dirty. I will quote from the park authority's document with the great title, the official ““Exmoor Landscape Character Assessment””. They want to preserve the"““Open Moorland and a strong sense of tranquility””." It states that there are some areas"““where the only view is one of Moorland expanse; stretching out as far as the eye can see. These areas are the most remote—some of the few remaining places on Exmoor where a sense of wildness and solitude can truly be experienced.””" That, in a nutshell, was the problem with Blackpitts bungalow. It did not look wild enough. It was too much like a real house and it spoiled the solitude. Whoever wrote the ““Exmoor Landscape Character Assessment”” was more concerned with solitude than with somewhere for local people to live. When Blackpitts bungalow finally came on the market, Exmoor national park dipped its hands into our pockets as taxpayers and signed a cheque for £235,000. It claimed that the bungalow was bought to stop creeping urbanisation. That is a bit hard to swallow given that Blackpitts is in the middle of nowhere. The nearest house is about five miles away. The authority was also on a promise from a charitable trust of £100,000 in its bank account if the bungalow was knocked down. Unfortunately, that was seen as a bribe by local people and was described as such in the West Somerset Free Press. I believe that the timing was bad, rather than anything untoward having taken place. In the politically correct spirit of open government, the authority issued a consultation document suggesting all sorts of things that might be done with the place. However, it was pretty obvious that it wanted to flatten the property to re-wild the moor. On 2 September this year, by the narrowest margin, the elders got their way and won. The six Secretary of State-appointed members who have no knowledge of the moor and no background on the moor swung the decision. Ever since then, re-wilding has become very popular on Exmoor because Exmoor itself has gone wild. The Revolting Exmoor Peasant Party was formed to save Blackpitts. The members chose a provocative name and I do not blame them. The name has now been changed to Exmoor Uprising. Their anger came from the heart. They felt that they were being treated like ignorant peasants by a remote park authority that cared only about a picture-book Exmoor and not about its people. They felt ignored and resentful. They live on the moor, they understand it and they love it. They also know it is not, and can never be, a museum. Part of the appeal of Exmoor is that some of the areas are rough. If the authority ever forgets that fact, it is in danger of presiding over a sterile, lifeless heritage site. Exmoor Uprising had a point and it still has. Today that was proven. The national park authority has rightly done a massive U-turn and agreed to rent out and ultimately sell Blackpitts and not demolish it. That is for the benefit of local people. Surely the most important thing that any Government would want a national park authority to do is to represent and not resent the people within its borders. I would like to say, ““Hip, hip””, but I am afraid that it is too early to say ““hooray!”” There is a fundamental problem with the make-up of all national park authorities—even the best of them. Exmoor is not the worst, but it is certainly not the best. Not a single member of any national park is elected. The Government appoint people; half a dozen in the case of Exmoor. Some of them are well-meaning, but they include people from Oxford, Bristol, Swindon, Warwickshire, Exminster and Torquay. Presumably they enjoy the long car journeys to attend meetings. There is no accountability, no local interest and little or no local understanding. The democratic and geographical disadvantages of this system ought to be obvious. National parks are responsible for planning decisions within their boundaries. That point causes problems because disgruntled locals cannot get their own back at the ballot box as there is nobody to vote for or kick out. Perhaps that matters less with big national parks. The bigger the park, the greater the chance that a few genuine locals will be picked to run things. Exmoor is a tiddler with a small population. Our authority is overwhelmed with bodies from everywhere except the moor that it is supposed to represent. That simple fact is another cause of bitter discontent. Exmoor folk do not like being told what they can do by those whom they consider outsiders—I suspect that that is the norm throughout the national parks—and boy, does the national park tell people what to do, or rather what not to do. One reason why the population there is so small is that it is almost impossible to build new houses. The high-minded souls at the park's planning department have developed an enviable reputation as a team that says no all the time, except to saving Cutcombe market on Exmoor, of which my hon. Friend the hon. Member for Leominster (Bill Wiggin), as a spokesman on agriculture, will be aware. It is right to save the market, but to do so, private housing must be built, breaking policies and smashing ideals to pay lip service to the rest of Exmoor. That cannot be right. However, that is only following the high-minded ideals of the authority, which is chaired by a Liberal Democrat county councillor from far-away Crewkerne, on the other side of Somerset, who answers to the name of John Dyke. He is an ex-MAFF man, as the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs used to be known. It has been suggested to me by unhappy moorlanders that a firm finger in that particular Dyke would not come amiss. Given that only about half the work force lives in the park, it makes one wonder what intent and aspirations the authority has to help the people of the park. The problem is that Exmoor national park has what Rumpole of the Bailey would call considerable form. Memories are long in that part of England. Few will forget the park's ill-conceived plan for a £2 million visitor centre. The authority wanted to stick it—I am not joking—in a massive bunker on the high coast road between Porlock and Lynton, a place way out of the reach of tourists where buses can hardly go due to the steepness of the hills. I am glad to say that common sense prevailed again because of the people of Exmoor, although not for long. I must also bring attention to the situation of the kookaburras. Exmoor national park discovered that one of my constituents had a pair of those antipodean pets. Kookaburras, it was decided firmly, were not indigenous to Exmoor, so they were ordered to go. Again, common sense prevailed. The park saw sense and said, ““No, we can let them stay.”” Another example is much more dangerous. A mire reclamation project has been undertaken recently to block a load of the mires—not far from Blackpitts, funnily enough—in order to turn them back into bog land, encouraging wildlife to increase and allowing people to see the bog as it should be, and possibly to sink in it. The problem is that locals remember why the mires were put there. They were put there after the Lynton disaster in the '50s, when Lynton was swept away into Lynmouth. Those mires are now being blocked up. I do not ask the Minister to reply straight away on that, as more research is needed.