Moorland Association calls for a national wildfire agency

The Moorland Association has called on the Government to consider a single national wildfire agency, arguing that Britain has capable fire crews but no national strategy and nobody in overall charge of a rising risk. Its analysis, published this week, points to the agency Portugal built after its deadly 2017 fires as the model.

How bad is Britain’s wildfire problem?

The National Fire Chiefs Council recorded 996 wildfire incidents across England and Wales by early September 2025, more than the 994 logged in the whole of 2022, until then the worst year on record. The association says fires are arriving earlier in the year and reaching ground once thought too wet to burn.

Behind the figures sits what fire scientists call the fire paradox: decades of successful suppression allow fuel to build, setting the stage for larger and harder fires under extreme weather. The association argues the answer is to manage the fuel, not just fight the flames.

Who is in charge of wildfire in Britain?

No single body, the association says. Fire and rescue services attend wildfires as a statutory duty, and responsibility for them in England moved to the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government in April 2025. Defra leads on land management and wildfire mitigation, while the Cabinet Office handles national risk.

Co-ordination rests largely on voluntary, non-statutory groups: the England and Wales Wildfire Forum, the Scottish Wildfire Forum and the fire chiefs’ own wildfire group. The England and Wales forum has itself told Parliament there is a framework document but no national wildfire strategy. The rulebook changes at each border too: England’s 2025 regulations lowered the protected deep-peat threshold to 30cm, Scotland’s muirburn licensing under the 2024 Act is expected to go live this autumn, and Wales and Northern Ireland run their own arrangements.

What did Portugal build after 2017?

Rural fires killed more than 100 people in Portugal in 2017. In 2018 the country created the Agency for Integrated Rural Fire Management, known as AGIF, and in 2020 it adopted a national plan for rural fire management running to 2030. The design principle is integration: prevention, land use and firefighting joined under one co-ordinating roof rather than left in separate silos.

The association says the transferable lesson is the governance, not the overseas ecology: strategic planning, trained and accredited burners, formal burn plans, smoke management and an institution that treats fuel as a landscape-scale problem.

What happens next?

Whether Britain needs its own version of AGIF is, in the association’s words, a question for government, and one the wildfire forums and fire chiefs have already put on the table. Gamekeepers and land managers, who already train and work alongside fire crews, would sit at the centre of any integrated system. The full analysis can be read on the Moorland Association’s website.