Moorland Association demands statutory wildfire board

The Moorland Association has called for a statutory Wildfire Resilience Board and a new legal duty to reduce fuel loads, arguing that disjointed government is feeding the mega-fires that have scarred British moorland this decade.

In an article published on Friday (28 August), the association says wildfire policy is split between departments with nobody legally responsible for reducing fire severity, and that gamekeepers and land managers must be formally written into the response.

What is the association asking for?

Three things. A statutory Wildfire Resilience Board, jointly chaired by Defra and the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, the two departments the association says share responsibility for land management and the fire service. A statutory Wildfire Severity Reduction Duty, shifting policy from reacting to fires towards proactively reducing the fuel they burn. And Regional Resilience Partnerships pairing fire and rescue services with the farmers, gamekeepers and land managers who know the ground.

The association says the 2025 season burned some 46,000 hectares, cost an estimated £460m and released 1.3 million tonnes of carbon dioxide from peatland fires, and it points to National Fire Chiefs Council warnings about the fuel loads building on unmanaged land.

Restrictions and “Fire Highways”

The article renews the association’s criticism of Natural England’s restrictions on controlled winter burning, arguing that unmanaged vegetation now forms continuous corridors of fuel it calls “Fire Highways”, carrying wildfire across landscapes that managed firebreaks would once have stopped.

Andrew Gilruth, the association’s chief executive, said wildfires in 2025 “have already surpassed anything we’ve seen before, both in cost and in the scale of damage”, warning that “unless we change course, this will become the new normal”.

What happens next?

Creating a statutory board and duty would need government legislation, so the proposals go to ministers rather than to any live consultation. The call caps a summer in which the wildfire argument has moved from the hill to the policy desk: gamekeepers held the line at Bradfield Moor in August, the Cairngorms fire took five weeks to put out, and the official report into the Pentland Hills blaze called for a formal partnership between fire services and land managers.

Holyrood is due to take wildfire questions in early September, and calls for a national wildfire response unit and a formal prevention regime are already on the table in Scotland. The association’s article is a bid to shape what any of that becomes in England: a single accountable body, a legal duty to cut fuel, and the people who manage the ground inside the tent rather than outside it.

The full article, How Disjointed Government is Fuelling Mega-Fires, can be read on the Moorland Association’s website.