What do you think of when you think of a national park? Is it a wide area of glorious natural beauty, where wildlife runs free under the protection of the state? Or is it a wide area mostly farmed by private landowners, in which nature is faring worse than outside its boundaries, and largely off-limits to the public?
In England, the reality is the latter, and this matters. The country is one of the most nature-depleted nations in the world, in the bottom 10% of nations for biodiversity. “Nature is in freefall in our national parks,” says Dr Rose O’Neill, the chief executive of the Campaign for National Parks (CNP).
Wildlife is wonderful for its own sake, but its loss also damages its near-magical ability to boost people’s wellbeing, as well as natural flood defences, pollination and more. Restoring nature is also critical to fighting the climate emergency, soaking up carbon in new trees and rewetted peatlands.
So why have national parks failed nature? There are thousands of good nature projects in national parks, from fresh flower meadows to leafy new woodlands, yet the picture is still one of decline. Most importantly, what needs to change to urgently reverse the decline?
The story begins 75 years ago, when Clement Attlee’s Labour government established national parks for the war-weary population. The vision was that everyone, no matter their background, could immerse themselves in the soothing beauty of nature.
As the nation cleared the bomb sites in its cities and rebuilt, the big threats to national parks were urban sprawl and industrialisation. So the parks were set up as planning authorities, to halt the march of towns into the countryside.
At that time, farming was far less intensive than it was to become. It had helped shape the countryside over centuries, creating important cultural heritage. But as the decades passed, sheep and cattle grazing intensified, assisted by chemical fertilisers and pesticides, and peatlands were drained and burned, with devastating consequences for nature.
But the national parks had no power to prevent the damage inside their boundaries. “So you have the situation today, where a national park authority can dictate what kind of window someone has on their house, but not control what happens on large tracts of land where activities would be really damaging to the natural environment,” says O’Neill. National parks were designed for a different, long-gone era.
The consequences have been severe. The very best of English nature, from gnarled ancient woodland to flower-rich havens for endangered butterflies, to heaths resonant with birdsong, is protected through designation as a site of special scientific interest (SSSI).
But only 26% of SSSIs in England’s national parks are in “favourable condition”, according to a health check report published by CNP in April. Strikingly, that is a lower proportion than across England as a whole, where 38% are in favourable condition.
The main causes of SSSIs being damaged are mismanaged livestock grazing, moor burning for game bird shoots, water pollution and deer.
The situation varies significantly. In four national parks – Dartmoor, Exmoor, North York Moors and the Peak District – less than 20% of the SSSIs are in favourable condition, while elsewhere more than half are doing well: the New Forest, South Downs and the Broads in East Anglia.
Waterways give national parks their natural sparkle, from the glacial lakes of the Lake District, to the chalk streams of the South Downs and the wide wetlands of the Broads. But these are declining too, the CNP report found. The proportion of national park rivers with “good ecological status” or higher fell from 47% in 2013 to 39% in 2022, while lakes fell from 18% to 15%. Even in the most pristine rivers and lakes, traces of toxic chemicals are found, meaning not one of the hundreds of water bodies are in “good overall health”.
Why? National park status is no protection from the sewage spills by water companies that afflict the whole country. The pollution running off farms adds to the foul mix.
The dappled light of woodland walks amid the myriad species that make their homes there is good for the soul. Yet barely any new woodland has been established in national parks in recent years. Tree cover rose by only 0.1% to 15.3% from 2015 to 2020, the CNP found.
Trees could cover twice that amount, conservationists estimate, without infringing on other important habitats and land uses. Instead, for example, the Yorkshire Dales national park has less woodland coverage (4.2%) than the city of York (4.5%).
At least these issues are known about – for others there is little or no data. Healthy, squelchy bogs, skimmed with slippery sphagnum moss and bog cotton, should cover 43% of national parks, but many of these peatlands have been drained or are repeatedly burned. How many? No one seems to know. Neither is the change in the populations of key species, from red squirrels to nightingales, known.
Lack of data also undermines the management plans each national park is legally obliged to publish. None contained baseline data on three key measures – habitats, species and water quality – the CNP found.
“The state of nature in national parks is an embarrassment in many ways on a world stage – every measure shows nature is in decline,” says O’Neill. Lake Windermere, in a Unesco world heritage site, the Lake District national park, is “turning green and toxic because it’s been so polluted”, she says. “It doesn’t make any sense that we’re in a worse place here – these should be the places where you’re focusing your efforts.”
Some people are, and it is important to celebrate the many projects in national parks through which charities, farmers and volunteers are restoring nature. “But all of those efforts are just not happening at the scale and pace needed to keep up with the biodiversity crisis and the climate crisis,” says O’Neill.
Amid a cost of living and housing crisis, it is fair to ask whether people really care about nature in national parks. The evidence suggests they do. More than 70% of respondents in a recent poll for the Green Alliance said providing habitats for wildlife and preserving the natural environment were the most important roles for national parks. Only 9% said farmers producing food was among the most important roles.
The government-commissioned Landscapes Review, published in 2019, found the same: “The message was clear: more than any other single thing, people and organisations agreed that our landscapes should do more for nature,” says Julian Glover, who led the review. About 100m visits are made to national parks every year.
So what needs to happen? The stated legal purpose of national parks has not changed in the 75 years since they were established: “Conserve and enhance the natural beauty, wildlife and cultural heritage.” The Glover review concluded a much stronger purpose was needed, and proposed: “Recover, conserve and enhance natural beauty, biodiversity and natural capital, and cultural heritage.”
“That’s much tougher language that actually meets the challenges of the 21st century,” says Guy Shrubshole, a nature campaigner and author. Our nearest neighbour, the Republic of Ireland, already has this as the number one goal for its national parks: “To protect and conserve nature for future generations.”
Jayne Butler, the executive director of National Parks England, which represents the 10 parks, says: “National parks can review and renew their entire purpose, and really focus on what they need to bring to the nation for the next 75 years. There is a lot of exciting and important work that we can do to help to recover nature and mitigate against the climate crisis.” However, the last Conservative government failed to implement Glover’s recommendation.
Even if the purpose was strengthened, it would make little difference if national parks still lacked the ability to follow through and restore nature on the scale needed. This brings us to the antiquated way in which national parks are governed.
Each park is overseen by a board that sets the strategic direction of the park and the implementation of its plan. But Guardian analysis has found the boards are almost a definition of “pale, male and stale”. 70% of the boards’ members are men, many retired, and just four of the 225 members are from ethnic minority groups. In contrast, two Welsh national parks have female majorities. Furthermore, only 15 members on English national park boards have professional conservation or ecology expertise.
National parks should be just that, parks for the nation, but the CNP report concluded: “The boards are not representative of the population, who, in the main, think nature should be the priority.” Guardian analysis of board meeting agendas shows that, amid discussions of car parks and toilets, items specifically related to nature are rare.
The problem is that the national park authorities do not appoint their own boards. Instead, 75% of the members come directly from local councils, a hangover of the focus on planning. The other quarter are appointed by the secretary of state for environment to represent the national interest but appear little more diverse or qualified than the councillors.
The boards are also far too large, with an average of 23 members. “The result is that [national park staff] spend an excessive amount of time servicing these bloated boards,” said the Glover review. It recommended cutting the boards to nine to 12 people, selected for their skills. Again, the government ignored the call.
Sleeker boards would still need increased funding to pay for more work on nature. In reality, the reverse has happened. Since 2010, the policy of austerity has seen combined government funding for the 10 parks plunge by 40% in real terms, to £54m a year. That means cumulative lost funding of £230m over the period, says Butler.
“That’s had a massive impact, because you’re constantly losing staff,” she says. Northumberland national park, for example, has lost a third of its staff. “Not only are we not able to do some on-the-ground work, but we’re not able to bring people together at the scale we would like,” Butler says. Funding is also settled year to year: “That makes it very difficult to plan ahead.”
“Park authorities have been absolutely starved of resources and forced to think about selling off land and nature reserves in order to fill black holes in their budgets,” says O’Neill. This defunding, plus the longstanding situation of not having enough powers, is “why we were in the state we’re in,” she says.
Who owns national parks is key to what measures will work to restore nature. In many countries, including Ireland, the answer is simple: the state and its people. However, the answer in England is that not even the parks themselves appear to know.
The Guardian made freedom of information (FoI) requests to all park authorities but only one, North York Moors, was able to account for the ownership of 100% of the park. The other nine parks were able to state the ownership of very little of their land. One, Dartmoor, provided no data at all.
What is clear is that, whatever the precise number, the vast majority of land in national parks is owned by farmers and other private landholders and mostly grazed by sheep and cattle or used for shooting. In the North York Moors, 83% of the land is privately owned.
Nine park authorities were able to say how much of the land they owned themselves – 1.8% on average, essentially unchanged from a review published in 1991. Some the Guardian spoke to said ownership was far less important than what was actually done with the land.
But Shrubshole suggests in his forthcoming book that using taxpayers’ money to buy and protect land could be far more effective than the millions in green subsidies already being given to landowners with poorly measured results.
“I’m not saying suddenly nationalise all the land in national parks – it’s clearly not going to happen,” he says. “But I do think having national park authorities that feel empowered to acquire more land is a good backstop. If land is being atrociously managed they can say we’ll buy it as soon as it comes up for sale.”
In Scotland, communities already get the first option to buy land, with grants available from the government. “We’d like to see a similar model trialled here for the national parks,” says O’Neill.
The largely private ownership of national parks affects another of their two legal purposes – enabling the public access to their land. Restoring nature is vital for biodiversity and climate, but people will only benefit if they can experience it.
The Guardian’s FoI requests found that less than half of national park land in England is “open access” – 44% on average (excluding the water-dominated Broads). The lowest was the South Downs national park where only 5% of the land is open access, and the highest was 76% in Northumberland. In Scotland’s two national parks, and indeed the rest of that country, 100% of the land is open, thanks to the country’s “right to roam” law.
Butler, offering National Parks England’s perspective, says: “Our view is to focus on making it possible for many people to access these national parks, rather than getting 100% access into every space.” She cites the The Sill landscape discovery centre near Hadrian’s Wall in Northumberland national park and Sutton Bank centre in the North York Moors, home to what the author and vet James Herriot called the “finest view in England”.
Nonetheless, access in England’s national parks is messy, as illustrated by the bizarre phenomenon of “access islands”. These are patches of land that are legally open to walkers but completely surrounded by private land which is not: to reach them you would need to trespass, or use a helicopter. Lewis Winks, from the Right to Roam campaign group, told the Guardian there are 127 access islands larger than 100 sq metres in England’s national parks. Two-thirds are in three parks: the Lake District, Peak District and South Downs parks, with the 6.6 hectare (16.3 acre) Netherley Down site an example in the latter.
National parks will not own much land anytime soon, so restoring nature will mean working with those who do. That is farmers, for whom the land is their workplace and home, often for generations. They own 64% of the parks, the CNP estimates.
There is a post-Brexit revolution in farm subsidies under way, with billions of pounds a year being shifted from payments for simply owning or renting farmland towards “public funding for public goods”, largely nature restoration and climate protection.
This should be good news for farmers willing to take on green projects, but several told the Guardian they were falling into a gap between the old payments being phased out and the new ones being phased in. Time could resolve this issue, but it is not the only one.
“Land in national parks has typically been deemed very poor agricultural land and so has got a very slim proportion of government subsidy,” says O’Neill. “We would like to see the inverse of that. National parks should be getting a much better deal than they have historically from state subsidies, because they could deliver so much in terms of nature recovery, climate sequestration and public access.”
One scheme all agree has been a success is Farming in Protected Landscapes, which has delivered £100m to 3,000 nature and access projects since 2021. More than 70,000 hectares of wildlife habitat has been created or restored – about 6% of the area of national parks – along with 100 miles of new hedgerow and 100,000 trees.
“It has been a brilliant prototype,” says Butler, but the funding is scheduled to stop in March 2025. “We would like to see it become a permanent fixture. For nature recovery, we should be looking at 10-year agreements, not one year. We’ve identified a phenomenal amount of potential, but we don’t have the resources.”
Another fund, the £50m Nature for Climate Peatland restoration scheme, will also end next March.
“You can find examples in every national park of really good work being done by progressive landowners and farmers,” says Shrubshole. “But is it enough to turn things around? I’d say not. This land [should be] prioritised for nature and climate. This is a national mission and everyone who lives and works within national parks can play a part in that.”
Such a shift of priority would be a huge change for farmers, who have an enormous attachment to their land and traditions. If it is to happen, then just like oil workers in the North Sea, a just transition to a greener world must be planned. “Our national parks are living, working landscapes,” says Butler. “People are trying to do the right thing, but they do also have to earn an income.”
“It makes sense for national parks to do more for nature,” says Victoria Vyvyan, the president of the Country Land and Business Association, which represents land owners. She says farmers could invest in habitat restoration, alongside government, but need to have thriving businesses to do so. “Planning restrictions in national parks stifle the survival of communities and create a monoculture of tourism. Too often the instincts of government are to treat national parks as museums.”
A newly installed Labour government could be an opportunity for a new start. When national parks were set up, the destruction of nature by intensive farming was not anticipated and, 75 years on, they do not have the goal, governance or funding to reverse this – deep reform is needed.
There are specific short-term actions required too, such as a ban on burning on all peatlands and the implementation of a new duty, passed in December 2023, on public bodies such as Forestry England and water companies to further the purposes of national parks when working on their land.
“We all know what needs to be done,” says Glover. “I’m watching for signs that at last we’ll get action, not words.”
A spokesperson for the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs said: “This government is determined to fix our natural environment. We will help our protected landscapes like national parks become wilder, greener and more accessible to all.” The government is undertaking a rapid review of the nvironmental improvement plan, which is intended to deliver the country’s legally binding targets to save nature but is largely off track.
Butler says: “There is a real opportunity for us to be seen as central to a sustainable future, and delivering on the nature and climate crises that the nation is facing. If we can’t protect nature in our national parks, then where can we do it?”