House of Commons
Friday 26 March 1999
The House met at half-past Nine o'clock
PRAYERS
[Madam Speaker in the Chair]
Orders of the Day
Right to Roam Bill
Order for Second Reading read.
9.33 am
Mr. Gordon Prentice (Pendle): I beg to move, That the Bill be now read a Second time.
I shall not speak for long because the Government have already spoken for me and for millions of our fellow citizens who wish to enjoy their countryside. The Government are now pledged to introduce a statutory right of area access to more than 4 million acres of some of the most beautiful countryside in England and Wales. There is no difference between my objective and the Government's policy objective. What is about to happen is long overdue.
The Government recognise that the voluntary approach has been tried for half a century and that it has not worked. My right hon. Friend the Prime Minister, speaking memorably in, admittedly, a different context, said:
There is huge public and media interest in this issue because, I suppose, the voluntary approach was pitched against the statutory. In the media supplementof The Guardian of 13 March, shortly after the Government's announcement on 8 March, the supplement, known as "The Editor"--it measures the stories that are judged to be most important by Britain's main newspapers--put the right to roam right up there behind the banana trade war. The right to roam merited 350 column inches and was just behind bananas, with 359, although the Budget did have an edge.
However, the press got it completely wrong. I remember that, on the afternoon of 8 March, after my right hon. Friend the Minister for the Environment made his announcement in the Chamber, I was having a cup of tea with my good friend the chair of the parliamentary Labour party, my hon. Friend the Member for Ealing, Acton and Shepherd's Bush (Mr. Soley). He looked me straight in the eye and said, "Gordon, the Government were always going to go down the statutory route." He added, "Never believe what you read in the papers, especially The Guardian."
In new Labour, we never believe what is in The Guardian, but we all read it. No. 10 wants us to read the Daily Mail and The Daily Telegraph, and other newspapers further to the right, and I do. However, I do not believe what they say either.
The press got it wrong, the PLP got it wrong and I got it wrong. I laboured with my Bill, confident that I had the answer to the conundrum and did not realise, in my innocence, that there was a third way, which has been revealed to us, has it not? When I was working on my Bill, I thought that my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister would be pleased with me, because it was and is classic new Labour. On the one hand, rights, on the other, responsibilities. That is just the sort of language that appeals to my right hon. Friend. We know that because he believes in consensual politics--big-tent inclusive politics.
As the House will know, I have offered my Bill to the Government, to take it and to amend it as they think fit. My right hon. Friend the Minister for the Environment has told me that, at present, the Government are not minded to use it as the vehicle for introducing the right to roam. Two reasons were advanced by him. One is that the Government want to introduce a measure that goes beyond my Bill and that will encompass other matters such as the protection of wildlife. Secondly, the Government are fearful of what would happen to my Bill, even if they embraced it, once it went into the other place. There are a lot of wreckers in the other place who might act out of self-interest and not in the wider public interest. They might seek to damage my Bill, and that would never do.
Before I go any further, I shall thank some people for the help and support that they have given to me with my Bill. First and foremost, I want to thank Helen Ingham and Ruth Wilkinson, who worked with me in my constituency office. They did all the background and back-breaking work--they were responsible for the letters that went to Members, the press releases that were churned out and much of the campaigning stuff. My thanks are due also to all the officers and staff of the Ramblers Association, who worked tirelessly to promote my Bill. I shall not single out any individual, save one--Jerry Pearlman, who helped me with the complexities of drafting the Bill.
I thank my colleagues, the 190 Members of Parliament who pledged that they would be here to support the Bill, had the Government taken a different route.
Mr. Bob Russell (Colchester)
indicated assent.
Mr. Prentice:
I see an hon. Member on the Liberal Democrat Benches nodding. Seven Liberal Democrat Members, of whom I think he was one, supported the Bill--seven out of 47, but I welcome that none the less, in the spirit of the times. It is good to co-operate in areas where co-operation is sensible, we are told, so today I feel warm towards the seven Liberal Democrats.
I thank the hundreds of people who have written to me. I do not have the time to answer all their letters individually, but that was a tremendous boost to my morale and convinced me that I was doing the right thing. A National Opinion Poll survey published recently showed that 85 per cent. of the public want a statutory right to roam, with commonsense restrictions to protect the environment, crops and animals. The Conservative party is backing the 15 per cent. of the population who think that that proposition is outrageous.
What we are asking for is not outrageous. We should not be afraid to articulate our demand. Access legislation is commonplace in other countries in Europe. In Sweden,
Finland and Norway, people have enjoyed access to all land for hundreds of years. That is the case in Switzerland too. In Germany, where people have a mystical attachment to the forest, they have the right to wander freely through the woods. That is what they do in Germany, and why not?
We in Britain have waited more than a century for a statutory right to roam. It has been a century of struggle, with the people pitted against the land-owning interests, who want to keep the land exclusively for themselves.
There have been many attempts to legislate to open up the land, from the Access to Mountains Bill, which was introduced by James Bryce in 1884 and re-introduced every year in the Commons until the outbreak of the first world war, right through to the National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act 1949, a landmark measure introduced by the post-war Labour Government. Although its intentions were correct, it did not produce the goods. That is why, after half a century, we are revisiting the issue that Attlee and that Labour Government thought they had successfully addressed.
Between the wars, mass trespasses took place. People took direct action to walk on the land of their birth--a land fit for heroes after the first world war, but the soldiers who fought for this country in that great war could not walk on vast tracts of this country. That produced a festering resentment that still exists. I feel it. Now, as we approach the millennium, it is an astonishing fact that we are still strangers in our own country.
In my constituency, Pendle in the Pennines, we are surrounded by thousands of acres of open countryside that is out of bounds. To the west, the Duke of Westminster owns 26,000 acres of open countryside. To the east is Boulsworth hill, which looks down towards Haworth and the parsonage where the Bronte sisters lived. They walked on the moors at Boulsworth. That was the inspiration for "Wuthering Heights" and Heathcliff, yet it is off limits. At some point in the past we, the public, lost the right to walk on that moorland.
From the top of Boulsworth hill, which is in my constituency, on a clear day one can see for 25 miles. One can see way over to Huddersfield. [Hon. Members: "Yorkshire."] I go into Yorkshire occasionally; I do not need a passport yet. Standing there on a clear day, seeing for so many miles, I am reminded of what the Bishop of Blackburn says. He is a member of the Countryside Commission and has newly been appointed to the Countryside Agency. He speaks about the feeling of spirituality, of being up there, in the clouds almost, and seeing the land spread out all round.
If I stand on top of Boulsworth hill or Pendle hill, I can see my entire constituency--85,000 people in seven towns. I can look down there, and in some of those towns, people can gaze at the hills, but not walk there. [Interruption.] Yes, they can gaze up and see me, and say, "There he is again, rambling." I am enjoying this, but let me be serious.
Millions of people are fed up with sneaking and creeping round the countryside, afraid to upset others. We have been brainwashed into believing that we cause damage wherever we go. We apologise for the harm that we allegedly cause by our very presence. A few weeks ago, in the Grand Committee Room on 10 March, at a
meeting called by the Socialist Environmental Resources Association--SERA--to discuss the right to roam, the Earl of Macclesfield told the astonished audience, "The countryside cannot accommodate humans on the loose." That is what he said; I jotted it down.
That is a man who owns thousands of acres in the Chilterns, which he insists remain off limits to humans on the loose. He does not want people to have the right to roam, but apparently it is okay for a tiny number of people dressed in red outfits to have the right to rampage across the countryside with dogs. Rampaging across the countryside with dogs is okay for the noble earl, but the right to roam quietly and peacefully on foot is apparently an outrage.
We are told that we cannot have the right to roam because of the terrible damage that we would do. We are also told that the landowners are the true guardians of the countryside. They are holding it in trust for tomorrow, and the rest of us are all wreckers. However, walkers and ramblers have not poisoned the countryside with pesticides. We have not polluted the water courses. We have not silenced the countryside as the birds have perished. We are not responsible for grubbing up the hedgerows and damaging biodiversity. But the landowners point an accusing finger at us and say that, if the measure goes through, we would damage or destroy the delicate ecology of the countryside that they maintain and preserve. The landowners, who say that they protect the countryside, sell green-field sites for building. They sell those sites to developers and then complain about encroachment on the countryside by townies.
"We have been there, we have done it, we have got the tee-shirt; it is time to move on."
That is the position with countryside access.
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