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Mr. Bercow: Courses or gorses?
Mr. Maclean: Courses, not gorses.
I want an assurance from the Minister that the Countryside Agency will not reach a judgment relating to improved or semi-improved grassland merely by looking at a map, or by looking at the land in question. Yes, in many cases it has been possible to tell what is a mountain and what is improved grassland; but that is not true of thousands of acres of inby land in Cumbria which are halfway up the fell sides, between the farm buildings and the fell tops.
An uninitiated person, or someone having a cursory glance, would say, "That is not improved or semi-improved grassland. Look at the gorse bushes; look at the trees; look at the bracken. That is wild mountainside". Nevertheless, 10, 15 or 20 years earlier, the farmers owning the inby land might have put considerable resources into making it improved or semi-improved grassland. We need to hear from the Minister whether evidence of that nature will be acceptable.
I do not want the Minister to say, "It is what the land looks like now that counts". I do not want to be told that it does not matter that five years ago farmers improved the land by cutting down all the bracken and gorse and spending a fortune on nitrogen, and that now, because nature has partly reclaimed the land, the agency will say, "Tough luck. It does not look like improved grassland to us, so it has not been exempted."
Mr. Bercow: I am grateful to my right hon. Friend for giving way, and it is rare for me to cavil at anything he says in the Chamber; but what he is describing, at least on the face of it, suggests to me that a great deal of labour-intensive activity will be required. Is he confident
that that activity will be feasible, even in the context of the largesse for the Countryside Agency about which the Minister boasted a few minutes ago?
Mr. Maclean: I am grateful to my hon. Friend for his intervention--and I would cavil with him. The largesse of which the Minister boasted would certainly not cover the cost of the additional civil servants who would need to be hired to draw up the maps required to implement the legislation, and to inspect all improved or semi-improved grassland that is the subject of dispute--and there may be hundreds of thousands of acres.
The difficulty that the amendment poses for the Minister and the Countryside Agency is that it would insert a clause dealing with some of the most contentious land. There can be little dispute about what constitutes a mountain: according to the definition, it is land situated more than 600 m above sea level--whatever that is in proper measures of height. That definition is clearly indisputable: it is possible, through the Ordnance Survey--and by means of certain navigation equipment that some Members may possess--to reach an exact determination of the height of any piece of land above sea level.
The amendment, however--although I welcome it in general--introduces an area of potentially great dispute. Many of my constituents will be willing to testify that they have improved their grassland over the years. They may not have improved it much over the past few years, because they are suffering: the Government have driven them into crisis in rural areas, and they have no money to make improvements. However, we need to ensure that all the work that they, and their fathers and forebears, did to improve the land will not be discounted because some hard-pressed official from the Countryside Agency, suffering under the grossly inadequate funding provided by the Government, has to give that land a cursory glance and then reach a decision that he might not have made had he been allowed to hear proper evidence and representations from farming organisations and properly qualified country and soil experts.
Under Lords amendments Nos. 153, 154 and 155, land more than about 66 ft away from a building will not be regarded as open access land. I think that that is about the length of the Chamber. You will be pleased to know, Madam Deputy Speaker, that if you lived in a little cottage or a house on a hillside in Cumbria, the world and his dog--or dogs--would be allowed to roam at a distance about the same as that from where you are sitting to the main entrance of the Chamber, but could get no closer. You are welcome to visit my constituency, and I hope that you will be reassured to know that on a dark winter's night in Cumbria people will be allowed to ramble at night on land but will not be able to get any closer to a building than the length of the Chamber.
5.45 pm
Mr. John M. Taylor: This is when an Englishman might be able to help a Scotsman. A length of 66 ft is better known as 22 yd, which is also known as a chain. It is precisely the length of a cricket pitch. I say that as someone who played cricket for well over 20 years.
Mr. Maclean: It is always helpful to have experts. My hon. Friend is a lawyer and that was the first helpful
intervention I have had from him in 20 years in the House. Although it seemed to have been given for free, no doubt we shall get a bill in due course.
Mr. Edward Leigh (Gainsborough): Is it not too hilly to play cricket in my right hon. Friend's constituency?
Mr. Maclean: I do not wish to go down that route, but we have champion cricket teams in Cumbria, and that includes my constituency. It is a pretty good team that can play cricket in the hillier areas. We do not play on the flat lands of Gainsborough.
I do not want to labour the point. Although it is good that an exemption is built into the Bill so that people who wander over someone else's land in the dead of night are prevented by the new access rules from coming close to someone's home, a distance of 66 ft, or one chain--the length of the Chamber or a cricket pitch--is inadequate. It will not reassure country people.
If I understand the Minister correctly, the exemption will not apply when a house is at the entrance or main access to the land. Open moorland is on the other side of stone walls and fences. If the main route or stile to it is beside someone's home, the 66 ft exemption will not apply. If the main access, or one of the most convenient routes of access, on to open land is 2 yd from someone's house--and may mean brushing up against its wall--the exemption will not apply and people will be allowed to get that close, which worries my constituents more than anything else.
The vast majority of my constituents who live in upland areas or on footpaths have no objection to people properly using footpaths or walking sensibly on open land or hillsides. They have no objection to people passing through their fields provided that they do not let dogs roam or leave rubbish that pollutes the area and harms their animals. My constituents' one objection is when people push right past their windows and kitchens or go through the middle of their farmyards to get on to land. That is not a rare occurrence. It happens in hundreds if not thousands of cases.
When the so-called definitive map was drawn up years ago, the footpaths on it were mostly private paths between one farm and another, between the farm and church and between the farm and the village hall. They formed a network of little paths between farm buildings, farm workers' buildings and rural communities--the school, church, pub and hall. All those private paths are now public footpaths on the definitive map. It is understandable that, in the vast majority of cases, the public are able to walk through someone's farmyard and past someone's front door when they are exercising their legitimate right to use a footpath.
We can do nothing about it now. That grave injustice was created 30 years ago. It is difficult to move a footpath out of someone's garden or backyard, or away from someone's kitchen window. When you come to Cumbria, Madam Deputy Speaker, I can take you to homes where the public footpath goes right past the kitchen, bathroom or bedroom window. With the Bill and the amendment, we are creating a new problem. We are saying that the public will not be allowed to roam all over someone's home or building and must be kept 66 ft away--unless the building happens to be situated where the public want access to land.
There is one other difficulty that always arises in my constituency in respect of access to land. If people who wished to climb mountains and hills--I try to do so a little occasionally--used the Pennine way, for example, and spread themselves out evenly over it, there would be little damage and few problems. If all the people who used the Pennine way entered it at fairly spread-out points along its route, there would be little difficulty.
The problem is that people honey-pot. They go to areas where there is a nice little village and a pub that is close to an access point to the Pennine way. The same occurs on our hills and mountains. There is a heavy traffic problem in the Lake district. It is not that the traffic is spread out everywhere: it concentrates on the small roads that give easy access to the mountains. Those idle people who wish to walk on hills, but who are not properly dressed and have no proper footwear, drive halfway up the hillside, park at someone's farm gate, in someone's yard, at the school or at the mountain rescue station and enter through the nearest convenient route. Those areas become honey pots.
Some buildings are probably situated at the convenient entrances to open land and moorland. Those are the places where people go at night to park their car and to stroll up the hillside, or they park elsewhere and enter the land, going right past someone's house. That is the difficulty with the amendment. That is why it does not go far enough. People are allowed to come too close to someone's house at night. The distance should be much more than 66 ft. Those homes should still have an exemption, even though the pathway that runs past them is an access point. They should not be penalised just because people want to walk through their garden or right past their house at two in the morning to climb a hill.
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