Examination of Witnesses (Questions 320-339)
MR DUNCAN
GRAHAM CBE, MR
MIKE JENKINS
AND MR
LESTER WILLMINGTON
11 JUNE 2008
Q320 Chairman: To follow up on your earlier
helpful indication of the maintenance costs, have you got a feel
at all of what the initiation costs would be, if you like, once
you get the gaps filled in: how much a mile might it cost to establish?
Mr Jenkins: We have recently completed,
I think it was, about one and a half miles. The cost to establish
that new section of coastal path was £90,000. It was expensive
because it involved two footbridges. On two other sections, which
are still under negotiation, we have got figures of, I think,
about £50,000 and £10,000. If it is simple clearance,
it is not very expensive. It becomes expensive when you are starting
to do accommodation works or provide such structures as footbridges.
On the £50,000 section, a lot of that cost is going to be
accommodation work in providing a hedge or a privacy border for
properties on the route.
Q321 Sir Peter Soulsby: I want to
follow up on these two gardens, because there has been quite a
lot of discussion around the impact on people's private space
from having a linear route. I think it would be quite useful to
have some of the experience that you have there. Clearly there
are gardens, and there are gardens that are rather more substantial
than what we might normally think of as a conventional garden.
Can you give us a bit more of a flavour of what is standing in
the way here: whether it really would be an intrusion into somebody's
private space were there to be access forced through there?
Mr Jenkins: I think the term "garden"
would need to be very carefully defined. I will just give you
the two examples which I mentioned. The first is where the proposed
line for the footpath is about 50 metres from a property and it
certainly is a formal garden, its lawn goes right down to the
cliff edge, and I do not think there is any doubt that that would
be classed as a garden. On the other property it is debateable,
because the proposed line would be about 90 metres from the property.
The first part is formal lawn, so there is no doubt about that,
the next part is a woodland garden, but in the last part the landowner
has left a 10-metre wide strip which he has not improved, which
is where we were proposing to put the footpath. It is debateable
as to whether or not that would be classed as "garden",
and, obviously, it would be very easy for the landowner to carry
out some further improvement words to say, "I have now improved
that ten-metre strip and, therefore, it is garden and, therefore,
it ought to be exempt under the current proposals."
Q322 Sir Peter Soulsby: Exploring
that, in neither of those cases is it necessary to go immediately
behind somebody's kitchen window; it really is at some distance
from them. Is it true that, in both those cases, it would make
a very substantial difference to the attractiveness of the route
were there to be a way through there?
Mr Jenkins: I think both landowners
would say that is the case, and I would certainly agree with one
of the landowners: I think the distance from the property is an
important factor here. As I say, it is debateable as to whether
90 metres away from a property is regarded to be intrusion by
some people.
Q323 Mr Drew: I want to ask you a
general question, given the nature of the beautiful areas that
you represent. Do you welcome this, is this a nice little bit
of tourist enhancement, or do you see this as a pain in the backside
that is just going to make your normal difficulties with rights
of way more complicated?
Mr Jenkins: It is a very important
route to the county. Exeter University a few years ago undertook
a study and they came up with a figure that the south-west coast
path as a whole was worth about three million pounds to the south-west
economy. If I go back to 2001 when we had the foot and mouth disease
in Devon, the tourist industry had been quite severely hit as
a result. One of our primary aims was to ensure that the coast
path was open, because we know that that was a draw for tourism
to the county.
Q324 Chairman: Mr Willmington, did
you want to contribute there? I saw your mouth open and no words
came out. I felt you might want to say something.
Mr Willmington: I am sorry, yes.
Simply to observe that this is quite important in the general
health agenda as well, encouraging people to go walking, take
more exercise. We do find that it is quite important in the county
as far as public rights of way generally are concerned. Certainly
access to walking makes a contribution to the general health of
the population.
Q325 Chairman: Mr Graham, we have
not forgotten about you. Did you want to add anything?
Mr Graham: I just want to add,
Cumbria is quite different from Devon. A vast amount of the coastline
is not open or, if it is, it is very informally so—there
are not any organised trails, nothing much has grown up—so
the coming of this Act will greatly stimulate something which
ought to happen and which ought to help the tourist trade. There
are coastal towns in Cumbria, like Barrow, Workington and Maryport,
where the health agenda is a very important one, which means opening
up the coastline, not just for long-distance walkers, but for
health reasons as well.
Q326 Mr Drew: I just wonder what
the members of your authority think. Is this a hot topic or is
this something that is seen as an administrative exercise and
it is going to be done as well as you can do it? Because with
CROW, it was highly political to start with and then it was an
administrative exercise. I just wondered, is this an administrative
exercise, because there is not any real politics apart from when
it affects someone specifically in an area?
Mr Willmington: I think that this
case is quite an important political exercise as far as our members
are concerned. They have seen from bitter experience the effect
of foot and mouth in 2001, and there was a very big impact on
small and medium enterprises, particularly those associated with
tourism, and walking tourism particularly, so I think our members
generally are very supportive of the establishment and improvement
of a public rights of way network.
Q327 David Taylor: I have done a
lot of long-distance cycling coast-to-coast through Cumbria, from
Whitehaven to Tynemouth, through Yorkshire and Northumberland,
and one of the joys of that was the ease of use, the interpretation,
of maps and signs. It was all integrated by such trails. Do you
think a similar version will be necessary, to make best use of
what will be a complete coastal footpath for England, for there
to be some sort of national organisation, small though it might
be, to provide the mapping, the signage? Maybe not to provide,
but to suggest, to recommend and to monitor, rather than leaving
it to however many discrete coastal counties there are in England—probably
in the teens, I would think? Do you think that has an attraction?
Mr Graham, Cumbria in particular is criss-crossed by such trails.
Mr Graham: Yes. There is always
a danger of death by signage.
Q328 David Taylor: We do not want
to over-do it. That is a point the Ramblers' Association made
earlier.
Mr Graham: I think there is a
danger of over-badging signs. People do not care whether they
are in Cumbria or Timbuktu, they care about their countryside
and how they can get to their destination and, therefore, signage
that does that and is co-ordinated is the most important thing.
The obvious authority to do that is the local access authority
in cooperation with Natural England.
Q329 David Taylor: But if different
county councils have different standards and different access
to resources, it could be a fairly patchy picture that emerges
over a ten-year period, could it not, Mr Jenkins?
Mr Jenkins: Yes.
Q330 David Taylor: Or Mr Willmington?
Mr Willmington: I think that the
national trail has standards which are applied across the country,
but we think that sympathetic signing that is in keeping with
where the route is, is very important. It has got to be subtle,
but you need signing to keep people to the route. We also think
there is a place for some interpretation as well—that is
part of the enjoyment, whether it be cycle routes or national
trails or the coast path routes—so that people who are coming
to those routes can understand and enjoy and appreciate actually
what they are experiencing, but, again, it has to be done, not
in a widespread fashion, but in a fashion that is appropriate
for the setting and in places where it can continue to be well
maintained.
Q331 Mr Gray: Can I bring you back
to the alignment blockages and the two landowners and all that
business, the two gardens, and, indeed, to the process by which
you have established the coast path over, now, 50 years or something.
Am I right in thinking that habitually and in most places you
do pay landowners compensation for the right to have a path across
their land?
Mr Jenkins: Yes, we do. That is
the way it has been achieved so far. The coast path is subject
to slippages, coastal erosion, and we do have to realign the coast
path and, in those circumstances, we do pay landowners compensation.
Q332 Mr Gray: So it has been successful.
In these two gardens, presumably, the landowners are asking for
a price that is higher than the county are prepared to pay basically.
The 300 kilometres that you now have, supposing there had been
no compensation? Supposing 50 years ago this Act had come in and
you had said, "We are going to have this track around Devon
and, indeed, around Cornwall as well and no compensation is going
to be paid to anybody", how successful do you think the establishment
of the track would have been?
Mr Jenkins: A lot of the coast
path that we have, as I say, was established back in the 1950s.
Largely it was put into public usage, the public were using a
coastal route and it was properly recorded, so there was obviously
no compensation payment in those circumstances. It is only where
we have the missing gaps.
Mr Willmington: That is a very
difficult question to answer. Clearly, if there was enabling legislation
that would give you the provisions to establish the route without
compensation, then it would be simpler.
Q333 Mr Gray: But would it be fair?
Mr Willmington: I am sorry, I
was not commenting on the fairness or the equity of it.
Q334 Mr Gray: I am just thinking
of your two gardens, one 90 metres and the other 50 metres, you
were saying. They are people's gardens, it is their land and they
have paid for it. They have purchased their house, including their
garden which runs down to the cliff. What you are doing in Devon
is saying to that gentleman who owns that house, "We will
pay you X figure for the completion of the path across your land",
but under this Act you would just be saying, "It is going
across your garden." What do you think about that?
Mr Willmington: It depends where
you are in this debate. At the moment gardens are excepted, and
so, therefore, to create that gap in the path as it currently
exists would mean that we would have to pay compensation.
Q335 Mr Gray: But there is a difference
between Natural England and Defra. Natural England and the Ramblers'
Association were saying parks and gardens should not be excluded,
so they should be part of the Act. In other words, that these
two that you have got with the landowners currently saying, "I
do not want it across my garden because my garden goes down to
the cliff edge", all of a sudden, if Natural England and
the Ramblers' Association were to have their way, and if Defra
were to crumble under the terrible pressure from them, you just
would be able to go cross those two gardens. I am tempting you
into a political area. Perhaps I ought not to.
Q336 Chairman: I think that is a
very wise move. I think we might just curtail that element of
questioning at that juncture. We will move on. I would like to
ask you, gentlemen, if you could just turn your minds to the contribution
that local authorities could make to the question of the alignment
of the route which Natural England are going to have to come up
with and, indeed, to deal with the more sensitive area of the
question of the spreading room. What do you think you can bring
to bear from your standpoint to this exercise, and have you had
any indication from Natural England as to how you might be involved
in it? Perhaps we could start with Mr Graham.
Mr Graham: Yes, I would like to
make a slightly broader answer.
Q337 Chairman: You want spreading
room for you answer as well!
Mr Graham: Yes. In the sense that
I would involve local access forums as well as the local authority.
We introduced the largest area of open access in England in Cumbria,
and I am a survivor of that. The overall lesson was that you cannot
get the right people together early enough and discuss it enough
and find ways through. If you get people confronting each other
(and this can happen when people are not involved at the right
stage), it is horribly hard to draw them back, and there is absolutely
no substitute for local knowledge. So I think the Highway Authority,
local access forum and other organisations, are key to successful
implementation and I would strongly counsel Natural England to
involve them as partners from the outset—involve rather
than ask for comments on. I think being there from the start is
most important.
Q338 Chairman: Local access forums
are not something we have had anything to do with up until now.
Perhaps you could give us a one-minute synopsis of what one is,
who is on it, who runs it, how is it funded, how does it operate?
Mr Graham: There are 85 of them
in England. They have the vast merit that in their membership,
which is normally about 20, they have ramblers, environmentalists,
landowners, NFU, so you actually have a mini-forum of all the
people who have a keen interest in what we are talking about,
and I have a tremendous feeling of déjà vu
about parks and gardens, because when we started open access we
had all the same fears on both sides and a tendency to exaggerate
difficulties. That is for the forums, which are all volunteers.
They advise local authorities, they advise Natural England and
they advise a whole range of other people, but their primary quality
is balance. The view which comes from them is not a partisan one;
it is a collective view, a reconciled view.
Q339 Chairman: Mr Jenkins or Mr Willmington:
who would like to comment from your side?
Mr Willmington: They are funded
and supported by the local authority under the CROW Act.
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