Dartmoor – commonly badly managed

This blog provides background to our legal challenge of the Dartmoor Commoners’ Council – see previous blogs here (22 July) and here (30 August).

The background to our legal challenge is that the UK has signed up to having 30% of our land area protected for wildlife by 2030 – that’s not far away. Dartmoor is, in theory, a protected area already but it is widely acknowledged that it is underperforming in terms of protecting the natural beauty and wildlife of this area. A range of bodies ought to be ensuring that Dartmoor’s wildlife prospers including Natural England (NE), its parent department Defra (Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs), the Dartmoor National Park Authority and a few others too.

This is Dartmoor;

Much of the land which is of high nature conservation importance is also common grazing land which would be fine if those areas were in good condition for wildlife but they are not. NE has assessed these and other areas as part of its routine work. Last year we published a Wild Justice report, A Site for Sore SSSIs, which criticised NE for not keeping those assessments up to date (partly because of government cuts to budgets) and criticised Defra for those cuts and for the state of allegedly protected wildlife sites across England – click here for the report.

The NE assessments of the state of the land which makes up the SAC land can be represented as follows:

All those red and orange areas are in poor condition and aren’t getting better, even the dark green shaded areas are in poor condition and there would be long discussions about whether they are really recovering (we won’t get into that here). Only the pale green areas are in Favourable condition and they, as you can see, make up a very small proportion of the total upland area.

When we tell you that all of the red and amber areas are common grazing land, and disproportionately high proportions of the dark green areas are also common land, whereas, very strikingly, the areas in good condition are disproportionately NOT common land, you’ll realise that the finger is pointing strongly at common land management as the key to getting Dartmoor habitats back into good condition.

This isn’t really a great surprise, but the very, very strong link between an area being common land and it being in poor ecological condition surprised us by its magnitude.

What’s going wrong on common land? The simple answer is overgrazing, although this is sometimes denied, particularly by those who are doing the overgrazing. Have a look at these two NE blog posts which spell out that overgrazing, particularly by sheep, and particularly in winter, is the cause of habitat damage – click here and here.

The latest of those blogs by NE’s David Slater states:

During the winter when grass availability is reduced sheep will browse the new growth of heather and bilberry. This grazing pressure will, over time, lead to a sharp decline in heather cover. [short passage omitted here to which we will return below] …  In some areas our monitoring data suggests that heather cover has reduced from 25% to 1% over recent years. This data does, however, show that small heather shoots are present across much of the site – albeit in a fragile state and restoration would be possible with the right grazing management in place.

There is a phrase often used about grazing on Dartmoor along the lines of ‘The problem with vegetation management on Dartmoor is as much one of under-grazing as over-grazing’. This is true to an extent but can be very misleading. The intensive management of many areas of Dartmoor in the past (the 1980s and 1990s), was aimed at creating grazing for high densities of sheep. This involved burning (to encourage growth of more palatable and young vegetation) with high sheep numbers. These measures harmed the existing vegetation and provided the conditions for one particular grass, Purple Moor Grass, to flourish.

Sheep do not readily graze Purple Moor Grass but cattle will, in the spring and early summer, and so a common remedy for overgrazing of the previous vegetation by sheep is to instigate (often reintroduce) summer grazing of such areas by cattle. This gives rise to the remark about undergrazing being an issue – in other words, it usually applies to cattle grazing and rarely applies to sheep grazing moorland. That is why the short passage we omitted from David Slater’s blog (above, to aid clarity of his main point) reads;

The impact of sheep on heathland vegetation is further compounded by the over dominance of purple moor-grass (Molinia) from a lack of summer grazing by cattle and historic drainage. As purple moor-grass is unpalatable during the winter this results in the sheep grazing being concentrated on the drier heathland habitats further compounding the damaging impact of winter sheep grazing.

A main cause of Unfavourable condition of Dartmoor’s important wildlife sites is overgrazing and associated management. Who should be sorting this out? NE clearly has a major role because it has responsibility for the state of the protected areas. We think NE has been feeble in exercising its powers to enforce the right management practices on these wildlife sites. Instead it has tried, and we recognise that it really has tried, to negotiate voluntary agreements with land managers to reduce overgrazing. Instead of using a stick, it has offered carrots in the form of public payments (from your taxes) for better management. The trouble is that all too often those taking the carrots have given NE an ultimatum that they will take the carrots but they don’t want to go as far with reducing overgrazing as NE thought necessary. This was when it was time to wield a stick, we say. Things came to a head last year when, correctly (in our opinion), NE announced that it couldn’t renew management agreements because those agreements weren’t working – good for NE! There was a big hoo-ha, NE was criticised by local MPs, a review was called and it was decided that a talking shop would be set up. That doesn’t sound like progress to us.

What has been ignored by almost everyone, is the role of the Dartmoor Commoners’ Council (DCC) – our proposed Defendant in our legal challenge.

The DCC is a very unusual body, we don’t think any other National Park has an equivalent body. The DCC was set up by Parliament in the Dartmoor Commons Act 1985 following widespread public concerns about excessive over stocking and poor animal care on the commons – you can look at the legislation here (it is pretty clear but some of it is written in very technical legalese that is unfamiliar to most of us).

The DCC was set up in order to maintain and promote ‘proper standards of livestock husbandry’, amongst other things, and it is clear that the drafters of the legislation, and therefore Parliament, had in mind ensuring that over-grazing did not occur. Part III of the Act, entitled ‘Regulation of the Commons’,  states;

‘Subject to this Act it will be the duty of the Commoners’ Council to take such steps as appear to them to be necessary and reasonably practicable for the maintenance of the commons and the promotion of proper livestock husbandry thereon (including the assessment of the number of animals which can properly be depastured on the commons from time to time) and in discharging that duty the Commoners’ Council shall have regard to the conservation and enhancement of the natural beauty of the commons‘. [Emphasis added in bold by us].

Later in Section III (section 5.1.a.ii) the Act states that;

The Commoners’ Council shall make regulations to ensure that the commons are not overstocked and, for that purpose, may fix or provide for the fixing of the number of animals or animals of any description which from time to time may be depastured on the commons by way of right of commons or of any other right or privilege. [Emphasis added in bold by us].

The wording of this act of parliament makes clear that DCC was set up with overstocking in mind. Parliament would have been well aware of the concept of the ‘tragedy of the commons’ where if people have unlimited access to a finite common resource (for example fish stocks) then the likelihood is that they will overexploit the resource to the detriment of all. The solution to such unwelcome outcomes is either voluntary restraint (which suffers from the free-loader problem (where it is always in the selfish short-term interest of an individual to exploit the restraint of others by continuing to overexploit the resource) or wise regulation. It appears to Wild Justice that the 1985 Act envisaged DCC as a source of wise regulation. However, the composition of DCC is largely, as the name suggests, commoners, and they arguably are the vested interest with most to gain in the short term from the absence of wise regulation.

Our legal challenge seeks to make DCC do the job that Parliament intended. On its website the DCC claims that the under the Dartmoor Commons Act 1985 ‘the Dartmoor Commoners’ Council was established to represent the commoners‘ among other things. We don’t see those words, or those sentiments in the actual legislation.