10 minute read
The Glover Report and its impact on national parks
By Pamela Morris and Alison Barnes
Pamela Morris is Senior Landscape Officer at the Exmoor National Park Authority.
Alison Barnes is CEO of the New Forest National Park Authority and a Fellow of the Landscape Institute.
In September 2019, the Glower review of England's designated landscapes delivered its findings. Seventy years have passed since the first National Parks were created, and the review calls for a dramatic transformation in how designated landscapes deliver for climate, nature and people.
The review was commissioned by then Secretary of State Michael Gove but produced by an independent panel led by writer Julian Glover, who travelled the country learning about what works and what can be improved in the management of and access to our national landscapes, including National Parks and Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AONBs).
The Landscape Institute submitted a series of recommendations (2) to protect designated landscapes’ original purpose, and to maximise public benefit – many of these were adopted by the review.
The report argues, among other things, for:
• Exploring a potential National Landscape Service to defragment and improve efficiency in the landscape protection system
• Reforming National Park governance, and appointing Boards that are smaller, more expert and more representative of wider society
• Encouraging a wider range of nondesignated protected landscapes (citing the East Midlands’s National Forest and London’s National Park City initiative)
• Designated landscapes to lead the response to the climate crisis and decline in biodiversity, and on Nature Recovery Networks
• A partnership with farming that promotes natural recovery and de-emphasises intensification
• The use of Environmental Land Management (ELM) plans to work with landowners to develop longterm, landscape-scale strategies to improve natural capital in designated landscapes
• Designated landscapes to do more to encourage new visitors, particularly those from minority backgrounds (citing the Mosaic model for engaging BAME communities in National Parks, which continues still)
The review has largely been met with optimism across the sector but there remain concerns about how these changes will be implemented and particularly about how a National Landscape Service will function and whether it will be sufficiently resourced.
Following the Glover review, the team at DEFRA have been working to implement the recommendations with ongoing engagement of stakeholders. Of particular interest to the government is the idea of a National Landscape Service. Despite all the other workstreams ongoing at DEFRA, progress is being made and many changes will come in the near future. Exploring how this might impact designated landscapes is vital to enable robust forward-planning and delivery.
Exmoor National Park
Exmoor National Park, at 692 km², is one of the smallest National Parks, but packs in a highly distinctive and diverse landscape. A rich mosaic of moorland, farmland, woodland and coast, intersected by a network of rivers and streams, and interspersed by small scale settlements – all the result of centuries of human activity.
In the review, Exmoor National Park received several special mentions under the topics of natural beauty, nature-friendly farming, natural capital principles and nature restoration. But it’s widely accepted that more needs to be done to enable National Parks to deliver on many of the big issues of our time, such as nature recovery, climate change, and the health and wellbeing of all.
Key challenges for Exmoor include: sustainable farm and land management to enrich biodiversity and support climate action; achieving greater visitor and board diversity; and continuing to maintain the beauty and special character of the landscape in the face of ongoing uncertainty over climate change, Brexit, Government funding for National Parks, and now a global pandemic.
Burrow Farm Engine House, Exmoor
© Keith Trueman
With 56% of land in the National Park in active farm management, ENPA sees the Government’s new Environmental Land Management Scheme as pivotal for delivering at scale for nature recovery, a healthy environment and landscape beauty on Exmoor. We are working with stakeholders and communities to test how this might align with National Park purposes to deliver multiple benefits and help sustain our rural economy.
The Exmoor Ambition, developed by ENPA and the Exmoor Hill Farming Network in 2018, outlined a transformative proposal for sustaining and enhancing our farmed landscapes and communities following Brexit, by incentivising all the public goods provided by the countryside.
This was followed by work undertaken by the Exmoor Society on the study “Towards a Register of Exmoor’s Natural Capital”, importantly recognising the value and interrelationship of both the natural and cultural assets in the National Park context.
Heddons Mouth
© N Stone
These approaches jointly led to the Defra Test and Trial that ENPA is running with farmers and foresters across Exmoor, engaging with landholders on both an individual holding and strategic landscape-scale basis. Delivering on the ambitions set out in the 25 Year Environment Plan and the Landscapes Review, a key focus of this work is to explore how to engage and gain support from those owners and tenants on whose land these measures would need to take place. Of particular significance for Exmoor in this trial is the approach by ENPA to address the economic values (by costing natural capital investment) and perceptual values (by recognising the distinctive cultural qualities) of the National Park’s landscape.
To help achieve a healthy and natural environment across Exmoor, ENPA adopted its draft “Nature Recovery Vision” in November 2020, kickstarting a process of wider consultation seeking to agree the key changes to land management needed to deliver on nature recovery, carbon capture and flood resilience within the National Park, and contributing to positive change in the wider landscape.
Employing the same landscapescale approach of our Test and Trial pilot, this vision seeks to agree the land management principles needed to deliver transformative benefits for nature and climate. All this must be achieved while retaining the cultural, historic and aesthetic qualities that people most value about our National Parks.
Using increased woodland cover as an example, guiding the provision of substantial new tree planting to support climate change targets will require engagement and joint working, including reassessment of the current land uses, existing special qualities and landscape characteristics of the National Park. To achieve holistic and long-term benefit for all, change, collaboration and compromise will be required by all stakeholders. There is also a need to anticipate unintended consequences arising from positive actions undertaken.
The Landscapes Review highlighted the establishment of our National Parks 70 years ago as a healing space for all, following the Second World War. The ongoing impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic have seen that passion for our National Parks and green spaces reignited in unexpected new ways that we are still working to understand. This year, Exmoor has attracted new audiences which we have welcomed and embraced, whilst also seeking to rise to the new challenges and frictions this has created. Moving forward, and very much in the spirit of Glover, we need to continue to encourage and provide for first time visitors, recognising the importance of this ‘breathing space’ to all our communities and the nation for our collective health and wellbeing. The chance to experience and benefit from all that Exmoor offers – its remoteness, wildness, tranquillity and the magic of its dark night skies – is a true national treasure that needs to be open to all.
Punchbowl Pan
© N Stone
New Forest National Park Authority
As the Landscape Institute celebrated its 90th birthday last year, we also celebrated the 70th anniversary of the National Park movement, when Parliament made the bold decision to protect the finest landscapes in England and Wales. With any anniversary comes a period of reflection, and during this time, Glover’s review of protected landscapes was launched.
As a National Park Authority, we welcome the review’s call to reignite the fire and vision which brought protected landscapes into being in 1949. The landmark report, placing landscape at the forefront of the Government’s 25 Year Environment Plan, is being underpinned by statute, including through the Environment Bill and Agriculture Act. This is a critical moment for the landscape profession.
We are well placed to apply our experience and practice with renewed focus and purpose to respond to the Glover Report. And, in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic and climate and biodiversity emergencies, our skills will be crucial in driving the ‘Green Industrial Revolution’ announced by the Prime Minister this November.
One of Glover’s key proposals was to make protected landscapes ‘for everyone’. When national parks were founded, they were integral to the nation’s approach to health and wellbeing for all, together with another post war movement – the National Health Service – supporting the nation’s rehabilitation in the aftermath of World War Two.
Completed work to restore wetland streams near Wootton.
© New Forest National Park Authority
During COVID-19, we’re starting to recognise these crucial links afresh. In the past few months, an unprecedented number of visitors to the New Forest National Park has shown just how much being out in nature improves people’s quality of life. At the same time, engendering care and understanding among those discovering our landscapes anew is vital.
As an organisation, we’re working on these parallel ‘care’ missions of restoring both nature and ourselves. National parks connecting through to green spaces in cities are at the centre of our vision for a ‘Natural Health Service’. This year in the New Forest, we’ve worked with the Clinical Commissioning Group, the NHS and New Forest District Council to develop how people can be ‘socially prescribed’ for spending time in nature or helping nature in the New Forest. We’re also addressing the twin challenges of the climate and natural emergencies by championing natural solutions. One of the keys to nature recovery is to make landscapes bigger, better and interconnected – working with our partners to create and manage the unique heathlands, wetlands, woodlands and wider habitats of the New Forest, and to build resilience to climate change.
Volunteers hedgelaying in the New Forest.
© New Forest National Park Authority
The landscape profession can articulate this through developments, ideas, and shaping policy such as the proposed new Government planning reforms which underline the importance of design and beauty. The Glover recommendations acknowledge the importance of design quality and bringing collective skills to bear – both in protected landscapes and beyond. Joining up and crossing borders is something we’ve embraced locally through the cross-sector Green Halo Partnership, which we initiated in 2016 with the aim of being a global exemplar of precious landscapes working in harmony with a thriving economy and community.
Alongside our planning services, our land management expertise is a vital way to affect change, delivering access, biodiversity and health benefits to our communities. It will be key to any new environmental schemes implemented once we leave the European Union, and will help focus public money on ‘public goods’ as mandated in the Agriculture Act.
The unique practice of commoning, where owned livestock is turned out to graze, has shaped the New Forest landscape for centuries. It’s supported through initiatives such as the Verderers of the New Forest “Higher Level Stewardship” scheme and the National Lottery Heritage Fund’s “Our Past, Our Future” landscape partnership scheme. These are great examples of partnership working at landscape scale which deliver the best for the Forest, wildlife and people.
The nation’s Green Industrial Revolution needs professional skills and an understanding of place and design, and as such the door has been opened to all landscape professionals to step forward to drive change and shape place through important landscape-led projects. As Glover said, “we need our finest landscapes to be places of natural beauty which look up and outwards to the nation they serve. In essence, we’ve asked not ‘what do national landscapes need?’, but ‘what does the nation need from them today?’”.
We need to grasp this opportunity to be the leaders in this mission, not only using our expertise, but inspiring others to think in different ways and deliver for the future, ultimately leaving a better environment for the next generation than the one we inherited.
A man uses horsepower to clear logs in this working woodlands scene.
© New Forest National Park Authority
References
1https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/ uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/ file/833726/landscapes-review-final-report.pdf
2https://landscapewpstorage01.blob.core.windows. net/www-landscapeinstitute-org/2019/06/ glover-review-designated-landscapes-li-finalresponse-20181218.pdf
