It’s still early days for Andy Burnham, and I wish him well in a difficult job. But so far, the man who calls himself the King of the North is turning into Mr Empty. Confronted with difficult choices, he repeatedly hides behind empty gestures.
It is not just that £1,000 fake No10 door he’s had installed in his Manchester office. It is also on practical issues like preventing wildfires.
Two weeks ago, I told the Daily Mail that the Prime Minister needed to take control of wildfire prevention or lives would be lost. That same day we came too close to my fears, with 19 homes destroyed in Stourbridge in the West Midlands.
Yet, instead of addressing the real issue behind the increase in the number of wildfires, which is excess vegetation, Andy Burnham hit the panic button. Literally. He freaked out the nation by using the emergency mobile phone alarm system designed to warn us of nuclear war.
For now, thankfully, rain has stopped the fires. Yet a Prime Minister of substance would already be thinking how next year’s predicted Super El Nino – a natural climate phenomenon developing over the Pacific – could make for an even hotter summer.
He would also be asking his environment secretary, Angela Eagle, about that excess vegetation fuelling the fires – especially the huge volumes of it building up on our moorlands.
I feel passionately about this because I am surrounded by moors near my home in North Yorkshire, and I see policies dictated by Whitehall being imposed on my neighbours against their will.
For years, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) has been reducing the number of cattle and sheep in the uplands and blocked winter burning of moorland through regulations.
Yet officials never calculated how much extra vegetation this was leaving behind.
Fortunately, the Moorland Association has done the sums: less grazing means we have 25 per cent more highly flammable grass, and stopping winter burns has resulted in 74 per cent more dead heather. Hot summers turn all this into tinder.
Andy Burnham should be asking his environment secretary, Angela Eagle, about that excess vegetation fuelling the fires – especially the huge volumes of it building up on our moorlands
The result? A six-fold increase in land burnt in the UK by wildfires over the last ten years – from 24,805 hectares between 2006 and 2015 to 151,954 between 2016 and 2025.
With the climate getting hotter, we must manage vegetation. Yet inside Planet Defra, officials don’t get this. They claim rewilding reduces wildfires. Clearly, the flames haven’t realised.
Firefighters have though. Last year, the National Fire Chiefs Council warned Defra’s restrictions threatened the lives of ‘firefighters and the public’.
The truth is Defra is isolated on this – it has become Nobby No-Mates. All those who understand the issue are in favour of winter burns. The G7, the EU and the White House back them. So does the Scottish Government. And science keeps showing that winter burns do not dry out peat – one of the core reasons for Defra’s near total ban on them. Researchers at York University found burns paradoxically make the soil wetter because burning reduces the amount of vegetation, so less water is drawn out of the ground by plants. It is rewilding, in other words, that dries the peat.
This month scientists at Exeter reported that peat also survives wildfires much better on areas where the vegetation has been kept short by winter burns.
Defra’s key evidence for its burning ban came in a peer-reviewed paper by Natural England published in 2025. Yet Freedom of Information requests have established that one of the reviewers of that paper admitted he could not ‘pretend to have read it end to end’. Another said their ‘brain could not keep track’. I find that gobsmacking. But Defra declared its evidence ‘rigorous’.
Even Defra’s own officials wrote a paper in 2007 saying stopping winter burns would produce ‘a much increased risk’ of wildfires. Which is exactly what happened.
Defra is now being mugged by reality. Yet it would feel hideously embarrassed to admit it has been wrong for so long.
And so Defra keeps on imposing rewilding on the North of England as if we were one of its colonial outposts. Ministers parrot the line that winter burns ‘damage’ peat, even though research emphatically says they do not, because the heat never reaches the peat.
Furthermore, if Whitehall wants to protect peat, why does its winter burning ban not cover peat in the South and East of England?
I believe it’s because the Establishment Blob hates the game shooting that takes place on the moors in the North. And the chief haters are in the RSPB. They love rewilding and are relentless in their attempts to undermine shooting.
If you had a suspicious mind you might think that’s because the RSPB is jealous of the vast number of birds thriving on Northern moors where gamekeepers protect them from foxes. Those moors have seen a 61 per cent increase in black grouse in the North Pennines in the last year and there are twice as many curlews on managed moorland in Teesdale as on unmanaged.
The RSPB can’t keep up and so stopped publishing its annual table of bird numbers in 2012. But I have seen the raw data and it shows the charity’s black grouse numbers fell 38 per cent over recent years, with ring ouzel and golden plover also sharply lower.
There is also the sad irony of how the charity’s obsession with rewilding is seeing its reserves going up in smoke. And it is my gamekeeper mates who have to put out the RSPB’s fires to stop them spreading onto their land. The RSPB’s wildfire crisis is so bad that hundreds of professional firefighters were needed to put out three fires on their reserves – in Suffolk, the Peak District and in Scotland – this year.
Every time the RSPB persuades gullible ministers to tighten the noose around the North’s rural businesses, the result is more rural depopulation with more unprotected areas. That is why the RSPB’s current attempt to hoodwink ministers into licensing shooting is so important.
The RSPB wants pheasant, partridge and grouse shooting choked by Whitehall. Jumped-up officials in London would close shoots on a whim. These mandarins cannot relate to Northerners who love bagging supper and love looking after their moors.
The North has to fight the Blob. And you don’t get more blobby than Oxford PPE graduates. Angela Eagle is one of them. Knowing her department is under the cosh, she wrote an article in The Guardian last week claiming that rewilding helps reduce wildfires.
Ms Eagle did not quote a single piece of scientific research. The only ‘proof’ she could offer that her approach works was a photo of a river valley at the National Trust’s Holnicote estate in Somerset that stayed green over summer. Breaking news: trees grow near rivers.
Another Oxford PPE graduate is the Energy Secretary. Miatta Fahnbulleh’s plan for the North’s moors is to carpet them with 200 metre-tall wind turbines.
So Andy Burnham has some decisions to make. He has four weeks to decide on allowing preventative burns – the upland burning season begins on October 1 – or risk another winter in which vegetation will just keep growing and form next year’s tinderbox.
Will he side with the Whitehall Blob? Or the North he professes to love? Will his legacy be dead firefighters and turning our moorlands into industrial landscapes? Or will he leave the empty gestures behind and get Whitehall out of the way of the North so we can flourish again?
- Lord Botham is an independent crossbench peer
