Wildfires

Earl of Erroll Excerpts

Thursday 12th June 2025 Grand Committee

[The Earl of Erroll (CB)]

My Lords, I often walk in the hills—I love them—and the heather, so I have frequently thought about this. In the old days, you would normally find firebreaks burned into them. The trouble is that there has been a big movement from a lot of people who do not really know much about the hills or heather, but because they did an environmental course somewhere, they reckon that all the carbon will be locked up in the peat below. However, the point about burning the heather in strips to get a firebreak is that it has to be of a sufficient width.

Two things have to be done. First, you do the burn in winter. It is a cool burn, and therefore does not burn the roots below and does not touch the peat—it must not, because you want these things to reshoot again. You then have a lot of tall rank heather in which birds can hide and, next to that, new, fresh and regenerated growth of young shoots and insect life on which the birds can feed. If a raptor comes over, it can then shoot inside the cover. That is how it works, and people have known it for years.

Interestingly enough, I was chatting to a gamekeeper on a moor who said something quite funny. Some people from the Environment Agency or somewhere had decided to come out to see the heather themselves and wanted a tour. He took them up and showed them some heather that they had burned two years earlier. There was some lovely growth, and they said, “God, this is just what we want. How can we get this? This is what we need”. He showed them the other part and asked, “Well, have you looked over here?” They said, “Oh God, that’s terrible. It’s all dark and rank, and there is no life under it at all”. What they were looking at was the effect of a proper heather burn. It encourages the wildlife and does not go down into the peat—that is the whole point.

The noble Lord, Lord Jack, mentioned the Mars bar test, which is famous because the burn would not melt one. If you put it just under the surface litter, you would see that the surface litter has not burned and nor has the Mars bar melted. That proves that it is not touching the peat. In contrast, a wildfire goes down into and burns up a lot of the peat; it will be a long time—possibly a century or two—before that is regenerated through normal peat growth.

What is being touted at the moment is completely the wrong way round, because of the lack of understanding from dogmatic people who say, “It is just about trying to shoot grouse”. It is not; it is also about maintaining the countryside, the heather and the hills.

The people who have lived and worked there for generations know what they are doing. It is about time someone listened to and took advice from them, rather than from some expert who has done a brief environmental course and borrowed a pair of green wellies to do a farm walk then writes lots of stuff about this. What they need to do is read the Game & Wildlife Conservation Trust’s work on these sorts of things because it is a charity that does its research regardless of fear or favour; basically, I recommend it to those who are trying to control these things.