This year is the 75th anniversary of our national parks. Following wartime privations, the forward-looking vision for the new parks was to preserve the natural beauty of the landscape and allow the nation, especially city dwellers, to enjoy nature and the outdoors as part of a “natural health service”.

The major threat to our countryside was seen as urbanisation, so parks were given strong planning protections. This has been successful, with less than 2% of land in the parks being built on.

However, in those early days before the intensification of agriculture and the use of chemical fertilisers and pesticides, the future decline of nature was not foreseen, and wildlife protections were overlooked.

The parks we inherit today provide access to 90 million people a year, and in surveys, visitors overwhelmingly support more wildlife in our parks. But sadly, they are in poor ecological shape, supporting no more wildlife than the wider farmed landscape. The wildness of our national parks that visitors come to enjoy is largely illusory.

In other countries, governments own and manage the land in national parks. Our parkland is privately owned, and the national park authorities own very little land on our behalf. In Dartmoor National Park, just 7% of land is publicly owned. Even common land belongs to large landowners, with commoners only holding grazing rights. The challenge today is how to reconcile the interests of landowners, commoners and visitors with nature recovery.

In its heyday, upland farming combined summertime grazing on the uplands with moving animals to the lowlands in winter and for fattening. Wool provided a good income. Today, the exposed climate, wet soils and short growing season mean that upland farming is unprofitable, and farming businesses cannot survive without public funding.

The Fursdon Review commissioned by Defra found that the average Dartmoor farm business made a loss of £10,400 and was paid £32,600 in basic payments and agri-environment payments in the farming year 2022-23.

At no more cost to the public purse, farmers and commoners could be paid through agri-environment payments to manage stock at numbers consistent with conservation grazing and

environmental goals, while supplying small quantities of high-quality meat – in other words, public money for the public good of nature recovery.

The Fursdon Review called for a new Dartmoor Land Use Management Group to oversee reforms for nature recovery. So it is disappointing that its newly appointed Independent Chair is Chief Executive of the National Sheep Association, Phil Stocker, who seems unlikely to drive such reform to benefit nature.

Discussing his appointment on the Farming Today programme, Mr Stocker lamented that, “in upland flocks, sheep numbers [are] being driven down through agri-environment schemes … and carbon credit schemes and biodiversity net gain mean the sheep industry is losing access to land”.

In the words of the Fursdon Review, “The climate emergency and the alarming decline in biodiversity set out in the recent State of Nature report means that we can’t afford to wait any longer. The way Dartmoor is managed needs to change radically and urgently to address these issues.”