Natural England

As someone who grew up in Ireland and has worked most of her career in Wales, I am particularly clear how potent a symbol the coastline is for the English.  Once it was the launch pad of a great maritime empire.  More recently it was a place that ordinary folk stood ready to defend to the death against what must at times have seemed insuperable odds during those dark days of the 1940s.

Indeed, the current drive to improve coastal access has its clear origins in that era.  The Attlee Government that took up the reins after the War was clearly focused on giving something back to those who had so resolutely safeguarded the nation against invasion and occupation.  The conclusion was - what better than to give them legal rights to enjoy their own countryside.  And so it was that the National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act of 1949 was conceived. 

For all of its many achievements, the 1949 Act eventually stopped short of delivering the general access rights that had been planned, preferring instead to make provision for local agreements and orders, and for the recording of existing public rights of way.  But that postwar drive to create clear and unequivocal public rights over land has remained a strong political theme in the intervening years. 

Such rights were of course finally delivered over our mountains, moors, heaths and downs a couple of years ago, with the implementation of Part 1 of the Countryside and Rights of Way Act 2000.  I recall that there were all manner of dire prophecies about how life as we knew it would come to an end if such rights were created.  In fact, it has all worked out rather well on the ground.  People have the security of knowing they can use these areas, but the damage that was predicted to land management and privacy has simply not materialised. 

So to those who approach this debate about coastal access with questions like “Where is the public demand for this?”, or “How can it be right to impose public rights over people’s private land?”, I respectfully suggest that they are missing the point.  The point is that it is not unreasonable for an island race to have access to its own coastline. 

The Secretary of State recently made a rather balder assertion than that.  He said this: “Land – even private land – is a public good, and we should assert our right to enjoy it.  It should be accessible to all.”  However people may feel about that assertion – I sense it may not fully find favour with everyone in this room – it is one that perhaps rings truest of all on our coastline.

So how can it be that as citizens of this country we do not already have such rights along the coast?  That is a very good question, to which there does not appear to be any very good answer.  The closest people ever came to having such general rights confirmed was in 1821, when the Court of Appeal considered the issue in a landmark judgment in the case of Blundell v. Caterall.  The Court was so alarmed at the prospect of men and women bathing in uncontrolled proximity to each other that it ruled that no legal right to use beaches or the foreshore had been established by the centuries of actual human use that had actually taken place. 

As so often happens, one of the judges disagreed with this conclusion.  “Free access to the sea”, he said, “is a privilege too important to Englishmen to be left dependent on the interest or caprice of any description of persons.”  But his fellow judges did not share this belief and incredibly, their unease about men and women becoming reprobate should they be given rights to walk on the same beach continues to bind our law today – which recognises no secure or consistent right for the English public to use and enjoy their coastline.  Whereas in Scotland, of course, people have already been granted such rights as part of a much wider-ranging piece of land law reform. 

In relation to the sea, there is no such distinction.  The public in England enjoy the same rights as the Scots to take a boat to sea, or to fish in it.  The law allows them to exploit the sea’s natural resources - for food or for profit – but not to stroll down to the waves for a paddle with the children, or take an evening walk along the cliff to drink in the sea views.  There is something rather puzzling about that distinction. 

So we at Natural England warmly welcome the Government’s manifesto commitment to tackle this situation.  The time has come to make a legal reality of the access that people already have to many parts of the coast – and to open up those parts that at present they cannot enjoy at all, or where their access is so constrained as to be unpleasant or unsafe. 

We are confident that the needs of wildlife can be fully taken into account by this process, and indeed we want to see the environmental quality of our wonderful coastline improved still further, both for its own sake and because that will directly add to people’s enjoyment.  Indeed, what is being proposed on the coast symbolises more vividly than any other single initiative what Natural England has been created to do – to join up the various parts of our business (the access work; the protection and enhancement of wildlife, landscape and heritage features; the creative use of agri-environment schemes; working closely with local people; sustainable development; environmental education; and so on), so that together all of these elements become much greater than the sum of the parts.  And the Government’s coastal vision is very well summarised in its own published vision statement: 

“A coastal environment where rights to walk along the length of the English coast lie within a wildlife and landscape corridor that offers enjoyment, understanding of the natural environment and a high quality experience; and is managed sustainably in the context of a changing coastline.”

Government asked Natural England for detailed advice on how best to deliver this top-level outcome, which it suggested consists of three component outcomes:
Firstly, secure access along the length of the English coastline, accepting that this may be subject to some exceptions.
Secondly, a more accessible coastline, by creating physical routes to access the coast from inland, and by encouraging more people to enjoy the coast.
Thirdly, improvements for coastal wildlife and the landscape, as well as encouraging people to enjoy and understand this environment.

To inform our advice, we undertook a detailed programme of research and investigation into the underlying facts.  This included work on the relative costs of different options, on demand, and on the position in other European countries, as well as a large amount of data analysis and case study work, and extensive discussions with interested groups both nationally and locally.  A clear overall picture emerged from this factfinding:

• The coast is enormously popular - for beach activities and wider forms of recreation, for enjoying nature or scenery, for walking along the coast.  In 2005 there were 72 million trips to the undeveloped coast, and 174 million to seaside towns.  And our research shows that walking along the coast is even more popular with the public than beach activities. 
• Coastal access can bring huge economic benefit. Experience with existing National Trails shows this. The South West Coast Path, for example, puts some £300m a year into the local economy – it breathes life into the towns and villages all along the way, keeping vital services open for business for both visitors and residents alike.
• But people’s current use of the coast is through a mixture of legal rights, other long term arrangements (such as National Trust ownership), short term permissions, and the many situations where people just walk along sections of coast in places where they know this has been possible in the past, or where they see others doing it.
• Our best estimate is that some 30% of the English coast lacks any secure access rights at all for the public, and a further 20% has a jumble of different access rights that fail to join up properly with each other, that create an unpleasant or unsafe experience, or that are physically unusable – for example because of erosion, slumping ground, or lack of infrastructure such as bridges or steps. 
• My Chairman summed up the problem pretty well when he recalled being struck on a particular coastal walk by how many people were coming the other way.  After about five miles, he found out why.  There was a barbed-wire fence, and everybody he had met was on their way back. 

So what has Natural England recommended to Government?

In a nutshell, we concluded that none of the existing mechanisms – new rights of way, or an extension of CROW rights (under section 3 of that Act), or short-term voluntary improvements through Environmental Stewardship etc – none of these could deliver on the Government’s ambitious outcomes for coastal access.  They could not create the right mix of national momentum with local delivery and design, and they could not future proof the access against the coastal change that is so evident in so many parts of the country. 

So we have advised Government to legislate to create an approach that combines the best features of the existing mechanisms.  Of course, Defra’s consultation paper, to be published next Tuesday, seeks views on all of these options, and Government will then decide how to proceed.  But let me give you a flavour of why we think our approach makes best sense.  

The legislation would give Natural England flexible new powers to align a suitable corridor of access land around the coast that people could enjoy with confidence and certainty.  In some places the access land would be relatively narrow and linear in form; in others it would include wider areas such as headlands, viewpoints or uncultivated land en route. 

We would aim to involve the local authority fully in the process of identifying this coastal access land – our default would be to ask them to undertake much of the detailed work themselves, and we would fund this involvement.  We would take full account of local circumstances, and consult with local interests including the land managers and the local access forum.  And we would concentrate our efforts on fixing what is broken.  Where existing access is secure and works well, with appropriate spreading room along the way, there would be nothing to fix. 

The whole process would be conducted in accordance with a statutory methodology approved for the purpose by the Secretary of State.  This would set out more detail about our approach to identifying the access land around the coast.  We suggest that there should be scope for appeal by the legal interests in land if what we actually did was at odds with what this Methodology says. 

A fundamental feature of the new legislation would be that particular sections of access corridor - and the associated public rights over them - should be capable of ‘rolling back’ automatically with any erosion that occurs in the future.  Equally, though, our local alignment approach would make it possible to provide detours in the most appropriate way to avoid obstructions such as coastal developments, and to ensure there is no adverse impact on key nature conservation sites.

High quality management of the resulting access is a key part of our vision.  Depending on the terrain, a specific path might be managed along the access corridor, to reinforce people’s confidence and certainty and ensure safe and convenient access.  There would be basic visual signals to enable people to walk around the coast without having to rely on maps.  Any necessary establishment works would be undertaken to physically implement the route, for example by the installation of bridges, steps, new gates or path drainage.  Again we see local authorities playing a key role in all of this, with suitable funding – and hopefully using local farmers and agricultural contractors to undertake the work wherever this is practicable. 

This is by any standards a big programme of work.  We envisage that there would be a ten year implementation period once the legislation was in place, and we estimate that the annual cost during this period would average about £5m.  And we think every penny would be money well spent to implement something on this scale that would be of such historic significance for the nation. 

Finally, a word about two thorny issues: compensation and liability. 

Our advice to Government is that it should adopt a working presumption against paying compensation for new access.  In the end, as I said earlier, it is not unreasonable that the people of an island race should be allowed to walk around their own coastline.  But I would emphasise that decisions about how access should work on any particular stretch of coast would be taken at the local level, after careful discussion with land managers and local interests to minimise any impact on other land uses.  Clearly we would not be in the business of forcing new access through people’s back gardens.

As to liability, we have recommended that as on CROW access land, the occupier should owe even less liability to members of the public than he would currently to a trespasser.  In particular, there should be no liability at all for accidents resulting from natural features such as unguarded cliffs.  In the end, it would be for users of the new coastal access rights to keep themselves, and their children, safe within what can be a dangerous environment.
Conclusion
As a society we have come a long way since 1821 - the year Napoleon died.  So it is perhaps surprising that coastal access rights in England remain much as the Court of Appeal declared them to be that year.  Of course, there have been some major steps forward – one thinks of the South West Coast Path for example – but even those have struggled to resolve the knottiest access problems locally and to provide consistently secure, comfortable, safe, and sustainable access around the coast.   

I now detect a real enthusiasm among most interested organisations for bringing coastal access into the 21st Century – and for delivering parallel environmental benefits by building on the excellent work of Environmental Stewardship and its forerunners.  The coast provides the ideal place to engage people with the natural world and enable them to marvel at the wonders of the marine environment.  They can do this in a way that sits comfortably alongside other land uses, and that brings real and lasting economic benefit to coastal communities.   At Natural England we are truly excited by the challenge before us. 

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