Before I call Freddie van Mierlo to move the motion, I remind other hon. Members that they can speak in this debate only if they have the prior permission of the mover and the Minister, and they have told the Chair. As no one has told the Chair, I presume no one else wants to speak. Of course, interventions are possible.
That this House has considered the condition of national trails.
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mr Betts. National trails are the less well-known but no less important friend of national parks and national landscapes. They deliver significant benefits by improving access to nature, as well as for health and the economy. However, due to their low profile, national trails have been an easy target for cuts. Funding remained flat for the decade from 2013, resulting in a 30% real-terms cut. Although funding began to rise with inflation in 2023, no account has been taken of that lost decade.
There are 16 national trails across the UK, which have more than 309 million visits every year. They provide access to nature, often just a stone’s throw away from people’s houses. They are treasured assets for walking, horse riding, running and cycling. Unlike some other countryside rights of way, they are extremely well signposted, making them more navigable to those less familiar with the countryside.
I congratulate the hon. Member on bringing this debate forward. I spoke to him beforehand. Northern Ireland stands apart from the rest of the United Kingdom in that it does not have a formal national trail system. What we do have is the Ulster Way, a 636-mile walk across the six counties of Northern Ireland. However, there are issues about signposting, overgrown paths and access. Does the hon. Member agree that these beautiful scenic walks need to be protected and that we need to work closely with the relevant agencies to maintain upkeep?
The hon. Member is right to point out concerns about the upkeep of the Ulster Way. I thank him for bringing that route to our attention; I look forward to perhaps walking it myself one day.
National trails tend to be far more accessible for people with disabilities due to additional work that takes place to replace stiles with gates and improve the standards of paths for wheelchairs users. For these reasons and more, the great British public appreciate the trails, and so does our economy. The combined economic impact of national trails totals £1.8 billion, and the contribution to health every year is £300 million through savings to the NHS.
In my constituency of Henley and Thame, we are lucky to have two national trails—the Thames Path and the Ridgeway.
The River Thames arises in my constituency, and hence the Thames Path does too. As well as providing a beautiful walking route, it offers a valuable corridor for wildlife. Does my hon. Friend agree that funding the Thames Path adequately is essential if we are to protect habitats, contribute to biodiversity targets and preserve the natural beauty of South Cotswolds?
My hon. Friend is right to point out the opportunity that exists in leveraging national trails for the improvement of biodiversity and meeting the Government’s biodiversity goals. I will come on to that a bit later.
I am going to focus on the two trails in my constituency: the Thames Path and the Ridgeway. As we have heard, the Thames Path begins in the Cotswolds. It enters my constituency at Benson, before darting across the river into Wallingford, and then crossing the river again and coming into Henley and Thame at Goring. From there, it makes its way into the beautiful village of Whitchurch-on-Thames before paying a visit to Reading and then onwards to my home town of Henley-on-Thames.
My hon. Friend makes a point about the urban settlements that the trails go through. I have three trails in my constituency—the Pennine Way, the Pennine Bridleway and the Coast to Coast Path. They go through beautiful countryside, of course, but places like Orton, Shap and Kirkby Stephen benefit hugely from people walking through them. Does my hon. Friend agree that it is right that there should be good services and facilities in those places? I mention that in particular because of the current threat in Shap to close the public loos. Does he agree that local councils, both at parish and district level, should do everything in their power to maintain these services for local people and for all the walkers?
My hon. Friend is right to point out the importance of services along these well-loved routes. He is also right to highlight that national trails are accessible from urban areas, which makes them particularly special compared with national parks and landscapes.
Walkers are currently forced to deviate from the Thames Path at both Benson and Henley. While the weir project is progressing in Benson, the Marsh Lock horse bridge between Henley and Shiplake has been closed for over three years. The current diversion requires crossing the dangerous A4155 twice and takes the walker well away from the water.
Since coming into office, I have been campaigning to reopen Marsh Lock bridge. With the help of an 11-year-old Brownie, Claudia, and her petition, access to a pot of £500,000 has been secured to begin plans for repairs. I continue to have conversations with the Environment Agency to ensure that repairs move forward. I am grateful to the Minister for Water for her engagement on that issue, but there is a long way to go, including to find the estimated £2.5 million needed to actually implement the repair.
Further north in my constituency, the Ridgeway national trail carves an impressive path from the iconic Goring Gap, through the village of Nuffield and the idyllic town of Watlington, before crossing the border into Buckinghamshire just after Chinnor. The Ridgeway is known as Britain’s oldest road. It is believed to have been in use over 5,000 years ago as a trading route. We know how important connection to our history and cultural heritage is. It is amazing to think that when we walk the Ridgeway, we are striking our feet on the same earth as our ancestors all those years ago.
The Ridgeway is also well known for the internationally renowned Uffington white horse, carved into chalk, but such chalk is vulnerable to damage and parts of the Ridgeway are classified as byway, meaning they are legally open to motorised traffic. The Ridgeway therefore suffers damage from recreational vehicles and off-road motorcycles. Local authorities and National Trails UK find it difficult to justify the regular repairs needed to maintain the trail to the correct standard. Ian, the project’s trail officer, is fighting to prohibit recreational motorised vehicles from the trail so that road users are limited to Trampers, off-road wheelchairs and road-legal pedal electric bicycles.
My hon. Friend talks about the economic benefits of national trails. In my constituency, we have the South West Coast Path, which attracts 9 million visitors every year and is reckoned to support them spending about £500 million. Does my hon. Friend recognise that a south-west inland path would maintain more hospitality jobs in Devon? Does he recognise the value for the hospitality sector in his constituency too?
My hon. Friend’s intervention speaks exactly to my point around the closed Marsh Lock horse bridge, which has resulted in a direct loss of hospitality revenue in the local economy because of people avoiding the path due to the long diversion.
As I said, there are many economic benefits to national trails, but they have not received a meaningful increase in funding since 2013. That is despite the fact that the national trail network has increased in size over the last decade, and will double in size by the end of 2025 with the addition of the King Charles III England Coast Path and the Coast to Coast Path. Increasing the workload while stagnating the funding is a recipe for decline; the Ridgeway’s funding now stands at just £1 per mile to cover all revenue, staffing costs and maintenance.
National trails are facing a range of new challenges that funding is not keeping up with. When speaking with Wendy and Ian, representatives from the two trails in my constituency, they both noted the changing weather patterns as a barrier to the trails’ protection. In Oxfordshire, rainfall was 300% above average in September 2024, but dry weather in the summer has worn away the grass on the riverbank in popular areas of the Thames Path, leaving bare soil exposed. The combination of bare soil and high rainfall means that there is an increased likelihood of erosion, with banks washing into the river. In Goring, part of the river path had to be closed last year precisely because of that issue.
Flooding presents an additional challenge. In anticipation, national trails are preparing to identify winter routes and diversions to avoid flooding, but without the funding, groups are worried that that they will find it difficult to tackle these new challenges.
Staff work day and night to support national trails. Hannah, who takes care of the Thames Path in Oxfordshire, says that they have consistently doubled any match funding that they receive. Despite their hard work year on year, a lack of funding coupled with inflation pressures has caused them to make some difficult decisions, cutting funding for improvement projects, engagement activities, information provision and volunteer programmes to stay afloat. With rising costs, there may soon be nothing left to cut.
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mr Betts. I congratulate the hon. Member for Henley and Thame (Freddie van Mierlo) on securing this debate on an important issue. I recognise his long-standing interest in the Thames Path, which runs through his constituency, and his assiduous representation of his constituents through the long series of parliamentary questions he has tabled since entering this House.
The Government are committed to protecting, enhancing and expanding access to national trails. Let us think of other countries. The Camino de Santiago starts in France and goes through Spain. A friend is currently following one of the long-distance paths in Portugal on a bike, finding out about the hills not shown on the map; the map is two dimensional but there are three dimensions out there. The grand routes in France—such as the GR20, or Grand Route Vingt, which that bisects Corsica—are epic, long-distance, mythical trails that connect us to thousands of years of human history.
Every town and constituency in this country has a Green Lane that was literally a green lane. It is important to protect them, not just for inclusive access for local people and the benefits to tourism, but because they say something important and cultural about the human condition, heritage and history.
We have 16 national trails across England and Wales. As the former MP for Wakefield, I know and dearly love the Pennine Way. We always had a new year’s day walk; we would drag the children out, complaining, and then they would find an animal skull and spend the rest of the walk asking what it was and whether they could put it in their pocket. We showed them the Ladybower reservoir where the Dambusters practised for their assault on Germany. Those are iconic, special places that have a heritage in the hearts of local people whose forefathers and foremothers did the Kinder trespass, coming up from Sheffield and Manchester to assert their right to access those beautiful landscapes.
The King Charles III coastal path will be an impressive achievement, if we can make it happen. Would the Minister commend the section between Lyme Regis and Sidmouth in my constituency? Would she also pay tribute to the National Trust, which does great work in maintaining our coastal paths?
I pay tribute to that section. I have not been to that part of the path but I opened a section of the coastal path in 2011 or 2012, when, sadly, no Minister from the coalition Government could be found to make the journey to Dorset. I was asked as the shadow Secretary of State, and was happy to walk up and down—a lot of up and down—with a pint of foaming ale at the end, which made the visit worthwhile. Achieving these paths requires lots of partners, and the hon. Member rightly mentions the National Trust, which does incredible work in maintaining and protecting the paths through its huge membership support. I was down in Dorset with the National Trust in March, releasing the first wild beaver on the Isle of Purbeck. The National Trust plays an important role in the life of this nation.
When the coastal path is finished, we will have an extraordinary national corridor of access: a 4,750 mile path around England. I have walked certain sections of the Appalachian trail in America, and have heard stories about who goes on these long-distance paths and why. We also have seen the story of “The Salt Path”, which is now subject to some controversy. The Appalachian trail was used by lots of Vietnam veterans as a way of healing; they walked from Georgia to Maine as a way of processing and dealing with the trauma that they had suffered as people who had served their country. Imagine walking 5,000 miles around England! It is lifetime’s work; I do not know whether I will have time to do all of it, but I will certainly have to mark off the bits I have done already.
Since 2009, successive Governments have invested £25.6 million in the planning and establishment of the coastal trail. Successive Governments have recognised the value it will have in connecting communities, landscapes and coastlines, and boosting rural economies. It will be a really important part of rural economic growth. This has never been done before. I remember that, when the Welsh completed their coastal path ahead of us—which was obviously galling—there were articles in The New York Times about it. The path became a tourism destination, with the breathtaking sweep of the Atlantic coast down there. Obviously we have some drier bits, certainly down the east coast, which I know and love dearly—particularly sections around Bridlington and Filey. Coast paths generate a huge amount for local economies. Research has shown that more than £300 million has been spent in local economies by people walking on England coast paths, directly supporting almost 6,000 full-time equivalent jobs.
As my hon. Friend the Member for Henley and Thame (Freddie van Mierlo) mentioned, many of the challenges facing our national trails are caused by the impacts of climate change, but at the moment Natural England’s fund for environmental incidents covers only coastal erosion and riverbank erosion. Does the Minister agree that this funding pot must be expanded and increased in line with inflation to cover proper provision for climate impacts such as storm damage and flooding?
The hon. Lady raises an excellent point. Making sure we are resilient to a rapidly changing climate with warmer, wetter winters and hotter, dryer summers is important for not just food and water security, but all infrastructure, including our roads and bridges. With the flooding in Tadcaster, we saw what happens when a bridge that connects two parts of a town is knocked out during a flood as well as the huge economic and social consequences that that brings. I will take the hon. Lady’s suggestion back to the Department as we look at business planning for this year.
In the Labour manifesto, we committed to deliver nine new national river walks, one in every region of England. That will open up our riversides to the public in a transformative way, creating new opportunities for recreation, supporting biodiversity and strengthening community access to nature. The walks represent a step forward in our mission to make nature accessible to everyone, improve public health and provide opportunities to engage in the great outdoors.
The new Coast to Coast Path national trail from St Bees to Robin Hood’s Bay—an area I know and love well—will take walkers across some of the most beautiful parts of the north of England, including through three national parks: the Lake District, the Yorkshire Dales and the North York Moors. It will be one to walk from west to east, so that hikers always have the rain on their back—and I can promise that there will be rain.
The new national trail will bring increased access opportunities for recreation and tourism, improving health and wellbeing and increasing spending locally. We already have fantastic rights-of-way networks across England, with 120,000 miles of footpaths, bridleways and byways. On Sunday, I got lost near Crawley and Gatwick airport while looking for a friend’s house on my bike. When we go down the little country roads and trails, the signposts are so important when the sat-nav is out of range.
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From just those two examples in my constituency, we begin to get an idea of how important protected national trails are for nature and our history. After speaking with representatives from National Trails UK, the Thames Path and the Ridgeway, I know that stark action is needed.
There are three main problems preventing the maintenance of national trails: legal status, underfunding and bureaucracy. National trails were originally designated by the National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act 1949. The main goal was to provide public access to the countryside and establish protected landscapes. Trails, parks and landscapes were considered under that legislation. It gave powers to Natural England to survey, plan and propose long-distance routes that would subsequently be maintained.
Since that legislation, however, the legal status and protections of those routes have deteriorated. Although national parks and national landscapes have what is known as a statutory purpose, national trails do not. They are therefore not sufficiently protected by or referenced in key legislation alongside parks and landscapes, giving them a lower status. That lower level of protection puts people’s access to the outdoors at risk.
Furthermore, the current designation of national trails is mostly limited to the width of the path, which is particularly worrying given that they neighbour vast biodiversity. The Thames Path, in my constituency, runs along the edge of Berkshire, Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire Wildlife Trust’s Hartslock nature reserve, which is one of the two remaining UK sites to have the monkey orchid. The Ridgeway passes through the Chinnor Hill and Oakley Hill nature reserves. Failure to recognise the paths’ interconnectedness with other nature means that BBOWT has reported damage to the surrounding nature due to ill-thought-through diversions or people straying from the paths, but without recognition of the surrounding nature, there is no allocation for renewal and maintenance.
The second main problem is funding. Considering how many economic benefits national trails bring, they have not received a meaningful funding increase since 2013.
A third issue facing national trails is bureaucracy. For work to be carried out adjacent to the River Thames, there is a need for a flood risk activity permit, but there is currently a four-month delay from the EA in issuing these. In addition, for some of the year, such as in winter when the river is flowing fast or in flood, work cannot be carried out, but funding is still given year by year. That leaves an extremely short window for work to be done, if there is any opportunity at all, and funds often cannot be used in time.
Although I have painted a bleak picture so far, some simple changes could improve the future of national trails. I make three recommendations to Government. First, they should support a statutory purpose for national trails, including them in the group with national parks and national landscapes. With a statutory purpose would come the duty to protect and enhance people’s access to the outdoor and to experience the national trails. It would give national trails a proper place in the planning system, and would help to stop the loss of trails to development, as has already happened to the new King Charles III trail. Changes to the national planning policy framework, such as making it clear that changes to national trails require the consent of the Secretary of State, would further protect their status. Automatically, with small cost-free changes, we can better protect national trails for future generations.
Secondly, the Government should invest in national trails properly, or at least restore their funding in line with inflation from the 2013 benchmark. Further, those funding settlements should be made three years long. Thirdly, the Government should communicate with agencies, such as the EA, that have responsibilities that interact with national trails to ensure that they produce assessments in a timely manner and are given the resources that they need to maintain assets, such as the Marsh Lock horse bridge and Benson weir. Without that, national trails are in danger of falling below the quality standard. In 2023, the Disabled Ramblers’ condition monitoring report revealed that nearly 80% of the 50 miles surveyed along the Ridgeway did not meet the established standards.
The Government have previously recognised the vital role that national trails play in rural tourism, promoting the cultural assets of England and the health of the population. With proper funding and support, we can ensure internationally high standards and deliver more for people and nature.
Before the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) leaves, I want to say that in Northern Ireland the national trails are mainly supported by Northern Ireland Government bodies and not the UK national trail funding pot. I like the sound of the Ulster Way and I will look it up next time I am in Magherafelt visiting my uncle.
The Pennine trail up and down the backbone of England offers incredible views over the Peak district and the Yorkshire dales. The South Downs Way runs between Winchester and Beachy Head for more than 100 miles. Those trails are vital public assets that promote wellbeing, health and tourism. It was the previous Labour Government that started work on the vision of an England coastal path, which will be completed under this Government. The King Charles III England Coast Path will be completed next year, an incredible infrastructure achievement.
This Government have backed their commitment to access with action. Since 2022, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs has invested £2.5 million into the protected landscapes partnership, which brings together the National Landscapes Association, National Parks England, National Trails UK and Natural England. The partnership focuses on enhancing access and ensuring that our trails have a real impact on people, nature and climate.
One of the most innovative projects under the partnership is the coastal wildbelt project, which is being led by National Trails UK. It focuses on the coastal margin adjacent to the England coast path, which amounts to an area the size of Dorset. Our pilots will identify innovative ways to connect the public with this coastal area around the country. They will also identify ways to better drive nature recovery in these places, because once the path is created, access is created, so we will be able protect and restore nature in some hard-to-reach places.
We have also provided around £5.5 million in support to National Trails UK to enable it to continue its vital work of protecting and restoring the trail network. Trail maintenance funding is provided through Natural England, which is responsible for managing those relationships and ensuring that the trails are well cared for.
Let me share a story with the House. As the Minister for the circular economy, I am always looking out for waste and pollution. I saw this big, white polystyrene thing by the side of the road and got off my bike, thinking, “That is absolutely disgraceful—someone’s chucked this huge piece of litter here”. It turned out to be a massive puffball mushroom family. I took it and put it in my bag. Last night, my husband and daughter enjoyed puffball mushroom steaks with a hot chilli sauce; we did a lot of checking to make sure it was not poisonous, but fortunately it is literally the size of a football so we could not really mistake it for anything else.
The hon. Member for Henley and Thame raised three points. On the issue of statutory purposes for national trails, the statutory purposes of protected landscapes have been established and evolved over 75 years. If we were going to make any changes, we would need lots of consultation and evidence gathering. Although trails and protected landscapes are part of the same family, they have different roles and responsibilities. Giving trails statutory purposes may not be the most effective way to support them to achieve their objectives.
A statutory purpose would not, on its own, bring planning protections. Many trails cross through existing protected landscapes and other designations. They are covered by protections for those designations already. As such, we do not at this time believe that additional planning protections for trails are needed to support trails in their mission. Perversely, without robust evidence they could place additional burdens on the teams that manage them, so we could not be certain they would provide the benefits that the hon. Member suggests.
We have, as he said, a constrained fiscal environment. This year, the trails have had additional funding with £3.26 million for access-for-all improvements. I saw when I visited Dartmoor how important that was in giving people with Tramper scooters, which I had not previously come across, access to the amazing landscapes there. I am afraid that the percentage quoted by the hon. Member is inaccurate, but we can give him the correct percentage if he wants it afterwards.
We had also funded National Trails UK. In ’25 to ’26, it received £108,000 in revenue and £150,000 of capital support from partnerships. DEFRA has also allocated £500,000 for national trail reinstatement this year to help reestablish the England coastal path when there was a break in continuity due to erosion.
There has also been movement in the last year on removing bureaucracy at the Environment Agency and I will take the good words from the hon. Member for Henley and Thame back to my colleague. I understand the Thames Path national trail partnership is continuing to work with the Environment Agency to reopen Marsh Lock bridge. The EA has conducted a survey and has options for repair and we will continue to work in partnerships on this issue.