I beg to move,
That leave be given to bring in a Bill to make it an offence to use a sky lantern; and for connected purposes.
Last summer, when, after an unprecedented heatwave, a spate of wildfires was raging around the moorland of High Peak, I was shocked to discover that an American company called the Lights Fest was promoting a sky lantern festival at a venue on the moors above Buxton. A sky lantern comprises a paper lantern and a candle, and this company was selling tickets, at £20 or £30 each, for thousands of people to release naked flames across the tinder-dry moors. At the same time, our fire service in Derbyshire and hundreds of firefighters from Greater Manchester and further afield, as well as park rangers, farmers, gamekeepers and our military, were battling dozens of moorland fires, putting their own safety at risk. I pay tribute to them.
Although our fire service, local councils and the Peak District national park and I all objected to the sky lantern festival, we had no authority to prevent it from taking place as it was organised on private land. I wrote to Lights Fest to set out the local fire situation and to ask it to cancel the event, and Derbyshire fire service did the same, but neither the chief fire officer nor I received a response. In the meantime, local people set up an online petition, which quickly gathered almost 10,000 signatures. Fortunately, at that point the venue refused to host the event, so it was finally cancelled with just days to go. It cannot be right, however, that a company can organise such a dangerous event without us having any jurisdiction to prevent it from doing so.
It is not just on dry moorland that sky lanterns are a problem. They have caused significant fires in recent years, most notably at Smethwick in 2013 where more than 200 firefighters tackled a fire in a tyre depot that lasted for three days, caused £6 million-worth of damage and injured 16 firefighters, three of whom needed hospital treatment. Had it not been for CCTV capturing the sight of that sky lantern descending on those tyres, we would not have known that that was almost certainly the cause of the inferno.
Following that incident, in 2013 the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and the Welsh Government produced a report that concluded that the
“fire risk associated with the use of sky lanterns is significant.”
In theory, sky lanterns should remain airborne for as long as they are filled with hot air and should fall back down only when the flame goes out. In practice, however, that is not always the case, and therefore sky lanterns can be a significant fire hazard.
A survey of fire and rescue services found that between 2008 and 2011 there had been eight wildfires in Dorset caused by lanterns and one in Northumberland that took 20 firefighters four hours to extinguish.