Anthony works for the Bristol Trails Group – a local community of volunteers that maintain the trails in Bristol and work with land owners to build new ones. The announcement of the Government’s potential sell off of the UK’s Forests has a big potential impact for their good work. Here’s a great article that Ant has written to explain what the impact could be on their – and your – local trails.
Like many people in the mountain biking community, we’re concerned at the news that the government is planning legislation which will enable them to force the sale of Forestry Commission land. We’ve been Facebooking and Twittering about the plans for a while, but it seems the time has come to go into a bit more depth about why the changes could be bad for what we do, and mountain biking in general.
Rheola in South Wales – an example of a venue where the FC have worked with riders for years to allow legitimate riding.
If you want a comprehensive overview of the plans to date, a good place to start is the Save Our Forests blog. This gathers all the facts about the proposed sale and the campaign to stop it, and its compilers (and many of the commenters) are clearly a well-informed bunch.
Still Woods in Bristol – A great example of how easy it is for private land owners to get spooked by riding. After nigh on 10 years of tolerating riding, the trails were suddenly shut in 2009.
On to our local trails. The Commission manage a number of the local woodlands where mountain biking takes place. The most important are 50 Acre Wood and Leigh Woods, but there’s also riding to be had in places like Wraxall Piece and Ashton Hill Plantation.
We work with the FC on the trail in 50 Acre, where they have a commendably hands-off approach, letting us build and develop the trail and then inspecting it for safety issues. They have supported us in small but significant ways throughout the past 5 years, such as paying for contractors to deliver materials to the wood, or getting their foresters in to clear blocked trail and make neat trail features. The result is a trail that’s been developed in a nice “organic” way and which keeps a decent level of challenge for more experienced riders. Throughout this, the Commission have received no financial return from the trail. It just ticks the box that they encourage the public to enjoy their woodland.
Glentress Freeride Park – a FC venue that is respected as one of the best in the world, will venues like this be at risk?
One of the best things about this arrangement is that we get a challenging trail, but the Forestry Commission assumes the risk. If anyone decides they want to sue after injuring themselves on the trails, the Commission assumes the responsibility. They have a great track record of defending liability claims while allowing risky activities. If you’ve ever ridden the official downhill tracks at Forest of Dean, Wentwood or Cwm Carn, it’s no coincidence that these are all on FC land.
Going back to Bristol, in Leigh Woods there’s a whole new mountain bike trail coming soon courtesy of the 1SW Project. This is a major initiative to get people riding across the South West, which has secured £200,000 of funding for new trails in Bristol. While it’s a partnership which also involves the National Trust and Bristol City Council, the Forestry Commission were the driving force behind it, and it’s their staff’s expertise and understanding that has enabled them to bring the project into being.
While we’re talking about Leigh Woods, it seems like a good time to mention the Commission’s sensible policy on access.
In the past, trail construction in Leigh Woods hasn’t been endorsed by the land managers - but in reality the unoffical trails there are so well established that they have been allowed to continue, as long as people rode sensibly and didn’t build new trails or jumps. There are several challenging unofficial trails over there (locals know the ones) which have been left alone due to the Commission’s tolerant policy on liability and risk. It’s only when cheeky trails have crossed over into being “built” (e.g. wooden structures or jumps) or brought mountain bikers into conflict with walkers (in Paradise Bottom for example) that action has been taken.
Leigh Woods in Bristol – local trails that are allowed to exist with the support of the land owners.
Despite occasional difficulties, in our experience the Forestry Commission are one of the best land managers to deal with, and have a policy of coming to sensible compromises rather than trying to kick people off places they shouldn’t be riding. The impression we’ve formed is that they want people to be out in their woods, using them, whether it’s on foot, wheels or horseback. Forestry Commission woods are either Open Access land or are in the process of being dedicated as such, so for walkers there is a “right to roam”. Wherever practical they also extend this to cyclists and equestrians.
So what would happen if the woods were privately owned?
According to the consultation document the government has produced, the FC’s land is going to be split up into groups.
“Large forests” are going to be leased to timber companies – not much controversial there, although it’s worth noting that many trail centres are also located in timber-producing forests – Kielder for example.
“Heritage forests” are going to be transferred to exisiting or new charities. It’s possible that Leigh Woods might fall into this category. Half of Leigh Woods is already owned by the National Trust, who have indicated that they are prepared to take over many woodlands after the sell-off happens. Historically the National trust have tried to discourage cycling in their half of the woods, although to be fair, the NT side of the woods includes most of the Avon Gorge SSSI, so there are also environmental reasons for doing this.
Smaller woods are going to be sold, with first refusal going to charities and community groups. Places like 50 Acre Wood and Ashton Hill Plantation could fall into this category.
Ashton Court – legit, legal trails that are due for a facelift in 2011.
So, what’s to stop us from buying our own forest and building mountain bike trails there?
First of all, there’s the basic cost of the land. The government’s plan is for any woodland to be sold at market rates – currently around £1,000 an acre. I doubt any of us can find this sort of money down the side of the sofa, so we’d need to embark on an unprecedented fundraising exercise. The initial cost of purchase wouldn’t be the end of it. We’d need landowner liability insurance, a massive expense which has forced more than one private mountain biking venue out of business. Finally, there would be ongoing management costs. Put simply, buying our own woodlands would be expensive, time-consuming and would lump us with all kinds of responsibilities which we currently don’t have to worry about.
Some woods might be taken over by charities or community groups. Great – but there is no guarantee that this will happen. Most charities are strapped for cash at the best of times and they may also have a different set of priorities to us. For example, the emphasis could shift to preserving the ecology of the woods at the expense of access or facilities. Woods of little ecological or historic value could also be passed over in favour of “heritage” land.
Which leaves private purchasers and businesses. At present, there is no obvious practical way for a business to make money by taking ownership of the mountain bike trails we have in Bristol. You could start charging for access to the trails, but how would you police this, and how many people would be prepared to pay? There are some successful privately run MTB centres in the UK (such as Coed Llandegla) but these are more of a draw than the trails in Bristol, have better facilities (car parks and visitor centres) and are massively subsidised.
It’s much more likely that the woods would be snapped up for small-scale timber production, shooting, or other tried-and–tested ways of making money. Woodland is also exempt from most forms of tax, so it may be purchased by private buyers as an investment. If this happened, we don’t know what would become of the trails as we know them. Access via foot would be guaranteed in some woodlands, but there are no such safeguards for cycling. The best we could hope for are agreements with the new owners. If these were breached, we would have to take the new owner to court, a drawn-out and expensive process.
Forest of Dean – more legal, FC trails that are at risk with the planned sales.
The frustrating thing is that the sale doesn’t need to happen. Over the past few years the Forestry Commission in England have become more self-sufficient, to the point where the funding they receive is relatively small – just £15 million a year for 2007/2008. In the same year they produced 60% of the UK’s timber, and the contribution they made to outdoor recreation in the UK was massive – over 40 million visits a year are made to their holdings. The sale is expected to make £150-250 million, but over a period of 10 years, so it’s hardly the solution the country’s budget deficit. UPDATE: There’s more information on the financial side of the sales here.
In the meantime the Forestry Commission’s staff is going to be downsized by up to 80%, becoming advisers and consultants to the new owners. Job cuts have already started to happen. A recent proposal to formalise the unofficial trails in Ashton Hill Plantation and create an official downhill area was recently dropped. The impression that I got from talking to our local ranger is that the Commission are now too understaffed in this region to supervise the project and the future of the land is uncertain.
A consultation on the proposals has just been launched but it’s phrased as though the sell-off is going ahead regardless. In fact the Bill is still being debated, and you can write to your local MP expressing your opposition. If you have’t already you can also sign the petition at 38 Degrees.
Finally, in a somewhat ironic twist, 2011 is International Year of Forests.
All words by Anthony De Heveningham. Visit the Bristol Trails Group site here.
What can you do?
Sign the petition voicing your concern here: http://www.38degrees.org.uk/page/s/save-our-forests
Write to your MP here: http://38degrees.org.uk/page/speakout/MP-forests
If you liked this post why not check out these?
This can’t happen!
Once they’re gone there is no going back.. sign the petition, write to your MP and make sure your voice is heard!
15 million quid to manage our forests?! Peanuts!!
Just got this from 38 Degrees newsletter:
Today’s the day. In just a few hours, MPs have their first chance to vote for or against the government’s plans to privatise our public forests.
That this vote is even happening is thanks to all we’ve done together. Our petition – referred to in the motion in Parliament – is over 400,000 people strong and rising. Local Save Our Forests groups are springing up all over the country. Nearly 70,000 of us have emailed our MPs.
Thousands of us have chipped in to get people-powered ads in today’s national newspapers. When MPs check the papers this morning, they will see our campaign, and the number of signatures on our petition, splashed across the Independent, Times, Daily Mail, and the Daily Mirror [1].
But we’re not done yet. Let’s make sure that as MPs go to vote, our voices are ringing in their ears.
Please phone your MP, and ask them to vote for a rethink of the Forest sell-off plans. MPs aren’t used to getting phone calls from voters, so ringing them up will have a huge effect! You can find the right telephone number, and some tips for things to say, here:
Click here to get started:
http://www.38degrees.org.uk/call-your-mp-forests
Thanks for reprinting this guys.
I wrote the article from a Bristol perspective but the sale will affect everyone in England (The sale isn’t going to happen in Scotland or Wales ‘cos they have separate governments who have quite sensibly decided not to flog their assets for a pittance).
If you ride at Sherwood, FoD, Haldon, Okehampton, Bedgbury, Cannock, Dalby, Stainburn or Kielder, get on the 38 Degrees site and tell your MP that you want to keep these places open and free to ride.
I think it would be simpler if the sale did not go ahead in a rushed manner and the FC was instead permitted time to find appropriate ways to adjust its operations under the guidelines of the over-arching principles it works to in the way it seems to be doing at the moment. This would not exclude the sale of land (the FC occasionally sells land at the moment anyway) but instead focus on better use of the land.
However, if the sale is (for some reason) rushed through with a view to making a quick buck (again, dubious judging by the analysis linked-to in Ant’s article) I think there are two potential areas to examine from a mountain biking perspective:
1) Establishing the legality of existing trails.
As I understand it, where footpaths and bridleways exist access will continue to be protected under the CRoW Act (2000) which did wonders for our Rambler brethren. In some areas of the UK (I came across this recently in Wales) the definitive rights of way map has not been updated in a long time. In some cases, even footpaths that are hundreds of years old do not appear. This is up to the local councils. Perhaps we should look at establishing the legal status of biking trails on forestry land under this act to maintain their existence beyond any change in land ownership. From a rather surreptitious point of view this will also make the land less attractive to potential future owners as their business risk increases with the volume (and to a lesser extent type) of activity occurring on the land.
2) Finding more sustainable models.
Most FC run trail centres are not sustainable business models. Revenues generated are minimal and little is done to maximise them. You only need to look at Llandegla (and the effect it has had on visitors to Coed-y-Brenin) to see how much more revenue can be generated by a well-managed centre. The model of Drumlanrig is another good one to examine. The easiest model to understand from a business point of view is a chairlift/shuttle accessed facility – something that is long overdue in the UK.
At the centre of this change is accessibility. It’s very difficult to squeeze money out of a tight-arse mountain biker who has already spent all of his (intentional use of the masculine here, to underline the appallingly small proportion of women in the sport) money to buy a £4,000 carbon, all-mountain bike, £30,000 on his BMW estate and Thule bike rack to drive from Slough to Afan. This hypothetical (stereotypical) individual has already spent so much on these things (not to mention the tax he pays) that the idea of paying a fee to use trails appals his sense of entitlement to use the trails (because his tax money paid for their construction in the first place – right?) Making the sport more accessible to the masses opens a wider variety of revenue streams. Think about businesses (these need not necessarily be private, they could be community driven http://www.cicregulator.gov.uk/ ) that remove the barriers to entry that currently exist in mountain biking and legitimately charge to do so. Suddenly, the average spend per person (no more than £10 per person for most visiting trail centres) is dramatically increased.
Historically the FC have not been as good as they could have been at providing recreational facilities. It has taken the work of a large number of people to drag a timber-producing wing of the government kicking and screaming into recognising the potential of the recreation market. Now we are lucky in some areas (and it seems to be a postcode lottery) that there are proactive and knowledgeable people working in the organisation that do very well. Producing new models that can be used by the FC (or by lease arrangement on their land) will be noticed, particularly if they are profitable and meet the other goals of the organisation. If not, then it becomes our responsibility to bring these models to the attention of organisations that are capable of financing initiatives to make better use of the land. It is already possible in Scotland to obtain a legal right to buy public land if able to prove the benefits to the community at large are greater than the existing use of the land by the FC.
As for the BMW-driving, all-mountain (provided it has a trail centre on it) rider. How do we get money out of him? Well, he needs some skills coaching to help him overtake Lloyd from accounting on the final descent of ‘The Wall.’ But that’s a separate issue I haven’t got time to go into just now…
Dan, how on earth is charging for trails going to make them more accessible? And why should we have to buy back trails we already ride?
As the government keeps saying, only 18% of England’s forests are owned by the FC. It’s not like they are squatting all the available land. Perhaps they have some prime ready-made sites that private developers have their eye on, but that’s another issue!
Do people eking out a living as coaches, or running bike shops and cafes, want to have to buy, build, maintain and insure the trails into the bargain? Llandegla keeps being cited as an example but it’s worlds away from what we’re doing in Bristol, and many of the trails there were only built thanks to funding from the FC.
I would love to see the Right of Way network in England extended, but until someone passes a version of CROW aimed at bikes and horses, it’s a slow, expensive process that isn’t going to help protect more than a tiny fraction of we ride or build. At the moment we are dealing with an organisation which has a policy of encouraging people to use its land rather than shutting them out or charging them for the privilege. Even most of their car parks are free. The past few years have seen massive steps forward in the relationship between mountain bikers and the FC in England – why throw it all away, just because it happens to be publicly owned?
I am trying to look at this as a way of increasing the number and quality of trails in the UK and encourage participation. I haven’t suggested charging for access, or that we should buy back trails we already ride. To make my point clear, neither of these ideas are feasible.
What is feasible is a separation of land ownership and land management, which is essentially what is happening in the case of volunteer management of existing trails on FC land. The fear of litigation appears to be the sticking point here. Let’s be clear, the FC doesn’t pay to insure the land at the moment. They are a self-insuring body with a salaried legal team that handles claims made against them. They went to great expense to create a risk assessment process for mountain bike trails that is now accepted as best practice. In reality that process is not difficult to complete on the ground and could be part of any management structure be it private, volunteer or otherwise.
What is to stop an organisation, regardless of type, becoming legally responsible for a trail network on land owned by another organisation? They could even charge a new landowner for the management services, especially if the landowner is a private enterprise that buys the land as a tax sink and/or for its steady appreciation.
I do not advocate the widespread sale of the public forest in such a kneejerk manner, you only need to look at the DEFRA figures to see why that is a bad idea. On a fundamental level I think that the health benefits of woodland recreation, if possible to quantify them into the sort of cost-benefit analysis that DEFRA are doing (in a way that would stand-up to criticism) are of greater economic value to the UK than any sale of the public estate. So much so that is should be possible to justify putting money from the public health budget into trailbuilding!
All good suggestions but I think the sport, and certainly the idea of purpose built trails, is at a pretty young stage and may not be on many landowners’ radars, except as a nuisance.
If you’ve bought land as an investment then letting a bunch of mountain bikers build trails on it could work (although I can imagine the liability issue giving some of them kittens). If you’ve bought the land for timber or game shooting, or for your own enjoyment, it might not.
Your posts above read like this is a done deal, I really hope not.
Hopefully it is a nuisance for landowners, because then we can provide an answer that doesn’t involve spending money to destroy/block trails like we’ve seen so many times in the past.
Apologies if my posts above make it sound like a done deal. I also hope it’s not. But we have to be prepared if this gets steamrollered-through somehow.