Sheep are destroying precious British habitats – and we taxpayers are footing the bill

The Guardian

4 days ago

Britain's uplands are dying. What should be some of the very best places for nature are the absolute worst. Across vast tracts of some of our most beautiful landscapes, life is rapidly ebbing away. Where once there was purple heather, bilberry and buzzing insect life, there are now over-grazed, sheep-infested ecological disaster zones. For a nation of nature lovers, it's a disgrace.
One of the very worst areas is the Dartmoor commons. These exemplify everything that is wrong about England's upland management. In a recent Natural England survey of Dartmoor's protected sites, only 26 out of 22,494 hectares (55,583 acres) were found to be in an ecologically favourable condition – that's 0.1%. All the blanket bogs and all the heathland surveyed are in an appalling state, and in many places these once wonderful habitats are in decline.
On Dartmoor's high moor, where there should be a diverse blanket bog, we see huge areas dominated by a single species – purple moor-grass. This hardy plant flourishes in degraded conditions, and is a wretched symptom of the historical extraction, erosion and drainage of the underlying peat, which was compounded by excessive burning and year-round grazing in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. This moor grass flourishes at the expense of peat-forming sphagnum mosses – the botanical engineers of healthy bogs. That legacy of intensive farming haunts us with the ghastly spread of impenetrable tussocks of moor grass as far as the rambler can ramble. Meanwhile, livestock – particularly sheep – continue to destroy what little heather moorland is left.
This modern-day tragedy of the commons is the result of a land that has been pushed far beyond its ecological limits by the farmers and commoners who have rights over it. But this is also a national scandal – because it is the taxpayer, you and I, who pay for this destruction.
Here is a hard, unpopular but simple fact: farming in this place does not make any money. According to a Duchy College Rural Business School report in 2023, each ewe put on the Dartmoor commons loses its owner £16.90. And there are a lot of sheep. The only way these losses are maintained is through public subsidies. From the 1970s to the 1990s, farmers and commoners were paid per head of animal – so the more you grazed, the more cash you got. Some sense prevailed in the late 1990s when the first nature schemes came in and public payments were made to actually reduce the numbers.
The problem is that numbers were never reduced enough; the grazing rates ended up being an unscientific compromise. For instance, on the huge Forest of Dartmoor common, the higher-level stewardship scheme allows an average of 0.52 ewes per hectare. In a Natural England 2020 study of 25 years of schemes in the Lake District, the habitat response was universally good only where the stocking rates were below 0.4 ewes per hectare.
But here is the greatest scandal. Over the past decade, more than £32m has been paid to Dartmoor commoners through higher-level stewardship schemes – schemes that exist specifically to improve nature on sites that should be protected by law. And guess what? Not one common has improved, and many have got worse.
The government's supposed regulator, Natural England, has tried to improve things. Back in 2023 it made a stand, being clear that if it was to agree to schemes being extended, it would need to see changes to those stocking rates. The backlash from the farming fraternity was wild, and a politically driven independent review saw NE make an embarrassing climb-down. Public funds continue to be wasted, and the law is not being enforced. That's why an organisation called Wild Justice has stepped up and secured a judicial review, which is being heard on 15 and 16 July. Our wish is that the Dartmoor Commoners' Council adheres to its legal obligations and acts to reduce stocking rates to ensure the habitat recovers.
It's not even as if this land is contributing to food security. Grazing on Dartmoor falls within the least productive 20% of land, which produces less than 3% of the food produced in England. In short, the public is propping up an environmentally destructive, loss-making industry that makes a minimal contribution to the nation's food supply, all while damaging Dartmoor's greatest asset: its nature. It's madness!
We are in a planet-threatening climate and nature crisis; we cannot afford not to make positive changes now. We need the government's new land use framework to lend weight to taking this minimally productive land out of any pretence of significant food production, and concentrating instead on its real potential for essential nature restoration. Dartmoor's blanket bogs, for instance, are internationally scarce habitats that, if restored, can store carbon and help regulate the flow of water, thus reducing flood-risk downstream. We need to remove the sheep, restore and rewet the bogs, and then leave them alone. At the very least, the public should not be subsidising sheep grazing on the uplands.
There are also some good farmers out there who want to do more to restore nature. If they put nature first, they deserve the public's support to restore our uplands with more suitable animals and more sustainable practices that the local community and our national parks can be proud of. Those farmers who don't want to change should be penalised for causing damage, not rewarded. Their destructive actions should be as illegal as dumping rubbish on protected areas or deliberately setting fires.
The time for unjust compromises is over. We have to stop pouring millions into ecological collapse. Dartmoor and our other uplands are failing ecological systems propped up by wasting taxpayers' hard-earned cash. If we truly care about nature, the climate, or even fiscal responsibility, we must stop funding failure and invest in healing: in carbon-binding peat, in wild and wonderful nature, in healthy landscapes that breathe life. Our uplands need a healthy future, and that future starts with change – radical, urgent and unapologetic.
Chris Packham is a naturalist, broadcaster and campaigner