This is a guest blog written by conservation campaigner Bob Berzins who has who has featured previously on this blog here, here, here, here and here.
The city of Sheffield lies immediately to the east of the Peak District National Park at the south end of the Pennines. The city boundary extends into the uplands with four intensively managed grouse shooting moors to the west and north-west of highly populated areas. Every year these shooting moors are burnt to increase grouse numbers and despite recent legislation banning the burning of vegetation over deep peat (more than 40cm) there’s been no noticeable reduction in fires. Around half of each estate comprises shallower peat generally described as Dry Heath and this is where we see continued rotational burning pretty much on every fine day between October and the end of March. The management of these areas affects everyone in Sheffield because of the impact on air quality, water quality, flood risk and carbon losses.
What happened in October?
It was only a matter of time until two factors combined: the moors closest to Sheffield suburbs were burnt and the prevailing westerly winds blew all the smoke into those densely populated areas. On 9th October 2023 all four grouse moors within Sheffield were burning heather and in particular Moscar Estate was burning near Wyming Brook just a mile from the suburbs at Lodge Moor:
Smoke was blown into Sheffield and that pollution built up in urban areas:
Very soon social media was alive with complaints from Sheffield residents who not only found the smoke unpleasant but were having difficulty breathing and were forced to stay indoors with windows closed [here]. The smoke particularly affected those with existing respiratory conditions such as asthma. And there was a real sense of anger because everyone knew this burning was intentional for the benefit of a few grouse moor owners.
Why is this smoke harmful to health?
Sheffield has a network of “citizen science” air quality sensors which measure particulates including PM2.5 which are tiny particles less than 2.5 micro metres (µm) in size and are especially harmful because they pass from our lungs into the bloodstream and affect all our organs. Defra say “Exposure to high concentrations of PM (e.g, during short term pollution episodes) can also exacerbate heart and lung conditions, significantly affecting quality of life, and increase deaths and hospital admissions” [here]. To put this into context the World Health Organisation has set a safe PM2.5 limit of an average of 15 µg/m3 per day and this air quality sensor was showing spikes of around 120 µg/ m3 as shown here:
There is a more detailed and easy to read analysis including data from Defra and Sheffield Council air quality sensors, undertaken by Sheffield University [here].
So it’s clear Sheffield suffered a major air pollution incident on 9th October and the only rational explanation for this was moorland burning.
But they’re allowed to burn aren’t they?
The burning near Wyming Brook occurred on moorland which is designated as a Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI), Special Area of Conservation (SAC) and Specially Protected Area (SPA). It’s obviously shallow peat soil (<40cm deep) so the blanket bog burning ban does not apply. But as Natural England explained to me:
“The moorland estates located within Sites of Special Scientific Interest (SSSi’s) close to Sheffield do tend to have Agri-Environment Higher Level Stewardship agreements that contain burning plans. These are compliant with the Heather and Grass Burning Regulations, which are the effective detailed consent under the Wildlife and Countryside Act for the agreement period.”
This is a long winded way of describing how Moscar Estate has a management plan which MUST be followed.
An Environmental Information Request revealed what’s entailed in the detailed consent – see below to read the Moscar Management Plan File:
According to this management plan, burning is allowed in this area on a 7-10 year rotation subject to a number of conditions including (4.1.5):
‘Burning will only be carried out when conditions allow for quick cool burns. A cool burn is one which removes the dwarf-shrub canopy yet leaves behind a proportion of ‘stick’ and does not cause damage to the moss layer or expose the peat surface.
Hotter, slower burns can kill the moss and lichen layer and plants like cowberry and bilberry and if severe it can burn into the peat surface causing erosion and affecting the integrity of the sensitive habitat. The moss or lichen or litter layer should not be damaged by burning, such that the moss layer will not recover within a year. When conditions do not to allow for this, fires will not be started‘.
But when I visited the burn site I counted around 40 individual burns many of which had apparently been “hot” and “intensive” leaving no heather stick or moss. Like this:
And like this (Sheffield suburbs just behind):
The burning occurred in SSSI unit 37 which has been assessed as ‘Unfavourable Recovering’; (3.2.1) lists the detailed management actions and objectives needed to achieve favourable condition.
The areas burnt in October are best described as species poor because they’re dominated by heather. There’s often a lack of ground layer which means organic soil can be exposed following burning and the management objective is to minimize the area of peat exposed through careful cool burning or cutting. But what actually happened appears to be the opposite – hot intensive burns left a large amount of peat exposed which could compound the unfavourable condition of the SSSI unit.
The burning appears to be a clear breach of the management plan conditions and therefore an apparent breach of Section 28 of the Wildlife & Countryside Act which deals with SSSIs.
In this case it’s crucial to emphasise that hot intensive burns inevitably create more smoke because all combustible material is burnt. Cool burns leave a lot of vegetation intact and therefore create less smoke.
I did report similar intensive, hot burning at Moscar Estate in 2016 which resulted in the estate receiving a warning, so the requirements for consented burning should have been very clear.
Natural England are primarily concerned with conservation not air pollution but as I’ve described above the two issues are inextricably linked in this case. The Local Authority – Sheffield Council – has powers under The Environment Act 1990 to tackle a Statutory Nuisance [here] which has a broad definition but includes smoke from “premises” that
- unreasonably and substantially interfere with the use or enjoyment of a home or other premises;
- injure health or be likely to injure health.
And given the public outcry, a number of people including Councillors are pressing Sheffield Council to serve a Smoke Abatement Notice via Section 80 of the Environment Act 1990. The latest Sheffield Council response is [here]:
“The Environmental Protection Service has written to the three landowners to establish what went wrong on this occasion and to seek assurances that measures are put in place to minimise the impact in future. We have advised them of the provisions of the Environmental Protection Act 1990 and the potential consequences if an authorised officer from this Service finds that a statutory nuisance exists during future burns. We are awaiting their responses. It seems that on this occasion the high pressure weather event played a part in forcing the smoke down into Sheffield.”
Blog readers will be familiar with this type of response from a statutory body to the actions of grouse moors – hopelessly inadequate. The citizens of Sheffield are crying out for their Local Authority to take immediate robust action for this major pollution event which has already occurred and already affected the lives and health of thousands of people.
Sheffield Council also contacted Natural England who said “Once we have established the circumstances leading to the incident this year we will consider if the service of a S80 notice is appropriate.” So it all comes down to Natural England’s assessment of the burning. I’ve done my best to give them full information by sending them videos of the burning and photos with GPS refs of the post-burn sites.
Landowner Public Accountability
My site visit revealed many of the burns had mown margins (that acted as a fire break) so it’s clear that all these patches of moorland could have been mown and the burning wasn’t necessary at all:
Moscar Estate owner, the Duke of Rutland, has now responded to a request for a ‘Smoke Summit’ meeting with South Yorkshire Regional Mayor Oliver Coppard [see here].
It is a matter of public record, via Defra’s Magic map [see screen grab below] that Moscar Estate receives around £200,000pa in High Level Stewardship funding which is taxpayers’ money. The public deserves an explanation:
The Sheffield Tribune [here] did manage to speak to a representative of the Peak District Moorland Group who “accepted the situation that occurred was totally unsatisfactory for those that were affected by the lingering smoke”. He added that the PDMG hoped to organise a meeting with residents to discuss the smoke and explain why ‘consented low intensity vegetation burning’ was selected over other management options available to land managers.
But of course we haven’t heard anything about a public meeting.
Conclusion
I’ve witnessed an awful lot of burning over the last 10 years and the intensity of burning and amount of smoke produced in this incident was bad but not exceptional. Everybody noticed these burns because the smoke ended up in Sheffield and was measured. Countless smaller communities and individual dwellings suffer similar levels of smoke pollution throughout the grouse moor burning season.
If you live in Sheffield please write to your councillor and MP to ensure the smoke abatement notice does happen. If you live elsewhere write to your MP and ask what they will do after the next election to ensure moorland burning comes to an end.
ENDS
Raptor Persecution UK 
Hand outs on an industrial scale to those who have a problem with people languishing on benefits. All propped up by the billionaire media. Thank God we’ve got such a understanding passionate King to Lead by example. Keep um out keep um poor Tally ho
Interesting stuff Bob, given the rotation period can be as little as 7 years in my experience there will be almost no stick left after burning heather this age unless the fire runs over the ground very quickly. This appears not to be the case, the idea of a cool burn on such young vegetation is often a joke the fire burns too slowly, too hot and takes all the vegetation. To me at least Sheffield Should be serving them with a restriction as should NE. Burning young heather often completely clears the ground, most keepers and estates know this.
I live in Pateley Bridge in Nidderdale, North Yorkshire and, because the town is surrounded by grouse moors, burning often takes place especially on nice sunny days when you want to be outside, have your windows open or, washing out on the line. The smoke from these fires often covers the town and if you are outside or have your windows open the smoke can catch at the back of your throat. Recently, there were a few annoying episodes of burning and I contacted my local council environmental protection team. This is their reply:
“The Local Authority can investigate complaints of alleged smoke nuisance from premises as defined under S79(b) Environmental Protection Act 1990. Land falls under the term premises. There are two limbs to statutory nuisance, one being prejudicial to health, and the other nuisance. To gather further information, you would be required to complete a period of monitoring in the form of written monitoring logs recording when the smoke is causing you a nuisance (substantial interference with the enjoyment of your property) or how the smoke is affecting your health, normally over a period of 2 weeks. We look at the timing, frequency, and duration of the alleged nuisance. Smoke effecting you at your property for a few days over a short period (e.g. a week), is unlikely to be a statutory nuisance. This can be a difficulty when investigating moorland burning as the activity is short lived, and there are many variables (e.g. wind direction, location of burning, intensity of the fire, length of burning).
In addition, we cannot take action against several landowners who would be creating a cumulative effect of smoke, (e.g. one land owner may have a fire one day, then another land owner a fire the subsequent day). Although there have been two fires that may have affected you, each landowner has only had one fire on one day. However, if one landowner continually has regular fires over a long time period and the smoke effects how you use your property then there is potential for a statutory nuisance.
As the burning tends to be short lived our initial advice is for complainants to contact Defra and Natural England to check whether the rules of burning are being abided by, as generally if they are it would be unlikely a nuisance exists, but if they aren’t operating in line with a permit etc then Defra and Natural England should be taking action in the first instance.”
Sorry, TOBornotTOB, publication of your comment was delayed because it went to the spam folder and I’ve only just seen it.
What a shockingly inadequate response from the authorities. Their residents health and wellbeing should be the priority, not being submissive to the dukes
Where there’s blame there’s a claim, For once I hope the Ambulance chaser’s pick up on this.
Sheffield council’s response would be a lot harder if they wanted to fell the city’s trees. ACW.
This is a widespread problem, it particularly affects communities in the Yorkshire Dales. Weather conditions that are suitable for heather burning often involve light winds and a temperature inversion that traps smoke in the valleys where our local communities are situated. Poor air quality is a public health emergency and yet there seems to be little to no oversight of the consequences of unconstrained heather burning. Despite it being the responsibility of local authorities to monitor air quality the local authority in this area seems only to be interested in traffic pollution along trunk roads and to be oblivious of the impact of air pollution in rural areas or from other causes. In the Dales it would be encouraging to see the YDNP step up and take some responsibility for the management of this issue but to date they seem content to pass the buck to the completely disinterested local authority. Lets hope that the issue can mobilise some public support in the same way that pollution of our waterways has managed to recently.
Agreed. What you describe is made worse in all intensive grouse moor areas where all neighbouring estates are grouse moors with typical burning regimes, for when one estate is at it – likely the neighbours are at it too.
Localised conditions being just right every keeper in the same dale comes out of the house in the morning weighs it up and has the same brainwave “let’s get out burning today while the weather holds”. So sometimes two or three (or four in the blog!) adjoining estates are all at it on the same day. Then of course when conditions stop being suitable, nobody at all is at it for days…but doing other stuff while waiting for conditions to change again, and then they are back at it in unison! This seems in part to be what happened in the Sheffield incident described by Bob. One obvious short term idea is that neighbouring estates – if they even give a shit – voluntarily agree to stagger the burning so only one estate is ever burning per day. Saying that, the glaringly obvious & inevitable (sooner or later) solution is of course that all burning (except genuinely required as firebreaks) needs to end.
Bob Berzins suggests that if you live outside Sheffield you might consider wrting to one’s own MP. In my experience this is pointless. I wrote to my local MP regarding an incident on a grouse moor some distance from my home. His reply: “It’s outside my constituency, I can’t do anything!” I then wrote to the MP responsible for the area (Mr. Sunak before he was PM) his reply was: “You are not resident in my constituency!”
I think your local MP is in the wrong, here. You are his constituent: not everything which effects you also happens within your constituency boundaries.
Very remiss of me to have missed this excellent, and very important thread, at the time. My congratulations to the author for his work on this.
I am always somewhat puzzled by the use of the terms: ‘cool’ and ‘hot’ burns. The temperature at which organic matter ignites does not change. In some cases it may take a short while longer to evaporate contained moisture, so the length of time at any given temperature may vary.
The ignition temperature being the same – sufficient to start the fire – the intensity of a such fire will then depend upon the fuel load (ignoring weather conditions). But I doubt that varies sufficiently on moorland to make much difference.
Clearly, the landed aristocracy have had plenty of time to ensure that all the laws regarding the nuisance and damage their ‘sports’ cause are either well-catered for or are easily side-stepped.
I deeply regret missing how they escaped the banning of stubble-burning debate.