The North's biggest assets are not its big cities - they're its problem

Most analyses of England's "North" start and finish with industrial decline and the ever-deepening divide between North and South. I fear that our analyses suffer from a fatal flaw in that they focus on the idea that the future for The North lies in those former beating hearts of industrial England and especially the transpennine cities - Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds, Sheffield.

The result of this analysis is a false imaging of The North as a peculiarly working-class place - once of flat caps, whippets and tea from chipped pint mugs while sitting on a box at the allotment, now of urban wasteland, sportswear, obesity and despair. Here's Phillip Blond concluding his analysis:

The more that the North escapes its working-class monoculture by bringing back the people who left, the more the working classes will benefit, because a diverse social mix is exactly what will create opportunities for the young people currently and cruelly being left behind.

Now I live in The North, in a lovely village an hour from Manchester and 20 minutes from Leeds and Bradford. It's a short drive to Skipton and beyond to the Yorkshire Dales. I simply don't recognise Phillip Blond's caricature of Northern culture or believe that this is the reason why people leave The North. You need to have a spectacularly narrow view of The North to say this:

The North has to become deeply attractive to the people it needs to bolster its technical, entrepreneurial and educational reach. And culture in its broadest sense is the pull for such people, as it is what makes a place worth living in. But educated families and skilled people won’t remain in, or relocate to, the North unless it has the institutions and culture they expect to enjoy.

And then to suggest that the reluctant move of a bit of Channel 4 to somewhere outside London is how you resolve this void. It all reads like "there's nothing do do in The North", it's a cultural wasteland dominated by Blond's conception of a "working-class monoculture" stretching from Sheffield to Carlisle. And, of course, working-class people don't have the sort of culture that would appeal to Jeremy and Jocasta!

This concentration on the city and failed urban places is, I think, where our analyses of The North go wrong. Airedale, where I live, is doing OK - not brilliantly but pretty well. It has decent enough schools, work ranging from traditional manufacturing through to modern financial services and tech business. And it's a short train ride into Leeds or Bradford. What it isn't is some sort of modish caricature of "working-class monoculture", quite the reverse, it's increasingly full of regular middle-class folk not so very different from those in Cheam or Epping. We'd welcome Channel 4 in Bingley - it might become a little less achingly leftist - but we don't need it because we lack culture.

A decade ago we drew up an Airedale Masterplan and Strategy, an ambitious vision of the valley and its communities. At the heart of this vision was the idea that we'd been ignoring our biggest asset for 100 years - the hills, moors and woods that dominate every vista. It's this realisation that changed how we saw our place and, on a larger scale, it's what The North should do. Forget about that "working class monoculture" for a minute and ask whether The North's biggest asset is is countryside, its market towns, its villages and its hills? When we talk about the Northern Powerhouse it's about how fast we can get from Liverpool to Manchester to Leeds, how these cities should be "economic hubs", and how we should throw money into universities, inclusive growth strategies and strategic rail systems. But this is how every struggling region, every challenged city, talks - from the US mid-west, to the Po Valley and Naples. With the same results - no change followed by another strategy, another place marketing campaign, another complaint about the lack of investment.

Perhaps The North should turn itself round, face away from its inner urban places and look instead at those hills, rivers, coastlines, lakes and forests. When rich tourists talk about Tuscany, they don't talk about Livorno with its high unemployment, declining industry (and probably an Italian version of a working-class monoculture), they talk about Siena, Chianti and San Gimignano. Maybe, when we talk of The North, we should stop trying to pretend it's any more working-class than say Crawley, Harlow or Sittingbourne, and instead point out that with York, Ripon, Whitby, Durham and the Lake District, we have a cornucopia of fantastic heritage and culture as good as anywhere in Europe.

I realise that this doesn't get rid of the issues that many places face - lack of good infrastructure, poor schools and something of an image problem - but it would shift the narrative from "please Mr London but something in our begging bowl" to "Hey you southerners get a slice of what we've got - and check out these house prices". Our biggest assets are not the big cities, they're our problem.

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We should charge ramblers for using country paths (or reintroduce wolves)

I was going to write about 'rewilding' - you know the idea that the supposed dominant activity in Great Britain's uplands (farming) is now redundant and only sustained to provide a cover for the real dominant activity (outdoor leisure). So we get rid of the sheep farmers and replace them with nothing except a restocked wilderness. And what an appealing idea as those woods and beasts return - beavers, pine marten, otters, lynx and wild boar (maybe even wolves).

For some this is a mission of rescue. Here's uber-townie Nick Cohen in an article that manages to combine warnings about both Brexit and climate change - something of an achievement:

Rewilding the fells is not just townies forcing their naive fantasies on the countryside. It is a hard-headed policy: in a tiny way, it will help offset global warming; more tangibly, it will slow the floodwaters climate change is bringing. It will also be popular. If you doubt me, look at how many go to see the new beaver colonies in Scotland or the wetlands in East Anglia and Somerset. Or listen to the sympathetic hearings plans to reintroduce lynx to the Kielder Forest receive. Look even at the seeds on sale in supermarkets and notice how popular the wildflowers we once dismissed as weeds have become.

Now I've no doubt that it will be popular - after all we have millions of folk who like nothing better than a walk in our countryside. Indeed Nick Cohen waxes lyrical about his childhood holidays tramping the Lakeland fells (where I might well have passed him on similar childhood rambles). Cohen also notes that the money in farming subsidy is, in effect, a payment to look after the features of the fells - walls, paths, cairns, stiles - plus the signposts we all need so we don't get lost.

The problem is that the National Trust isn't going to buy up millions of acres of upland sheep pasture because most of it isn't for sale or likely to be for sale any time soon. It's true that upland sheep farming is uneconomic and unsustainable - farms are barely viable even with subsidy and welfare benefits. But the rewilding described by Cohen and others is expensive - the restocking with animals isn't simply catch and release but a complicated process of breeding, assessment and habitat preparation. This works on a small scale where charities and paying customers can make it work but to achieve a substantive change on the scale that really would mean a 'rewilded' uplands only comes from the willingness of national government to stump up the millions needed to buy the land and develop the programmes needed to recreate a wilderness not seen for several thousand years.

And there's a reason for all this. The millions of us who take to the by-ways, hills and woods of Great Britain every weekend aren't willing to pay directly for the privilege of using the countryside. We'll fork out plenty of money for fine boots, expensive rainwear, camelbacks, rucksacks, walking poles - all the paraphernalia of country pursuits, but we'll then moan about a £2.50 parking charge. And when this is pointed out - in the context of local councils having less money to support footpath maintenance and such - we're told this is 'scoffing'.

It's time we looked at ways to capture the value people get from our countryside - not through council tax (or any other tax) but through the people using the countryside for leisure and pleasure paying for that privilege. We expect fishermen to buy a licence, when folk use a gym they pay, cricketers and footballers pay to play their sports, and even elderly badminton players fork out for the village hall. How about we start thinking about people paying to use all those paths, styles, bridges and steps that are maintained mostly for free by farmers and other landowners. Currently the fishing rod licence is £27 for a full year (with concessions for the retired and for children). Hardly an imposition for someone prepared to pay over £100 for a pair or boots or an anorak.

It's a thought.

Or we could reintroduce wolves?
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Rambler gets pleasure from rambling but does he pay?

Looking after stiles is the landowners responsibility. That is when they're not fretting about the ramblers dogs worrying the sheep or the fallen stone wall (where some walkers have decided it's a short cut) that means he can't graze cows in that field. Or filling in interminable forms rained down upon him from assorted parts of national and local government. Nope, the priority is to fix a stile so Mick Melvin doesn't rip his anorak:

The president of a Bradford rambling group has called for action on “dangerous” stiles on walking routes in the district.

Mick Melvin, of the Bradford CHA Rambling and Social Club, said on an average day walkers would have a problem with up to five per cent of the stiles they came across.

He said many stiles in the district presented a danger to walkers, young or old. He said he wanted to see landowners take responsibility for problem stiles on their land, and for the Council to take action if that did not happen. 

What Mick means, of course, is that those landowners should pay - in time and money - to ensure he can have his walking pleasure. A walking pleasure for which Mick doesn't pay and has no intention of paying. Despite this Mick and his walking buddies are prepared to pay £200 for a waterproof jacket, £150 for a pair of boots, £30 or so for those funny ski pole things and so on through rucksacks, nice warm hats and a host of other items.

What Mick isn't prepared to pay towards is keeping the place he walks spic and span, fixing those stiles, mending walls, cutting back weeds and shoring up paths worn out by the passing tramp of boots. Perhaps he should consider that as an option? Somehow I fear Mick and his mates will still turn first to the Council and then moan to the local paper. Sad really.

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How to create a housing crisis - remove the right to develop!

Amidst all the special pleading and NIMBY critiques of proposals to change the planning system – you know make it a little simpler so as to allow decisions on development to make some sense just occasionally – not many people have stopped to think.

Firstly, when I say planners are anti-business and anti-market I mean it. This doesn’t make them evil but it does reflect the fact that the planner’s job is to control development (these days, in a fit of correctness, it is termed “development management”). So, whatever those planners might say, their activity represents a cost to the developer – to business – that distorts the market. However much this ‘development management’ might be a good thing, its advocates cannot argue that they do not distort the market and add costs to development.

Secondly the idea of devolving planning responsibility to local communities is a good one. For years planning decisions have been made in the context of a room filled with seemingly endless policies, statements, guidance and precedence leaving the local councillors charged with the decision (subject to costly appeal of course) with little or no choice. Replacing this vast overload of regulation with 52 pages of a National Planning Policy Framework (ideally enshrined in statute and therefore not subject to the usual ministerial mission creep) is a good thing. As indeed is recognising that communities can and should be allowed a substantial input to the rules under which development decisions in their community are made.

But this devolution requires a balance – a protection against the inevitable NIMBY and BANANA objections. We have to state – right at the top of the page in big capital letters – that, ceteris paribus, the owner of a property has a right to develop that property. And to profit from that development if that is his intention. If we do not have this right, we grant to neighbours the power – given the tyranny of democracy – to stop any development.

The proposed “presumption” in favour of “sustainable” development does precisely this – it recognises that the planning system already presumes in favour of development (if the plan says a piece of land is housing land it will be developed as such however much neighbours campaign to stop the development) and adds a caveat of “sustainability” that may or may not actually mean something. There is little substantially different in this from the current over-complex system.

The challenge for local communities is to take the offer on the table – and local councils should support them in this – and develop plans that allow for housing development, that recognise the need for rented housing and that are determined by local need and demand rather than by the decisions of some distant bureaucrat who has never visited nor is likely to visit.

In Cullingworth, increasing the size of the village by around 10% would not be a problem – this is 100-150 houses and there are existing permissions for around 70 already. The remainder could come from developing sites within the current village boundary and permitting the conversion of redundant agricultural buildings to residential use. This would not impact on the ‘green belt’ nor would it need to be done in one fell swoop - it could be spread across a flexible ten-year plan period.

Scale this sort of locally-led approach to development up across the country – assume that current permissions will be developed and that historic designations for housing (however much we may not support them) will remain – and the one million or so houses we need can be delivered without the sort of high profile “they’re concreting over the countryside” campaigns we are familiar with through the pages of the newspapers.

It is this approach that could come from the localism proposals and the limiting of national direction over planning. But we cannot further nationalise property rights by removing the presumption in favour of development – that would be wrong and, just as bad, would make existing challenges meeting housing need, especially in the south east into a real crisis.

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Making hay while the sun shines...

Sunday - a day worshipping the wonders of nature. And where better to do that than in Swaledale one of the northenmost of Yorkshire's dales. The walk from Muker along the Swale takes in the hay meadows - perhaps past their best now if you're a wild flower fan (but maybe not so bad if, like me, you're a hayfever sufferer) and you can wind onto the top of the hill there to look back down the valley. A dale that shifts - almost abruptly -  from steep-sided, wooded and close to wide, sleepy slow and sheep grazed.

And it was busy. Not just with the walkers and trial bikers. Nor even with the lazier tourists enjoying the sunshine in Swaledale's villages. But with hay-making. From the top of the hill you could look over the fields below and in every direction - as if in some competition - hay was being made. Tractors scuttling up and the fields, cutting, turning and baling the hay - the food for all those sheep and cows looking on with their perennially bemused expressions from neighbouring fields.

All this - the meadows, the sheep, the walls, the paths. And especially the tractors making hay. All this reminds us that the beauty of this dale is not just a random bounty from nature but has been shaped by man. Indeed, is still being shaped by man as we look after the paths, add new fences, plants woods and make sure the river stays in its banks through the villages. Nature needs business - the frantic scrabbling of humans - for it to show its wonders best. Just as the gardener carefully tends the rose so it shows best, the farmer, gamekeeper and forester shape the countryside's beauty in a way that makes for what we cherish.

And we get it for free. Perhaps we should consider that more when we're stuck behind a tractor or help up by some sheep or when the muckspreading leaves a little odour hanging in the air. Without these things, would those places - that countryside - be quite as wonderful?

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Scrumping, foraging and mushrooming - they'd rather you didn't you know!

The Food Standards Agency is a QUANGO that should have gone in the great cull – and their wild food advice tells us why:

…the traditional harvest-time pursuit of hedgerow-picking has been targeted by a government quango that says children should not gather wild food unsupervised. The Food Standards Agency (FSA), which escaped last week's money-saving cull of public bodies, has also warned against eating anything that hasn't been washed or fruit that is "unhealthy looking" or "bruised".

It isn’t that children shouldn’t have what is and isn’t edible pointed out to them – that’s a good idea (that sadly the FSA’s advice fails to provide at all) – but that scrumping is bad for those children. What kind of message does it send out if everything has to be sanitized and decontaminated before little Jenny or Miles can eat it? What ever happened to the old advice – “you’ve got to eat a peck* of dirt before you die”?

However, what I found most interesting was the little threat in the FSA’s advice on wild food foraging:

Under the 1981 Wildlife and Countryside Act it is illegal to uproot any wild plant without the permission of the owner or occupier of the land. It is also illegal to pick, uproot, collect the seed from, or sell, any of particularly rare or vulnerable species.

Which I guess brings us to Epping Forest, where the City of London (who for odd historical reasons own said woods) has been gleefully prosecuting people for mushrooming:

Epping Forest keepers have warned that people will be prosecuted if they continue to pick mushrooms at one of London’s most historic open spaces. Illegal fungi picking has reached record highs this year at the Forest which has been declared a Site of Special Scientific Interest partly because of the diversity of fungi found there.

Apparently all this is for our own good:

It is dangerous for the public to pick mushrooms from the wild as poisonous mushrooms can be commonly confused with edible ones.

Not really – there have been about 200 or so reported cases of possible mushroom poisoning but nearly all of these relate to precautionary actions by parents whose small children have eaten a mushroom. In truth most mushrooms aren’t poisonous – they just don’t taste very nice!

The City of London goes on to say that mushrooming affects the ecology of the forest. Now I’m not going to get all mycological here but, if mushrooms are gathered properly, the impact on the ecology is minimal. I agree that there’s a case for making sure mushroomers know what they’re doing and perhaps a case – as we do with fishing – for selling licenses to gather mushrooms. And lo, that was the case:

The Fungi Licensing Scheme - introduced in Epping Forest in 2004 - has been terminated to help protect the genetic stock of fungi in the Forest. Licenses are currently granted for fungi research or organised educational fungi courses only and will not be issued for personal or private consumption

I’m sure that the genetic stock isn’t remotely bothered – collection for ‘research’ isn’t objectively any different from collecting for dinner. It would be much more honest for the City of London to have issued a limited number of licenses auctioned off to the highest bidder. This would have had the added benefit of providing a degree of self-policing as those who have paid for the rights will act to protect those rights. Not to mention some income to support forest management!

But then that would be too obvious wouldn’t it?

With foraging increasing as a pastime – and that’s what it is – we have reached the stage where authorities have noticed and, as ever, the default position of government everywhere is to stop something uncontrolled happening. By a combination of idiotic, counter-productive and threatening regulation and passive-aggressive warnings, authorities like the Epping Forest Keepers and the Food Standards Agency hope to keep us all safely consuming vacuum-packed, processed, tasteless and soul-less food purchased from shining, sanitized shelves in supermarkets.

Ignore them folks – get out there, enjoy your countryside, scrump if you want to, forage for the good things and hunt, shoot or trap the game. If more do these things we’ll get away from the stifling, scrubbed, unhealthy, bunny-hugging urban world and back to understanding how we’re part and parcel of nature. Back to appreciating the magic of nature’s bounty, to protecting it for that bounty and to using it for our personal purposes where right to do so.

As Kipling put if in ‘The Land’:

_Georgii Quinti Anno Sexto_, I, who own the River-field,
Am fortified with title-deeds, attested, signed and sealed,
Guaranteeing me, my assigns, my executors and heirs
All sorts of powers and profits which--are neither mine nor theirs.

I have rights of chase and warren, as my dignity requires.
I can fish--but Hobden tickles. I can shoot--but Hobden wires.
I repair, but he reopens, certain gaps which, men allege,
Have been used by every Hobden since a Hobden swapped a hedge.

Shall I dog his morning progress o'er the track-betraying dew?
Demand his dinner-basket into which my pheasant flew?
Confiscate his evening faggot into which the conies ran,
And summons him to judgment? I would sooner summons Pan.

His dead are in the churchyard--thirty generations laid.
Their names went down in Domesday Book when Domesday Book was made.
And the passion and the piety and prowess of his line
Have seeded, rooted, fruited in some land the Law calls mine.

Not for any beast that burrows, not for any bird that flies,
Would I lose his large sound council, miss his keen amending eyes.
He is bailiff, woodman, wheelwright, field-surveyor, engineer,
And if flagrantly a poacher--'tain't for me to interfere.

'Hob, what about that River-bit?' I turn to him again
With Fabricius and Ogier and William of Warenne.
'Hev it jest as you've a mind to, _but_'--and so he takes command.
For whoever pays the taxes old Mus' Hobden owns the land.

*For those not brought up on proper measures, a peck is two dry gallons or a quarter of a bushel