BURNING OUR LAND

 BURNING OUR HERITAGE

BURNING OUR LAND

This case refers again to a Legal Justice Newsletter with Case 1 being on game bird release that I posted yesterday.

 

Case 2: this is a new legal challenge but it builds on the e-action that was supported by 123,000+ people after it was launched on Hen Harrier Day 2020 (see here) where we asked, among other things, for regulation of burning of vegetation on peatlands.

 

DEFRA has brought in measures which limit, to some extent, burning of upland vegetation but the measures cover, at best, only 40% of the resource (see here for details of the faults).  The DEFRA proposals have been roundly criticised by non-governmental organisations, by a parliamentary committee and in a special debate in the House of Lords (see here).

 

We have four grounds for requiring DEFRA to do a better job of drafting their Burning Regulations;

 

• Ground 1: Unlawfulness arising from the Burning Regulations frustrating their own purpose
• Ground 2: Demonstrable flaw in the reasoning or serious logical error in the reasoning leading to the making of the Burning Regulations
• Ground 3: Breaches of the Habitats Regulations 2017
• Ground 4: Failure to take into account Material Considerations, in particular the requirements to act swiftly to limit the emission of greenhouse gases.

We have asked DEFRA to take urgent steps to amend the Burning Regulations to avoid the errors set out above.