National Parks (Amendment) Bill

Part of the debate – in the House of Commons at 12:00 am on 30 January 1959.

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Photo of Sir Ronald Bell Sir Ronald Bell , Buckinghamshire South 12:00, 30 January 1959

I rise to support and, if need be, to second the Motion of the hon. Member for Newcastle-upon-Tyne, East (Mr. Blenkinsop), because I think that his is a worthy proposition. The individual proposals in the Bill are not, in themselves, ambitious or far-reaching. On the contrary, they are eminently modest and practical.

In broad terms, the purpose of the Bill is to enlarge slightly the competence of the National Parks Commission, and also to enlarge slightly the competence of my right hon. Friend the Minister—an operation that he cannot but view with pleasure, I feel, the more so when that enlarged competence is founded on our old friend, the Land Fund, upon which, on another occasion, I tried to found some other amendments to the law, an attempt that had an outcome less happy than I hope will be the case today.

I think that I can say, not only for myself but for the hon. Member for Newcastle-upon-Tyne, East, that the fact that we seek to enlarge the competence of the National Parks Commission imports no sort of criticism of the county councils within whose areas lie the National Parks. The fact is that in the case of almost all of those counties the area of national park is a relatively small consideration among their many other preoccupations.

It was, perhaps, inevitable—though I think that some people regretted it at the time—that the main responsibility for the National Parks should have been laid upon existing local authorities. So many of them are involved that, in the very nature of things, they face a rather difficult problem. The coordinating body, the body which can, and is designed to see the whole thing from the national standpoint, is the National Parks Commission. In fact, the Commission has a very limited competence. This Bill will still leave that competence very limited, although it does enlarge it very slightly. I think the justification for the Bill is the slow rate of progress which has been made. There has been progress in this concept of National Parks, but it is rather striking that nearly ten years after the passing of the Act there is still not one of the major long-distance routes absolutely complete. That is really remarkable. The amendment which we propose to Section 98 of the 1949 Act will be of some slight help here. Also the amendment which we propose extends the Minister's competence for grant to paths which are not long-distance routes, but to other paths and bridleways in the National Parks. Since those also have lagged behind, this is a very desirable amendment of the law.

It has always struck me as a paradox that in our country, which geologically is an old one, with apparently easily accessible mountains, in practice the mountains should be much less accessible than are the Alps. It is a good deal easier to go for a walk in the Alps than in the Pennines. Whether from the point of view of paths, rights of way, general accessibility or somewhere to sleep at night, it is quite an undertaking to make use of some of the National Park areas in this country. It was, after all, primarily with that in mind that the National Parks Commission was set up. Progress has been too slow by any standard. It still is too difficult to walk about the National Parks, and I should like to see somebody beginning to get a move on.

For those very few reasons, I commend this Bill to the House. There are many provisions in it, and I could say a lot about them, but from considerable experience of Private Members' Fridays I know that the greatest friendship that anyone can show to a Bill at half-past three on a Friday afternoon is brevity, and that act of support of this Bill I intend to confer.