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Historic Rights of Way

My Lords, this debate is about historic rights of way: those that have never been registered but existed before 1949. I want to talk about the procedural and technical problems involved in historic rights of way, so I will not talk about their value and so on. I assume for the purposes of this debate that that is a given and people do not need an explanation of why they are such a good thing. I thank in particular the British Horse Society, the Ramblers, the Open Spaces Society and the Trails Trust for the wonderful briefings they have sent. I declare an interest as vice-president of the Open Spaces Society. I also thank everybody who has put their name down to speak in this debate.

It all started with the CRoW Act in 2000, so I decided to look up what I said in the debate on the Bill as it went through the Lords. On 26 June 2000, which seems a remarkably long time ago, I was talking about resolving conflict over local rights of way et cetera. This, I said,

“must, essentially, take place at local level. As it stands, the Bill relies too much on national quangos sorting things out when what is really required is for local people on the ground to negotiate with each other in a sensible way”.—[Official Report, 26/6/00; col. 671.]

I do not believe we thought at the time that nearly 20 years later we would still be talking about the problems.

Sections 53 to 56 of the CRoW Act set out the process for claiming old, unclaimed historic rights of way—crucially, with a cut-off date of 1 January 2026. Any that have not been claimed by then will cease to exist for ever, although with the possibility under Section 56 of an extension by regulations to 2036.

The passage I have just quoted was, in retrospect, a bit naive. Things are not quite as simple as I thought at the time—but we have seen in the system for claiming historic rights of way the worst of all worlds: national inaction and delays, half-hearted efforts to get things going, followed by more inaction and delays. Local authorities have sometimes tried and sometimes been unwilling; they are increasingly unable to cope because of financial cuts. There is an increasing reliance on local groups, charities and volunteers to sort this out. They are wholly underresourced, frustrated and dismayed by the hopelessness of the task.

According to a freedom of information request from the Ramblers, 4,400 or more applications are stuck in the system. What happened? First, the Countryside Agency set up the Discovering Lost Ways project in 2004. That was closed down three years later, with four new rights of way registered. In 2008, Natural England set up the Stakeholder Working Group on Unrecorded Public Rights of Way, a body which consisted of local authorities, user groups, landowners and management interests, and really did get people together to thrash things out. It produced the Stepping Forward report in 2010 with 32 recommendations. Five more years went by before the Deregulation Act 2015 legislated for many of the recommendations in Stepping Forward. Another five years have now gone by and nothing has happened. We are still waiting for that part of the Deregulation Act to be brought into play through regulations.

I was going to quote what the Minister in the Commons said about the Act in 2000 but the noble Baroness, Lady Taylor, is here and she can give evidence.