Natural England

Update on mapping open country & registered common land – 17 April 2002

With the initial stage well under way in the south east1 and lower north west2 of England, the Countryside Agency has begun work on a third area, central southern3 England, learning lessons from the first two regions.

The Countryside Agency will identify where open country and registered common land occurs.   This is part of the process that will provide people with the right to walk over 4,000 square miles of English countryside under the Countryside & Rights of Way Act.   Public consultation on the draft maps for central southern England will start at the beginning of September 2002, for three months.   This is slightly later than originally planned, to allow time for the acquisition and use of high quality aerial photography to fill gaps in existing data for the area.

Draft maps of the south east and lower north west were subject to three months of public consultation which ended in February.   The Countryside Agency received over 8,000 comments on these first two maps and is considering these at the moment.   Provisional maps, which may contain amendments reflecting these comments, will be published in July 2002 (for the south east) and September 2002 (for the lower north west). This will provide time for thorough consideration of all the representations.   The target date for producing the last of the provisional maps (Spring 2004) and for the introduction of the new rights throughout England (end of 2005) are unchanged (full timetable attached).  

Pam Warhurst, Countryside Agency deputy chair, said: “We’re very pleased with the strong response that we’ve had to public consultation on the draft maps.   We received a good number of comments from all types of people on all sorts of issues, which is exactly what the consultation process is about.

“We are giving every comment careful consideration and I’ve no doubt that the provisional maps will be better for it.   We have modified the timetable for the roll out of the remaining maps, to give ourselves time to use new sources of data (like aerial photography), and to make time to do some additional fieldwork. But the target date for the production of provisional maps for the whole country remains as it was and the Government are committed to making the new rights available across England by the end of 2005.”

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Notes to editors:

For further information please contact the Countryside Agency press office on 020 7340 2909/7/6 

1 The south east of England covers Kent, Surrey, East and West Sussex and outer London boroughs of Bexley, Bromley, Croydon, Hillingdon, Hounslow, Kingston upon Thames, Merton, Richmond upon Thames and Sutton.

2 The lower north west of England covers Lancashire (excluding a small area north of the A65), a small part of Cumbria south of the A65, part of North Yorkshire (including Craven), part of West Yorkshire (including Bradford, Calderdale and Kirklees), Merseyside, Greater Manchester, Cheshire, and parts of Staffordshire, Derbyshire and South Yorkshire in the Peak District National Park.

3 Central southern England covers South Gloucestershire, Bristol, Somerset (excluding West Somerset and Taunton Deane), Wiltshire, part of Berkshire, Dorset, Hampshire and the Isle of Wight.   When the draft maps for this area are published people will have three months to comment on them.   They will be available on the Countryside Agency website, at roadshows which the Countryside Agency is holding around the area, at some local authority offices and public libraries.   Parish councils across the area being mapped will also be sent a map covering their parish.

Once the provisional maps for the south east and lower north west are published, people with a legal interest in the land - land owners, tenants and holders of common rights - will be able to appeal to the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs if they think land shown as open country or registered common land is incorrectly identified.

Mapping timetable

The Countryside Agency expects conclusive maps to be issued 6-12 months after the provisional maps are issued.   The exact timing will be dependent on the number of appeals which the Planning Inspectorate have to hear.

Mapping registered common land and open country in England:

Progress report from the Countryside Agency.

The Countryside and Rights of Way Act 2000 paves the way for the introduction of new rights of access to substantial areas of England and Wales.   Government are committed to introduce the new rights before the end of 2005.  

The Countryside Agency are producing maps of those areas of open country (comprising mountain, moor, heath and down) and registered common where the new rights will exist.    Work started in January 2001 on maps for the North West and South East of England. 

Regions 1 and 2

On the 12th November 2001   the Agency commenced a three month period of public consultation on the draft maps for these lead regions. During this period we:

Ÿ        distributed 7750 draft map sheets to statutory consultees;

Ÿ        distributed 350,000 information leaflets;

Ÿ        held 19 roadshows in the lower north west and 16 in the south east, attended by   more than 3300 people;

Ÿ        answered over 6000 questions on the access helpline; and 

Ÿ        received over 6 million hits on the website where these maps could be viewed. 

By the time the consultation closed on the 12th February 2002 the Countryside Agency had received over 8000 comments on the draft map.   68% of these related to the lower north west draft map and 32% to the south east draft map. 

We were pleased with the constructive participation in the consultation process from a wide range of interests. We are now considering these comments and assessing whether changes need to be made before ‘provisional’ maps are issued for these areas.    Aerial photography and site visits are being used to supplement existing survey material, to ensure that the provisional map is an accurate representation of registered common land and open country.

As well as reviewing the comments received during these first consultations, the Agency have reviewed the general approach that was used to produce these maps (the ‘mapping methodology’), to take advantage of the experience gained.    The   methodology has proved to be generally robust and we intend to continue to use it for the remainder of the mapping process, with the following minor changes: 

a)   we intend to change slightly the way that we use the criteria we set for assessing whether areas smaller than 5 hectares should be included as open country.   The effect will be to give us greater choice about whether to include or omit small 

areas of open country from the draft map, based on our judgement of their potential usefulness.   We will use this modified approach to reassess the discrete areas of open country of less than 5 hectares which are shown on the draft maps of regions 1 and 2, before we publish the ‘provisional’ maps for these regions.

b)   we will provide some additional explanation of what we mean by, and how in practice we apply, the terms ‘usually of an open character’ (in relation to moor) and ‘of a generally open character’ (in relation to heath).   This will clarify existing practice rather than change it.

c) we will in future make more extensive use of modern high resolution aerial photography as a primary data source, especially (but not solely) where other data is sparse or unreliable.

Regions 3 to 8

Good progress is being made with mapping region 3 (central southern England).   To date Hampshire, Dorset, Somerset and part of Berkshire have been mapped and the Agency is conducting quality checks on these areas. 

There are some concerns over the availability of quality data for Wiltshire, the Isle of Wight and a few other areas.   Because of this, the Agency has purchased new aerial photography for much of this region, and will use this, and some fieldwork, to produce the draft map.   This process will delay the publication of the draft map for region 3 until early September. 

Initial data collection is underway for region 4   (the upper north west).    The primary data sets have been collected and evaluated and mapping will start in May.    Publication of the draft map for region 4 will be in October, one month later than originally planned, in order to make sure that thorough quality checking takes place of the location and boundaries of what is expected to be quite extensive areas of open country.

The timetable for the publication of draft and provisional maps for regions 5 to 8 have been modified slightly to make the huge printing, distribution and consultation processes fit together more efficiently from a process management point of view. The new dates (which are listed on the above timetable) vary by a few weeks from those originally set, and the target of March 2004 for the completion of provisional mapping for England remains unchanged.   We expect the process of hearing appeals and producing a conclusive map to take between 6 and 12 months following each provisional map.