Commons Bill [Lords]

Amendment No. 23 is an important amendment and I congratulate the Minister on listening to the representations made in Committee. It is important that those who earn a living from the land should have more say on how the commons are managed than those who are just living in the area. There is an increasing tendency these days, as farming declines and particularly some of the small farms at the foot of the hills decline, for them to be bought out by offcomers like myself, as they would say in Cumbria—a large number of people who do not earn a living from the land but are buying up farmhouses or farms; and suddenly, one discovers that one has some extraordinary rights of common. I think—I can only say ““think”” because I am not certain; it is my negligence—that for the past 10 years I owned some rights to cut peat on Mungrisdale common. I did not exercise them and I have sold that house now, so I shall not be exercising them, but it is not too farfetched to imagine a situation where so many of us who are not practising farmers buy houses or land—we buy our quaint little bit of old England—and then we want to freeze things in aspic. We do not want to let modern farming practices continue and we do not want to see sheep around, breaking into the garden. We do not want grazing. We do not want this or that. It is important that the minority, in some cases, who may be actually carrying on the practice of farming the commons, and managing them and keeping them in their current condition, have a much greater say in how they are run than those people who just buy a bit of land and suddenly find that they have a grazing right, a peat-cutting right or a heather-burning right and do not intend to do anything with it. Again, I know that the Minister cannot be specific about what weight he will attach to five representations from one side and 10 from the other. He cannot be formulaic about it, but we need assurances on the mechanics of how he will listen more to the views of practising commoners, rather than those who have merely acquired a piece of land. That is probably going to be an increasing problem that we face in rural England in the management of commons over the next few years.