Commons Bill [Lords]

I entirely agree. We do not want unlawful fencing. We do not want those wild open spaces to be cordoned off so that people cannot use them, we do not want miles of barbed wire so that people get tangled up in it—but we do not want people to fall down holes. The simple examples that I shall give the Minister are not original; I gave them in Committee. But if the Bill were already law, by this time of the year the Minister would probably have 1,000 applications on his desk from Cumbria alone. Why? If I read the law correctly, at this time of year the bulk of those applications would be for permission to put up a few gates for a few days—a few weeks at most—to separate the sheep from the lambs. Sheep may now be out on the fells with the lambs. They may be nearer to the in-bye land. Farmers will not drive them all into the sheds to separate them; what they will do, at times, is take out a few gates, wooden or steel, put up a temporary pen, and then do some separation work. They will do it when they are doing the lug-tagging—putting the ear tags on. They will find a corner where two stone walls come together, and put up a temporary pen there. That happens every day of every week of the year in Cumbria, and no doubt in other sheep areas. Those pens do not stay up permanently. The common is not fenced off. The pen provides a little sheep fank in which a farmer can work with his sheep for a day, or a couple of days. Then he will take the pen down and move on. That is happening all over Cumbria. We have thousands of miles of stone walls in Cumbria, all built in the 19th century. Some of them look splendid, but most are teetering and a great many have fallen down. Every day of the year a bit of stone wall falls down on some Cumbrian common. If the commoners—the farmers—do not have time to fix the wall immediately, they will stick 10 ft of sheep netting or electric fencing around it. Over a period of two or three weeks they will rebuild the wall, a bit at a time, each day when they are checking the sheep. Those farmers are law-abiding people, but there is no way they are going to write to a national authority saying ““A bit of my wall has fallen down; may I please have permission to stick up 6 ft of electric fencing?”” That is just not going to happen, and those people will be breaking the law. A wet hole may suddenly appear on a common. Again, we are not talking about a village green; we are talking about tens of thousands of acres of moorland and rough fell—some of the wildest, roughest land in the country. There are little bogs and hollows. Sheep fall in, so a farmer will try to fence off a circle around the hole, perhaps 10 or 20 ft in diameter. Given the right-to-roam provisions—which we all welcome—what is the legal obligation? If a farmer goes out one morning and finds a dead sheep in a little hole in a boggy bit of land, does he do nothing to fence it off? Some of the stone walls are very high, particularly when the banking beneath them has been undermined. If a farmer suddenly finds that a stone wall is about to fall down, does he do nothing about it? Or does he go to the farm office, eat his morning snack and start applying to the Minister for permission to fence off the bit of wall for a period? That ain’t going to happen.