My Lords, it is a pleasure to take part in this debate and particularly to listen to the powerful and incisive speech of the noble Lord, Lord Rosser. I seek to add to the content of the debate rather than to repeat what has been said, but I could not resist rising to support entirely the regret Motion tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts. It is not often that your Lordships’ House sees the two of us aligned, but it reflects the fact that, all around this House, every speech has expressed great regret, not just in technical but in real terms, about the direction that the Government are taking on these public rights of way.
I will very briefly set this in historical context. Since the election of Margaret Thatcher, 10% of what was public land in the UK has been sold into private hands. If we look back to centuries before that, it is one long tale of enclosure, of the public being excluded from more and more land. The real tragedy of the commons is that they were stolen from the people. Today, we are not talking about ownership but about rights of way: the right to walk on our own land. Maybe that path up the hill towards the church was once how people visited a family grave. Maybe the path between one village and the next was how courting couples got together and how, historically, families were created. We might make different uses of those rights of way today, but they should still exist. This country is sometimes referred to as a property-owning democracy, yet 40,000 land millionaires, 0.06% of the population, own nearly half our land.
We are in a situation where people have rights which are threatened with being cut off. I pick up one point that was highlighted in the excellent Ramblers briefing. As the Government are presenting this to us, it was never intended that paths in current use would not be cut off, yet our current arrangements are that this could be happening. These days with social media and mobile phones—I am probably not the only one with a walking app that often records the route that I took in various places—there may well be a great deal of data indicating that footpaths are in use. However, I invite your Lordships to consider for a second, as many others have referred to, how difficult it would be for volunteers and small local organisations to collect and collate all that data to provide the proof that is needed. That is not something that will happen quickly. We have lost so many rights. Let us not lose any more.