My Lords, I support these Motions from a particular perspective. Back in 1993, I was first elected to Suffolk County Council. Somewhat to my surprise, I found myself chairing the rights of way committee, a position that I held for some years. With all the experience that I gleaned, I can do nothing but agree with all the comments that have been made tonight.
When I was first learning about rights of way, I came across a summing-up by Lord Denning in which he said that nothing excites an Englishman so much as a footpath—I always thought that said rather a lot about Englishmen. Nevertheless, what I learned pretty quickly from that is that you have the coming together of two polar opposites. On the one hand there is the right of access, often historic, that people want to exercise, and on the other, “This is my land, it is private and I do not want anyone on it”. These are often irreconcilable. However, I also learned very quickly that, as public bodies and as legislators, it is not our job to pick a side but somehow to find a way of bringing them together. This is what saddens me about current proposals: they do not do that; they are partial and have come down on the side of the landowners.
The stakeholder working group, which other noble Lords have mentioned and which brought together local authorities, landowners and user groups, was able to come up with a consensus report. It is worth
reflecting on how nigh-on impossible that must have been, and yet the stakeholder working group did that. That ought to be a gift to the Government, to say, “Here is a package on which all the stakeholders agreed”. Yet the Government have taken one piece of that and ignored all the rest, despite the conclusions of the group that
“implementation of the proposals in full is crucial to preserving the balanced nature of the package”.
It is a real pity that, all this time later, we have not moved; in fact, this is a massively retrograde step.
As we have heard, we do not have information about the exemptions from the cut-off date. There are some really important categories of rights of way here. Many paths in urban areas have never been on a definitive map and yet are used all the time. There are paths which are already in use. Where I take issue with the speech, with which I otherwise agreed, from the noble Lord, Lord Thurlow, is that they are often not long forgotten and ill-used; many of them have been used for hundreds of years and still are but just happen not to have been recorded. It would be tragic if they were to be lost. Then there is the backlog of which we have heard: what is the status of those for which applications have already been made?
I want to finish by agreeing with noble Lords who share my disbelief at the Explanatory Memorandum, which says there will be no significant impact on the voluntary or public sectors, because that is palpable nonsense. Local authorities, as we have heard, already have a massive backlog and are hugely strapped for cash. If you are running a local authority and you have limited legal support, are you going to put it into childcare or public rights of way? That is the reality that many of them are facing. All that will happen is that the backlog will get larger. Who is putting in these claims? They are being put in by volunteers from various user groups. In all the years I chaired the rights of way committee, I never saw a specious claim. Every one of them had been immaculately researched, often over many years, and although occasionally we would disagree on the point of law or its interpretation, they were made in good faith and deserved proper consideration. How volunteers are to carry on working against this sort of deadline, and produce that quality of work, defies belief.
I urge government to prioritise the regulations governing these historical paths and the exemptions from the cut-off date, and to set out how government funding can be used to support the work of both local authorities and the voluntary sector, if we are not to lose them for ever.