Stuck in reverse: Lake District National Park transport plans

Friends of the Lake District believes that the new five-year plan for the Lake District National Park, due to be adopted on 24 June, represents a step backwards in relation to its ambitions and objectives for transport.

Lorayne Wall, joint acting CEO of Friends of the Lake District said: “when presented with this new Plan, the National Park Authority has two choices: to reject the weak transport objectives put before it and revert to the more progressive objectives set out in both its own 2040 Smarter Travel Vision and in its current Plan, or to accept the Plan as tabled but apply more ambition to its delivery. Taking a third option of accepting the Plan and delivering equally unambitious actions would kick any hope of the transformational approach to transport that the Lake District needs yet further down the road. We urge the Authority not to take this retrograde step.” ¹

The National Park’s new plan was developed by the Lake District National Park Partnership, a multi-stakeholder forum comprising representatives of business, civil society and the two Cumbrian unitary authorities, as well as the National Park Authority itself. While parts of the Plan show a genuine, collective commitment to improve the National Park for both nature and local communities, it offers little hope for change to the current situation in which 90% of visitors use private transport to travel to and around the Lake District. By causing congestion, blocking access and damaging verges, this harms nature, frustrates locals and compromises the enjoyment of the landscape for visitors. The lack of ambition in the wording and objectives relating to transport is an unacceptable response to the scale of the issues themselves and runs contrary to the Park’s statutory Purposes and Duties. ²

At stake too is the relationship between the National Park Authority and the National Park Partnership and in particular whether the Authority is bound to adhere to plans proposed by the Partnership, especially when to do so would represent a minimalist interpretation of its responsibility to fulfil its Purposes and Duties.

In the case of transport, the Partnership commissioned a Task & Finish Group to look into how to deliver and fund sustainable transport in the Lake District. This Group argued for systemic change in the way people travel around the Park but its conclusions – to develop a vision for sustainable transport in the Lake District and to conduct further research into how to fund it ³ – were rejected by the Partnership and not carried over into the Plan. As such, this serves as an example of how seeking consensus in a multi-stakeholder forum can lead to a lowest common denominator position.

Lorayne Wall concluded: “the Lake District National Park Authority is obliged to fulfil its statutory Purposes and Duties and should not be beholden to approaches proposed by the Partnership that would force them to fail in meeting this obligation. For the Authority to reject the transport section of the Plan or to commit to going beyond it would reaffirm its recognition of the need for systemic change to transport in the Park, while also sending a clear signal as to what the proper relationship between the Partnership and the Authority should be.”

[1] The draft Plan proposes an objective to ‘improve integrated sustainable travel and reduce dependency on private vehicles by working with relevant authorities to create and deliver a plan for improvements in sustainable and active travel’, with the crucial qualifier ‘transformational’ – i.e. transformational improvements – rejected. This runs contrary to the existing Management Plan and the Park’s own Smarter Travel Vision, which has the stated aim to“catalyse transformational change in the way people get to and around the Lake District”.

[2] The National Park has two statutory Purposes: (i) ‘to conserve and enhance the natural beauty, wildlife and cultural heritage of the Lake District National Park’; and (ii) ‘to promote opportunities for the understanding and enjoyment of the special qualities of the National Park by the public’. It has corresponding Duties to seek to further these two Purposes and to seek to ‘foster the economic and social wellbeing of local communities within the National Park by working closely with the agencies and local authorities responsible for these matters, but without incurring significant expenditure’.

[3] The Group’s report was, for a short period, publicly available on the Lake District National Park Authority’s website. Following a redesign of the website, it is no longer available. Copies can be obtained by contacting Friends of the Lake District.