Sporting rights — what continues, what is constrained

Shooting rights, sporting tenancies, predator control under the General Licences, and walked-up shooting are existing private rights. The Ure Dales Landscape Recovery scheme does not extinguish them, does not require landowners to surrender them, and does not transfer them to the scheme’s Single Legal Entity.

Where sporting practice and the scheme’s ecological aims pull in different directions — for example, intensive driven-grouse management and peatland restoration on deep peat — the constraints come mostly from existing statute, not from this scheme. Some of those constraints have tightened over the last few years and are continuing to tighten. The scheme inherits that landscape; it does not create it.

• Sporting rights as part of the freehold or as separately held rights. Where the landowner holds the sporting rights, those rights continue. Where they have been granted to a sporting tenant under a separate sporting lease, that arrangement also continues.
• Predator and pest control under General Licences. Authorised persons can continue to act under GL40 (conservation), GL41 (public health and safety) and GL42 (preventing serious damage to livestock or crops). These are issued by Natural England and apply across England independently of any scheme membership.
• Walked-up shooting and rough shooting.Lower-intensity shooting practices that do not depend on heavy heather burning or extensive medicated grit are unaffected by the scheme’s delivery plans.
• Dog restrictions on grouse moors under CRoW. A landowner managing land for breeding and shooting grouse can apply a restriction of up to five years on dogs being taken onto CRoW access land — a separate, pre-existing route under the Countryside and Rights of Way Act 2000 (see Public access).

Three practices in upland sporting management have direct ecological consequences for the kinds of restoration the Ure Dales scheme aims for. The interaction is worth being honest about.

Heather burning on deep peat

The Heather and Grass etc. Burning (England) Regulations 2021 (SI 2021/158) prohibit burning of specified vegetation on peat over 40 centimetres deep within SSSIs that are also Special Areas of Conservation (SACs) or Special Protection Areas (SPAs), without a licence from the Secretary of State. The 2025 amendment regulations (SI 2025/1000) extend that prohibition to Less Favoured Areas (LFAs) and lower the depth threshold from 40cm to 30cm — bringing the protected area from around 246,000 hectares to over 676,000 hectares.

The peer-reviewed evidence base supporting the regulations — including the EMBER project at the University of Leeds and reviews published in Ibisand similar journals — documents direct effects of repeated burning on deep peat: changes in peat hydrology, carbon flux, water chemistry, and downstream river ecology. The Game and Wildlife Conservation Trust has published a counter-position arguing that careful rotational burning supports certain bird populations and the upland fire-fuel load. The regulatory direction in England is settling on the precautionary view: burning on deep peat without licence is not permitted, and the protected area is expanding.

For Ure Dales delivery plans, the operative point is that the scheme’s ecological obligations on peatland tend to align with what the burning regulations already require. The scheme does not add a new layer of restriction in this area; in most cases, it is consistent with the statute.

Medicated grit and disease management

Use of medicated grit to control strongyle worm in red grouse populations is part of intensive driven-grouse management. There is no scheme-level prohibition on its use. Where a holding has SSSI features within the scheme delivery plan, the grit’s placement and quantity may need to be reflected in the agreed Land Management Plan to avoid inadvertent conflict with water-quality monitoring. This is a co-design conversation, not a unilateral restriction.

Track and infrastructure development

New shooting tracks, butts, parking, and bothies in upland landscapes typically need planning permission and may sit within SSSI or AONB consent processes. None of those existing planning obligations change under the scheme. Where a scheme delivery plan involves restoration of peat-forming habitat, new permanent infrastructure on those parcels would need to be agreed through the same site-specific delivery-plan conversation that governs everything else.

Where the sporting rights have been granted to a sporting tenant under a separate lease, the lease continues on its existing terms. The scheme does not interpose itself between landowner and sporting tenant. Where a holding’s scheme delivery plan would materially affect the sporting tenant’s rights or the practice they are entitled to carry out, that is a conversation between landowner and tenant in the first instance — the same conversation that would happen for any other change in land use.

For sporting income that is tied into the holding’s wider economics, the scheme’s financial model treats it as continuing income from outside the scheme, alongside any agricultural income. The holding’s overall position is the sum of scheme payments, agricultural revenue, sporting income, and any other revenue streams; the scheme does not aggregate or replace these.

There are real precedents of upland sporting estates adjusting management practice to participate in landscape-scale restoration programmes. North Pennines National Landscape (formerly North Pennines AONB Partnership) has run peatland-restoration programmes on or alongside grouse moors for over a decade, including the Pennine PeatLIFE project covering 1,353 hectares across the North Pennines, Yorkshire Dales, and Forest of Bowland. Sporting estates engaged with those programmes have continued shooting while accepting tighter constraints on burning regimes within the relevant peat and SSSI boundaries.

The compatibility, where it has worked, has rested on three things: (i) the burning regulations setting the floor; (ii) site-specific agreement on what management is appropriate for which parcel; (iii) the sporting estate retaining the income, the rights, and the day-to-day decisions outside the agreed restoration parcels.