LARA has received the following email from Natural England:

“… we are not at this point intending to schedule a meeting for October but propose, in line with discussions and actions from the last meeting, to consult with highway authorities re: best practice around TRO use and other vehicle management measures and strategies, with the aim of revising and updating the existing guidance made in two previous publications “Making the Best of Byways”  and  “Regulating the Use of Motor Vehicles” * We will also collate information from the sub-group reports and meeting discussions and contact you if we need any further detail or clarification. We don’t have a definite timescale at the moment but it’s likely to be Spring/Summer 2019 before we have a working draft. In the meantime members are of course welcome to contact us and continue online and face to face discussions.”

* We have slightly re-worded the text of the original email to clarify the two documents to which Natural England refer. Both documents were published in December 2005 and are available from the Government Publications page of this website.

Some background to this decision by Natural England

In the immediate aftermath of the passage of the Deregulation Act 2015 through Parliament, the Minister for Rural Affairs announced the formation of the Motoring Stakeholder Working Group (MSWG). The MSWG was tasked to look at a broad range of issues regarding the recreational use of motor vehicles on unsealed roads (including byways open to all traffic), and had members drawn from local government, land managers, non-motor users, motorists, and organisations seeking to close these roads to drivers. The group was to be facilitated and chaired by Natural England. The first meeting was on 17 November 2016, and the most-recent on 2 May 2018.

The MSWG focused on four principal areas:

• The status of unsealed unclassified roads.
• Traffic regulation: orders and other measures.
• Surface standards and repair.
• Illegal and anti-social driving.

In late 2017 the House of Lords Select Committee on the Natural Environment and Rural Communities Act 2006 heard evidence about how the NERCA Act had changed the pattern of vehicular use of unsealed roads (including byways open to all traffic) and the Trail Riders Fellowship, LARA, and representatives from the anti-motors organisations, submitted written evidence and spoke to the Committee.

The Select Committee’s report, published on 22 March 2018 and available from this link, concluded that the current system of making traffic orders is just not flexible enough ‑ something the motoring groups had stressed in their evidence ‑ and recommended that the Government should move to make the process more effective.

It seems that the Government has now decided to progress the achievements of the MSWG by updating its own 2005 guidance.

What does this mean for LARA and its members?

The motoring members of the MSWG (GLASS, LARA, TRF) will continue to work with Natural England, DEFRA, and other MSWG members, in producing good, effective, and fair guidance on traffic management. LARA and its members remain committed to seeking “as much consensus as possible” via the MSWG in line with the Government’s stated position as made in the House of Lords during the debate on the Select Committee’s report (see above).

As a precursor to our forthcoming update of the LARA Publication on Unsealed Unclassified Roads, we have just published two new LARA Reference Documents; one on Road returns and records, and one on Evidence of public road status. These are extracts from the previous two-volume report, re-published as stand-alone documents cross-referenced from the updated report (which will be single-volume). Both documents are available from the LARA Papers and Reports page of this website. We will shortly be withdrawing the second volume (the Appendices) of the previous report, as this is now totally superceded by re-published Reference Documents.

‘Are all unsealed unclassified roads open to the public with motors?’  That question has been asked and argued over for decades. The answer seems to be that the great majority are, but a few can be shown to be bridleways or (more rarely) footpaths.

We have just published a new LARA Paper which is a collection of letters from government departments, 1983 onwards, stating the government’s view at the time of each letter.

The Paper is available from the LARA – Papers and Reports page in the Reference Documents section of this website.

This issue is also discussed at length in the LARA report, Unsealed Unclassified Roads. Their History, Status, and the Effect of the Natural Environment & Rural Communities Act 2006, due to be updated and re-published very shortly.

Apologies, to those unfamiliar with Rights of Way Terminology, for the cryptic title, but we know it will help those-in-the-know to find this post in the future.

We are often asked whether Local Access Forums (LAFs) have any role in advising on the use of Mechanically Propelled Vehicles (MPVs) on Unsealed Unclassified Roads (UURs). The short answer is No, and this was confirmed to LARA in a letter from DEFRA in November 2012.

For more information see DEFRA’s Guidance on Local Access Forums in England document, now available from the Government Publications page of this website – see Annex A, paragraph 3, on page 29 of the document (page 33/52 in the PDF).

We have published a new Privacy Notice, in advance of the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) coming into force on 25th May 2018.

The House of Lords Select Committee reviewing the NERC Act 2006 published its report last week. You can view/download the complete report as a PDF file from this link. Chapter 6, covering Green Lanes and Rights of Way, starts on page 79 of the report, and the key recommendations are contained in paragraphs 316 and 317 on pages 81 and 82.

Without going into the detail, LARA is quite content with the wording of these paragraphs. We feel that they represent a sensible, and nuanced, appraisal of the current situation which can be usefully referenced to our advantage within the MSWG.

We have been asked questions about LARA’s response to the DEFRA Consultation on “Health and Harmony: the future for food, farming and the environment in a Green Brexit”, launched on 27 February 2018. More information about the Consultation is available here.

LARA has already responded to the Consultation, primarily to point-out that the Consultation document appears to be totally ‘silent’ on non-agricultural land use, with no mention of sport in general, nor motor sport in particular.

LARA’s member organisations are aware of the Consultation, and we know that some will be submitting detailed responses in due course.

At the LARA Steering Committee meeting on 23rd January it was agreed that the LARA Byway Code (November 2017 version) should be withdrawn pending revision. The intention is that a revised and updated Code will be published during Summer 2018.

In the interim, users should refer to the recommendations of the appropriate user organisation:

• Trail riders on motorcycles – The TRF Code of Conduct.
• Recreational 4×4 drivers – The GLASS Code of Conduct.

For motorsport, the procedures for event authorisation cover similar topics to the LARA Byway Code.

After our oral evidence session to the House of Lords Select Committee reviewing the NERC Act 2006 – see previous posting – we were invited to submit further written evidence. This, together with further written evidence from the TRF, GLEAM, and others, has now been posted on the Parliament.uk website. To read the submissions, follow this link, then scroll down to Written evidence, select View all, and look for documents published in January 2018. We will be reviewing the written evidence submitted by GLEAM (all 23 pages of it) in due course, but remain unaware of the Lords’ overall timetable for reporting and recommendations (if any).

LARA and the TRF were both invited to give oral evidence to the House of Lords Select Committee on the Natural Environment and Rural Communities Act 2006. This followed written evidence submitted by LARA in September. The oral evidence session took place on 21 November, with Alan Kind representing LARA and Mario Costa-Sa representing the TRF. As usual with Parliamentary Select Committees, the members of the Committee (all Members of the House of Lords in this case) had been well-briefed and asked pertinent, and searching, questions. Overall we felt that both motoring organisations had been given a fair hearing.

You can read more about the Committee, and its work, here – http://bit.ly/2BwY75U – selecting “View all publications” for links to transcripts of the various evidence sessions and a link to watch the proceedings on Parliament TV.