Support us from £3/month
We deal with almost 1000 cases a year assisting communities, groups and individuals in protecting their local spaces and paths in all parts of England and Wales. Can you help us by joining as a member?
We have revealed that public access to the Midlands National Forest (520 square kilometres)1, established with the government’s financial support since the early 1990s, is collapsing.
There are 45 sites, which were open to public access within the forest by agreement between owners and public bodies such as the National Forest Company and the Forestry Commission, where the agreements expired within the last five years. The society’s survey by local volunteer members during last summer covered 26 of these sites: only 12 of them were still open to public access—despite the efforts of local woodland managers.
Notice banning access below Woodlands Farm, near Ratby in Leicestershire.
On the other sites there are now ‘NO ENTRY’ or other forbidding signs, and on some, the former access signs had been crossed out or thrown aside; and elsewhere overgrowth and fencing keep the public out.
We have written to the minister for access to nature, Jenny Riddell-Carpenter MP, pointing out that time-limited agreements will not secure the permanent green spaces within 15 minutes of home which is the government’s target2.
Our general secretary, Kate Ashbrook, notes that closure of access to Windmill Wood, one kilometre north-west of Ticknall village in south Derbyshire, is especially distressing. She says: ‘Only a few months ago the local Melbourne Footpaths Group, acting with the landowner’s consent, installed and improved stiles there. Now those stiles are blocked up and impassable.
Blocked stile at Windmill Wood.
‘This deplorable situation shows that time-limited access agreements do not provide the long-term access which people want, and are a big disappointment to visitors when they find access barred.
‘The government boasts three new national forests as part of its programme to provide greater access, and to secure green spaces ‘within a 15-minute walk from home’. But our research shows that unless that access is statutory and permanent, it is of little value. It’s no good the government spending public money on time-limited access agreements because at the end of that period the access may be gone.
Closed: Windmill Wood.
‘We have called on the minister, Jenny Riddell-Carpenter, to ensure there is permanent, legal access to and within the new national forests’, Kate concludes.
1 The Midlands National Forest covers parts of Derbyshire, Leicestershire and Staffordshire. The first trees were planted in 1991. In 1987 the Countryside Commission (the government’s then adviser on public access) said: ‘the benefits of a new Midlands forest would be considerable. It would be a major recreational and tourism resource’.
2 Commitment 86 of the government’s Environmental Improvement Plan, published in December 2025, is to ‘make sure that everyone has access to green or blue spaces within a 15-minute walk from home’. One of the actions to achieve this is to ‘establish three new national forests’.