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The National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act 1949 (12, 13 & 14 Geo. 6. c. 97) is an Act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom which created the National Parks Commission which later became the Countryside Commission and then the Countryside Agency, which became Natural England when it merged with English Nature in 2006. The Act provided the framework for the creation of National Parks and Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty in England and Wales, and also addressed public rights of way and access to open land.

Background

The Act was passed in 1949 with all-party support, as part of the reconstruction of the UK by the Labour government after World War II.

The Act followed reports by:

  • a government committee chaired by Christopher Addison (later Viscount Addison) in 1931,
  • John Dower, secretary of the Standing Committee on National Parks, to the Minister of Town and Country Planning in 1945, and
  • a government committee chaired by Sir Arthur Hobhouse in 1947, which proposed 12 national parks.

National parks

The first 10 British national parks were designated as such in the 1950s under the Act in mostly poor-quality agricultural upland. An eleventh 'national park' in the Norfolk and Suffolk Broads was set up by a special Act of Parliament, the Norfolk and Suffolk Broads Act, in 1988. Strictly speaking, this is not a national park, but the differences are sufficiently small that this entity is always regarded as being "equivalent to" a national park. The New Forest was designated a national park on 1 March 2005. The South Downs, the last of the 12 areas chosen in the 1947 Hobhouse Report, was designated as South Downs National Park by the Secretary of State Hilary Benn in March 2009, making 15 national parks in total.

Amendments

The structure set up by the National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act 1949 was amended by:

Further amendments are made by the Natural Environment and Rural Communities Act 2006, under which English Nature, the Countryside Agency and the Rural Development Service merged on 1 October 2006 to form new bodies called Natural England and the Commission for Rural Communities.

See also

References

  • R. N. Hutchins and H. F. Full. The National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act 1949. (Butterworths Annotated Legislation Service: Statutes Supplement No. 65). Butterworth & Co (Publishers) Ltd. 1950. Reviewed at "Legal Literature" (1951) 101 The Law Journal 12 (5 January 1951) and (1951) 211 The Law Times 39 (19 January 1951)
  • Norman Browning. National Parks and Access to the Countryside. Thames Bank Publishing Company. 1950. Google
  • Blunden and Curry. A People's Charter? Forty Years of the National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act 1949. HMSO. 1990. Google
  • Ann Holt. A Charter for Whom? The Access Provisions of the National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act, 1949. Ramblers' Association. 1990.
  • "The National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act 1949". Halsbury's Statutes of England. Second Edition. Butterworth & Company (Publishers) Ltd. 1950. Volume 42. Pages 465 and 890.
  • "The National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act 1949". Halsbury's Statutes of England. Third Edition. Butterworths. 1970. Volume 24. Page 65. See also Preliminary Note at p 29.
  • Desmond Heap. "National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act, 1949". Encyclopedia of the Law of Town and Country Planning. Sweet & Maxwell. 1959. Paragraphs 2-465 to 2-595. Google
  • Guy Seward. "National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act 1949". Howard Roberts on the Law of Town and Country Planning. Second Edition. Charles Knight & Co. 1963. Volume 2. Pages 761 to 844.
  • Andrew Waite. "National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act 1949". Butterworths Environmental Law Handbook. 1994. Page 3. Google
  • Michael J. Fry. "National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act 1949". A Manual of Nature Conservation Law. Clarendon Press. 1995. Page 5. Google
  • Stephen Chapman. "The National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act, 1949". Statutes on the Law of Torts. Butterworths. 1962. Page 345.
  • John Sheail. "The National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act of 1949 – its Origins and Significance". T C Smout (ed). Nature, Landscape and People since the Second World War. Tuckwell Press. 2001. Chapter 1. Pages 1 to 12. Google
  • Tom Stephenson. Ann Holt (ed). "The National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act 1949". Forbidden Land: The Struggle for Access to Mountain and Moorland. Manchester University Press. 1989. Chapter 11. Pages 206 to 222.
  • Peter Bromley. "National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act (1949)". Countryside Management. Taylor & Francis. 1990. Digital Printing. 2006. Chapter 3.2. Pages 42 to 49.
  • "National Parks" (1950) 28 The Canadian Bar Review 452
  • "The National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act, 1949" (1950) 210 The Law Times 147 (15 September 1950)
  1. ^ The citation of this Act by this short title is authorised by section 115(1) of this Act.

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