The Wild Rover_ A Blistering Journey Along Britain_s Footpaths - Mike Parker [123]
The above paragraph is a précis of just about every local authority’s Rights of Way Improvement Plan (ROWIP), a statutory requirement of the 2000 CROW Act. All authorities dutifully produced these mammoth documents, intended to show what was the current situation in their area, and their ten-year plan for improvements. My local authority, Powys, managed to spin more or less the contents of that one paragraph into a 254-page, A4-sized book. I’ve seen quite a few others, and they all follow the same pattern: acres of big photos, lots of meaningless graphs and pie charts, spurious statistics gleaned from tiny, self-selecting surveys, endless repetition and a cavalier approach to good English (and, in the case of Powys, good Welsh too).
On the plus side, they all promise to make the rights of way network more accessible, open and signposted. Of course they do. In Powys, they have come up with the ambitious target of seeing 80 per cent of the network in unblocked, usable condition by 2017. That might not sound much, but it’s starting from a hideously low base: they state that only about 35 per cent of the county’s footpaths were usable at the time the report was written, around 2005. A couple of years earlier, the Countryside Council for Wales estimated it to be 31 per cent. Bridleways and byways are in better shape, but there are far fewer of them. It’s also starting from the point of Powys’s gargantuan size: there are over 6,000 miles of paths and byways in a county with a population of just 132,000.
The 80 per cent target is bandied around liberally, but other things in the report suggest that they have no intention whatsoever of reaching it. A statistic that baldly contradicts it slips in almost unannounced, and just the once, on page 117: ‘With current base-line capital and revenue management budgets . . . it is predicted to take 38 years to achieve an 80% open and easy to use PROW network.’ Ah. And that ‘does not take into account any legal costs, Definitive Map work or surface management’. Ooh. Then you remember that the report was written in 2005, before the county council lost 6 per cent of its budget in an Icelandic bank and before the cuts. Hold those boots back a while.
Untangle the deathless language, and another more sneaky puncture in the 80 per cent target appears. In the plan, it is repeated again and again that the majority of people would rather see resources put into the improved maintenance of paths that are already open and used, instead of using the money to open up blocked paths. This spurious contention comes from a stark either/or question posed in their consultative survey: the option of working towards both was not offered. ‘The results show that more emphasis needs to be placed on the maintenance of opened routes in the future,’ the report states, and not on clearing the vast backlog of obstructed routes. Yet the vote was split only 55–45 per cent, hardly enough of a majority to command such a clear and long-lasting choice. Perhaps the answer comes from the fact that amongst one sector of the survey, landholders (defined as Powys members of the CLA, NFU and Farmers’ Union of Wales), the result was 89–11 per cent in favour of quietly ignoring blocked paths. As the 266 consulted landholders accounted for a fifth of the entire survey’s constituency, their overwhelming majority was more than enough to swing it their way. Even if a majority in every other interest group surveyed (‘general’, tourist information centres, town and community councils, tourist accommodation providers) voted for the unblocking paths option, the strength and size of the land-holders’ vote was sufficient to carry it the other way. That’s perhaps what you get in an authority where over half of the councillors are returned unopposed. In my ward, there hasn’t been an election since the 1970s. Powys, twinned with Pyongyang.
There’s a high ‘no shit Sherlock’ quotient