Peak District chiefs plan to sell off part of national park - to raise £1million to fund its vision for a country estate

The Peak District National Park Authority’s (PDNPA) Capital Strategy for 2023/24 – 2027/28 outlines plans to spend £945k on the Warslow Moors Estate over the next four years.

In a meeting of the authority, acting head of asset management Matt Freestone said this sum would come entirely from selling off parts of the estate itself.

“There are a number of properties that we recognise for disposal that are peripheral to the estate and surplus to the estate that will also fund the investment that’s needed,” he said.

“So at this stage we’re looking at around eight to ten properties, not all of them actually built assets, some of them are land.”

He added that no more than around ten per cent of the current estate was likely to be sold.

The next largest investment planned by the authority is £666k in the North Lees estate, which Mr Freestone said would be funded via a mixture of borrowing and additional income generation.

PDNPA has budgeted £3million on investments to the national park over a four year period, with more than half of that allocated to the Warslow and North Lees estates, a fact which Councillor Patrick Brady raised concerns over.

“What we’ve got here is a very substantial sum of money going into North Lees, which is only a very small part of the whole national park, and I do hope over the year ahead we start rising out of our management plans, whether there are other things we should be doing because our job is to have responsibility for the whole national park and all our resources are going into a very small part of it and I have to say that rather worries me.”

Chief executive Phil Mulligan responded: “Any revenues from Warslow have to go back into Warslow, so that’s why you’ll see a lot of our expenditure there.

“Although you say the park is much bigger than North Lees, if we’re going to invest in assets then it’s better to invest in our own.

“We only own a relatively small amount of the park and North Lees is quite a large part of what we own other than Warslow, which has its own revenue stream for investment.”

He pointed out that external funding streams had not been factored into the report, such as Government grants, which could become available over the course of the capital programme.