COLUMN: Forget a new National Park - create Wales’s first Nature Park

Liberal Democrat councillor Glyn Preston shares his views on the current hot topic.

Protecting our beautiful countryside and welcoming visitors to our area is the right thing to do, but a new National Park in the north of Montgomeryshire is not the way to do it.

We simply don’t need the costs and bureaucracy, especially when the ones we already have in Wales are underfunded.

Powys is the place for green tourism. It’s the place for people who love our scenery and our wildlife, who enjoy walking and camping and who care about our environment. They are not looking for second homes and buy to lets that drive up prices and destroy local communities.

We could create here in Montgomeryshire Wales’s first Nature Park.

It doesn’t need a costly new board with powers to regulate every fine detail of development in our area. The concept of a nature park could bring people together with a common vision of what we have to offer.

We have nature friendly farmers who manage our landscape, encouraging wildlife while producing food and diversifying into small scale tourism. We already have the ideas to restore and grow our woodlands, peatlands and flower meadows and there is work already being done, it just needs bringing together. 

A Nature Park could be community led, with some public investment to kick start conservation projects and footpath restoration, but nothing like on the scale an imposed national park would need.

It would bring together farmers, conservationists and people involved in small scale tourism and hospitality.

The framework for an alternative is there, buried in consultation documents for the new National Park.

Other ways already exist, like the Cotswolds National Landscape and closer to home the Valleys Regional Park in South Wales.

Instead of properly presenting these other options upfront as an alternative, the Welsh Government have angered people with their planned top down imposition. They could work with people in Montgomeryshire to build a different, community-based approach, and it’s not too late to do that.

It doesn’t have to be a national park or nothing. A National Nature Park would fit well with what we have, would be affordable, community led, and give a distinctive brand for tourism in Montgomeryshire that would be good for the local economy and good for the environment.