Tourists could soon have to pay to enter this UK national park

A beloved UK could soon see visitors forced to pay an entry fee to visit. According to the leader of the body running the park, charging tourists to visit the Peak District could address "unprecedented" financial problems. Alongside dealing with issues including wildfires and dangerous , the Peak District National Park Authority says it has had a real terms funding cut of 50% in the last decade.

A spokesperson for the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) told it was providing national parks with a capital uplift of £15 million. The 555 square mile area welcomes over 13 million visitors each year with a permanent population of around 40,000. It supports an estimated 18,000 in farming, manufacturing and tourism. This week, the Moors for Future Partnership (MFP) said there had been more than 30 moorland fires in the Peak District so far this year, including one in Goyt Valley which destroyed trees and grassland across an area bigger than 300 football pitches.

The cost of this issue has affected the authority's finances, alongside illegal parking, which has interrupted gritting operations and emergency services' access to some parts of the area.

However, chief executive of the authority Phil Mulligan said the park would "not need any government funding" if a 10p per visitor charge were implemented.

He said 10% of the authority's staff had been made redundant in recent months amid "declining funding".

Mr Mulligan told Politics East Midlands: "We have the pressure of visitors, we have the pressure of delivering for the nation in terms of the ecological crisis - the climate crisis. I'm trying to do that with an ever-declining set of government funds, at a time when what's being asked of the national park is more and more.

"I think that [charging tourists fees] is a big discussion that the Government is going to need to have. But what would be the mechanism for that? I haven't got the powers. If [the government] are going to keep cutting our funding then there is going to need to be a different way of funding national parks."

Alan Graves, the Reform UK leader of Derbyshire County Council said charging tourist sounded like a "good idea", but that it was important not to "frighten people off".

He continued: "So long as it's not too expensive, I think people visiting the national park will contribute. Maybe up to £1 just to go there.

"The real difficulty is how do you police that... because there's no point in having these expensive cameras to do that. But in principle, it sounds like it's a good idea."

A Defra spokesperson said: "Our national parks are a source of great national pride which is why this government is providing them with a capital uplift of £15m. This is in addition to the £400m we are investing in restoring nature across the country."