New Forest Notes: A thicket of permissions for people using the New Forest

LAST summer, while most of us were still fully occupied with the problems of Covid and the consequent damage being inflicted on the New Forest by uncontrolled and often illegal recreational activity, Forestry England introduced a new system for regulating organised events in the Forest.

It is called a habitat regulation assessment. The objectives are entirely reasonable and are designed to benefit the Forest, but the mechanisms involved are quite complex, slow and extremely bureaucratic.

A very helpful lady from Forestry England explained them to me in great detail and followed this up with a lot of written material, some of which was updated as recently as last month.