Is the budget and timescale – £50million over a decade – realistic to roll out the footpath?
That’s our best estimate and the approach we’re taking explains its relative modesty. We’ll focus on key bits of the route, working in a very consensual way with all the interested parties – local access forums, landowners or local authorities – and using local knowledge to get the best way through. So it doesn’t involve the expensive process of mapping we used for open access and will be a lot quicker, avoiding lengthy and costly appeal processes. The government has said you have to try to agree permissive access over parkland with private landowners in the next 5 years before looking at legal options. Do you think this will work? We sincerely hope so. We’ve no desire to go through inappropriate areas underneath peoples’ kitchen windows, but often in private parkland you’re talking about areas that are miles from the nearest dwelling. We’ll try to build up trust about a sensible alignment for the route and hope those landowners will come willingly into a voluntarily agreement. But I t
