Losehill Hall: site of this weekend's meeting of OSS representatives
Volunteer activists from Britain’s oldest conservation body will gather this weekend at a national park centre threatened with closure.
Local representatives of the Open Spaces Society will hold their meeting at Losehill Hall near Castleton in the Peak District to plan their campaigns to protect access to open spaces in towns and country and to defend the right to enjoy Britain’s path network.
Losehill Hall, owned by the Peak District National Park Authority, is threatened with closure as a cost-cutting measure aimed at saving up to £300,000 a year from the national park’s squeezed budget. The jobs of 41 staff are at risk, along with a further 45 casual posts.
The OSS’s local representatives want to increase their numbers and clout, and improve their knowledge of common land, village greens, open spaces and public paths – which the society campaigns to protect and promote.
Kate Ashbrook, general secretary of the Open Spaces Society, said: ‘We are dependent on our hard-working volunteers to carry out the society’s vital activities in their areas.
“For instance, they check and respond to all the proposals to alter the routes of paths in their territories, and object when the plans are detrimental to the public’s interest. This is invaluable work.
“This weekend, which has been generously funded by the Bantam Trust and the Ramblers Holidays Charitable Trust, is an important opportunity for our local representatives to meet and learn from each other, and to plan how to increase their effectiveness.
Kate Ashbrook: hall needed for future generations
“We meet at a time when our part of the world is very insecure. We have just learnt that the quango Natural England, to which we look for leadership on recreation, access and landscape, is to be ‘substantially reformed’. Local authorities are preparing for severe cuts in their rights-of-way and countryside services. We need to lobby hard to ensure that they recognise the public benefit of these services, that they are an investment rather than a cost.
“It is particularly appropriate that we meet at Losehill Hall, which has for the past 40 years been an outstanding centre for environmental learning. It is a place which provides inspiration, and is just the sort of facility in which the Government should invest, to foster appreciation and awareness of our fragile environment.
“It is tragic that the Peak District National Park Authority is being forced to consider selling Losehill Hall because of the cuts. We hope that it can find a solution which enables the park to retain Losehill Hall in partnership with a body which can deliver environmental learning.
“We need Losehill Hall for the benefit of future generations,” she added.
The park authority is seeking potential partners interested in leasing or buying the hall and is inviting tenders. It said the national park environmental learning and conference centre at Castleton faces closure in April 2011 unless a suitable partner can be found to take over the running of the building.
Closing date for submission of tenders is 4 November 2010.
