Unless action is taken to stop it, in 2026 an unprecedented removal of public rights will take place and thousands of rights of way will be lost forever.
Many of the public rights of way under threat are used every day and some are British institutions, being part of much-loved national trails. In fact, it's even possible that a path you've been using for years to get to the shops or walk the dog is on the hit list.
What we're doing about it
We put a petition on the Number 10 Downing Street website as part of our effort to persuade central government to repeal this law. By the time the petition closed on 1 July 2009 nearly 6,500 people had signed. That made it overwhelmingly the best-signed petition in the ‘environmental’ section of the Downing Street website. It collected near double the amount of signatures than its closest runner in the category, before it closed. Many thanks to everyone who signed.
We're now part of a Stakeholder Working Group comprising representatives of user groups, landowners and local authorities, which has been brought together by Natural England to try to find a way of improving the legislation surrounding the recording of paths on definitive maps, to the benefit of all concerned, so that the need for a cut-off date is either removed or its effect on the network of unrecorded routes reduced. To find out more about the work of the Stakeholder Working Group visit the Natural England website.
Countdown 2026 briefing
In 2000 the Government passed a law following pressure from landowning groups which says that all public rights of way which:
a) came into existence before 1949; and
b) have not been formally recorded as rights of way by 1st January 2026
will be extinguished on that date.
It's been estimated that around 20,000 public rights of way are not formally recorded, and many of these were established centuries back, long before 1949. If these rights of way are not recorded by 2026 the law says they'll be extinguished forever, meaning nobody will have a right to use them. Even if the public has used an old, unrecorded right of way for centuries, and continues to use it right up to 1st January 2026, the owner of the land will still be able to turn people away on that date, or gate it off.
The government wanted to introduce "certainty" about the extent of the rights of way network for both landowners and users, largely because of the time it was taking local authorities to deal with applications to have paths added to the definitive map and the large backlogs of such work within some authorities. But the legislation as enacted is a sledgehammer to crack a nut in that it threatens all unrecorded, pre-1949 rights of way, many of which are well-used.
Because of the potentially disastrous consequences for rights of way, the Government simultaneously introduced the Discovering Lost Ways Project, a scheme to record as many unrecorded, pre-1949 rights of way as possible so as to save them from the effect of its law. But the project proved far too complex and cumbersome and the political will to see it through evaporated. We think discontinuing the project but keeping the law is a bad deal for the public.
We think the 2026 'cut-off date' is unfair to the public and a bad idea. Whilst we agree that there may be some old, unrecorded rights of way which are no longer useful for getting from A to B, they may nonetheless have the potential forma pleasant recreational route. The fact that some rights of way are no longer visible because they have become overgrown does not necessarily indicate that they are not valuable to the public - many rights of way become overgrown and invisible because they have been illegally obstructed for a long time, and the public has never been able to use them. The point is they belong to the public.
You need to check a document called the definitive map which is held by your local authority. You can arrange to see the definitive map for no charge during normal office hours and some authorities may be able to show you an online version. If a path is shown on the definitive map there's no need to worry - it's safe. If it isn't shown you should make an application to have it recorded on the map as soon as possible, because if you don't and the right of way has existed since before 1949 (it's not always possible to find this out for sure) it will be lost forever in 2026.
By making an application to have it recorded as a right of way. To do this you'll need evidence that the public have gained a right of way over the path, which might be user evidence or documentary evidence, or both.
Contact Janet Davis to find out more.
