THE custodians of a national park which has seen activities to conserve and promote it multiply despite its government funding dwindling have criticised the findings of a major review which concluded it should be doing even more for even less.

The North York Moors National Park Authority, which is charged with looking after 700 scheduled monuments, 3,000 listed buildings, the largest expanse of heather moorland in England and Wales and 26 miles of coastline, said while it supports some of the recommendations in the government-commissioned Glover Report, others could damage the park’s landscapes and communities.

Some 68 years on from the North York Moors being designated as a national park, the Glover review concluded sweeping changes were needed for how such protected areas are managed.

The Government could use some or all the recommendations to reshape the running and activities in national parks.

The park authority said it welcomed some of the review’s ambitions, including doing more for wildlife, giving every child a night under the stars, increasing affordable housing, harnessing the park to improve the nation’s health and lead on climate change.

The park authority’s chairman, Jim Bailey said the authority wanted to offer practical suggestions about which of the reviews’ proposals it thinks could work or not and some suggestions for alternative action.

He said: “We are very positive about a lot of things in the report. We do welcome the ambition and recognition of the national park’s ambition.

“However, some of the assumptions and evidence was just plain wrong and we didn’t get the benefit of sight of the draft report, so it was published like that.”

Among the park authority’s leading concerns is the reviews’ proposal for national parks “to move away from over-reliance on core grants towards more diverse, larger and more sustainable flows of funds…”.

The park authority said the proposal was “unrealistic about the level of activity that can be generated from the resources” available to national parks. It has estimated five to ten times its current funding of £13m would be needed to deliver the level and range of activity described in the Glover Review.

It said the authority would this year bring resources to bear that are three times the value of its core Defra grant, but even so “could not deliver anything like the level of output described”.

Mr Bailey said: “As far as the Glover Review is concerned there’s a paradox in delivering step change and a real terms funding reduction on the other hand. I can’t see how that’s going to work.”

He said while the government wanted more nature-based solutions to matters such as health and wellbeing, national parks were well placed to deliver them cost-effectively, but that it would be impossible without extra funding.

Mr Bailey said the authority needed certainty over its core grant to be able to continue levering in millions of pounds of extra funding from outside bodies.

He added: “If we don’t have the certainty we can’t go out and bid for things. I think the North York Moors is very good value.”

The park authority’s leadership believes if the review had based its conclusions more directly on reliable evidence and practical experience this would likely have led to “different and more effective conclusions”.

The authority’s leaders consider the Glover Review’s proposal for the existing duty to “seek to foster social and economic wellbeing” to become a leading purpose of the park “unnecessary and worrying”.

A spokesman for the authority said: “We consider that giving one of the few parts of government that has a primarily environmental role an additional economic one is really unhelpful and curiously backwards looking.”

In addition, the authority said while it strongly agrees with the review the national parks “should be exemplars of the very best” to aid nature, it did not recognise the analysis that wildlife is low on its list of priorities as it is the authority’s first, of only three, strategic priorities.

The park authority also added to criticism of the review’s proposals that has already been raised by members of the Yorkshire Dales National Park Authority, over proposals to cut the number of democratically-elected members, saying they would be a blow for democracy and residents.

It said the suggestion to pass responsibility for planning decisions to a separate planning committee, with a different set of members not responsible for the legal, financial and reputational standing of the authority was “a recipe for serious dispute and inconsistency”.

Mr Bailey added: “We think the proposals on governance would impact quite badly on the park.”