Contribution
I commend my hon. Friend the Member for Hazel Grove (Lisa Smart) for her passionate, articulate exposition of the great work that mountain rescue does in her constituency. We also heard the passion for mountain rescue and the great outdoors from the hon. Members for Bolton West (Phil Brickell), for Strangford (Jim Shannon) and for Stirling and Strathallan (Chris Kane), and from the right hon. Member for Dwyfor Meirionnydd (Liz Saville Roberts), my hon. Friend the Member for Westmorland and Lonsdale (Tim Farron), and a few others who intervened.
I too have a passion for the great outdoors and mountain walking. I spent a bit of the recess that we just had doing some of that in south Wales. It is often quite hard to articulate exactly why walking up a hill or a mountain is so tempting. Of course there is the reason that it is there, but beyond that it is the combination of the satisfaction of having done so, the exhilaration of overcoming a challenge and pushing one’s own boundaries. But the risk that we have heard about today underlines the importance of our all respecting the hills and mountains and the great outdoors more widely. With greater numbers seeking enjoyment of it, but with skills such as paper map reading and compass navigation not necessarily what they were, mountain rescue will continue to play an essential role, particularly as even those with reasonable experience in mountain environments can get things wrong, experience bad luck or get into bad habits.
Alas, I know that only too well myself. A combination of bad habits and a bit of bad luck meant that I needed to be rescued by mountain rescue in Italy, when 36 hours on the side of a mountain with no food and water turned into the not entirely welcome exhilaration of being winched on to a helicopter and then spending 27 hours in an Italian hospital. Thanks to mountain rescue, I lived to tell the tale and learned from my experience. I have significantly added to my previous experience and made sure that when I do these things, I have better risk mitigations. I pay tribute to that particular branch of the Italian mountain rescue, as well as the mountain rescue teams who have saved so many people in this country.
I join my hon. Friend the Member for Henley and Thame (Freddie van Mierlo) in his comments on Lowland Rescue Oxfordshire, which was honoured to receive the Queen’s Award for Voluntary Service. Between its creation in 2008 and 2022 its volunteers attended more than 600 incidents, equating to more than 18,000 hours deployed on searches, both in and out of Oxfordshire. They were initially focused on foot search, but they expanded their skills to incorporate water rescue, dog search and drone search.
As we have heard, mountain rescue teams are a de facto fourth emergency service, especially during major incidents such as flooding and heavy snowfall, yet they do not have the equivalent funding streams or protections of other services. As climate change leads to more serious weather events in the UK we will, alas, come to rely on mountain rescue services more and more—and that reliance will not be reserved just for avid hikers, climbers, mountain bikers or other forms of adventure, but for whole communities, as flooding events become more common. In some teams, annual call-outs now exceed 150 to 300 incidents. As we have heard, drivers of the growth in those incident numbers include an increase in outdoor recreation and tourism, social media-driven locations attracting increased numbers of inexperienced visitors, and the impact of climate change on weather-related incidents.
The accounts of Mountain Rescue England and Wales show a total income of approximately £1.25 million in 2024, with the majority coming from donations and charitable activities rather than Government support. Since 2011, the UK Government have provided grant funding, historically around £200,000 to £250,000 per year across the whole UK. That funding is project-based rather than being core funding, and is primarily for equipment and training, rather than operational sustainability. That is a challenge faced by many other third-sector organisations—charities, museums and so on—where the grant funding system is focused on capital rather than operational sustainability.
As we heard from the hon. Member for Stirling and Strathallan, Scotland operates a distinct model. The Scottish Government provide direct annual grant funding to Scottish Mountain Rescue in recognition of its team’s role in delivering land-based search and rescue on behalf of Police Scotland. That includes an annual grant totalling more than £300,000 per year, which is distributed to teams via an agreed formula; allocation reflects call-out volume, team size and assets, including funding in the Scottish Government’s fairer funding pilot, providing assurance of continued funding until at least March 2027 and giving those organisations the ability to plan ahead.