Cycling UK, Beicio Cymru (formerly Welsh Cycling), the UK MTB Trail Alliance, Mountain Bike Wales and the Wales Adventure Tourism Organisation (WATO), along with over 90 other groups, organisations and businesses from across the Welsh mountain bike sector have united to send a letter to Huw Irranca-Davies MS, Deputy First Minister and Cabinet Secretary for Climate Change and Rural Affairs (who is the Welsh Government’s Minister responsible for Natural Resources Wales).

1. Align actions and budgets with the Well-being of Future Generations Act, ensuring that decisions made today do not compromise the ability of future generations to enjoy the health and access to natural heritage benefits that mountain bike trails provide. There needs to be a sustainable, meaningful and ongoing investment into the maintenance and development of NRW’s existing mountain bike trails.

2. Just as importantly, ask NRW to radically change its approach to working with volunteer groups, cutting their internal red tape that’s blocking them from doing so currently, or if not, to look at different models to mitigate the liability risk of mountain bike trails on their land (we have some ideas to suggest here). If it can do this, there are volunteer groups standing by all over Wales (the UK MTB Trail Alliance has over 25 member groups in Wales), ready to not just help maintain and develop community-built trails but also those managed and run by NRW, which would obviously help compensate for the finite financial resources available for their maintenance and development.

3. Ensure no decision is taken to close visitor centres, even temporarily, while partners are found to run them, or if they are, then to ensure the tender and contract processes are expedited so the centres are closed only for a very short time. The finances of NRW need to be considered in the context of the wider impact on the economies of the local areas around the centres, and how it will impact the Welsh Government’s ambition to grow adventure tourism.

4. We also urge you to ensure NRW properly consider local community groups as candidate partners to take on the running of these centres, and to make allowances for the fact they will be newly formed and immature entities created in reaction to the potential closing of their local visitor centre. They should not be expected to meet the same criteria that NRW would expect of a normal commercial partner.

5. Improve access to the outdoors: The budgetary issues that NRW face, and the subsequent impacts on outdoor recreation opportunities, help shine a light on access issues in Wales. We ask that the Access Reform Programme be unfrozen, prioritised and included within the current Programme for Government. Access reform offers a unique opportunity to open up access and recreation opportunities all over Wales with comparatively little budgetary outlay, to at least partially compensate for the inevitably reduced NRW recreation offering and ensure future generations can access the unique landscapes of Wales. This could also be an opportunity to legislate for a reduced level of occupier liability on access land in Wales (perhaps modelled on how this works for the coastal margin in England), which, as well as making access reform a much easier sell to private landowners, would also almost entirely remove the liability risk the Welsh Government is exposed to on all of the access land it is the occupier of (including NRW land). If responsible right-to-roam laws can exist in Scotland, Iceland, Norway, Switzerland, Austria, the Czech Republic, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and even Belarus, why not in Wales? Now is the time to change this.

The group also highlight how Mountain biking contributes greatly to the health and well-being of the Welsh population. Research by the Wales Adventure Tourism Organisation (WATO) estimated that just a 10% increase in recreational activity would yield £187m of social returns. It stands to reason that a 10% decrease in activity would have the opposite effect.