It's a shame that the BMC has chosen to present such an imbalanced, ill-informed argument. Poorly written it may be, but the FLW report makes important points about the need to take account of the needs of local people, and to think in wider terms of sustainable development. The two Scottish national parks already have this as a statutory aim, so claims that the Welsh initiative will break-up the UK family of national parks strike me as rather far-fetched. It makes no sense to claim that “the National Parks in Wales could be relegated to a lower tier of Protected Landscapes as defined internationally by the IUCN”. All of the UK’s national parks already belong to this classification (Category V: Protected Landscape). None are classified by the IUCN as National Parks (Category II) because the landscapes are too much modified, both past and present, by humans. Indeed, precisely because people live and work in these landscapes, the IUCN best practice guidelines argue for a revised model of management that has much in common with the FLW proposals: https://portals.iucn.org/library/sites/library/files/documents/pag-009.pdf See pages 12-14. Whatever the merits of the different arguments, the "narrow, old-fashioned view" is not greater emphasis on development as Elfyn Jones suggests - it is the proposal that we must stick to the original idea, defined by outsiders, that it is only the scenery that matters in national parks. BMC member N387002