Wild Justice wins High Court ruling on Dartmoor overgrazing

The High Court has ruled that the Dartmoor Commoners’ Council (DCC) has mismanaged Dartmoor commons. DCC did nothing to assess or prevent overgrazing, resulting in the deterioration of important wildlife areas.

Environmental campaign group Wild Justice brought the claim. It argued that DCC had failed to meet its legal responsibilities towards the conservation of the commons.

The High Court judgment on 17 March ruled that DCC has failed in its legal duty under the Dartmoor Commons Act 1985 to assess the number of animals which should be allowed to graze on Dartmoor.

Dartmoor commons is an open area of land which covers more than two-thirds of Dartmoor National Park, spanning just under 36,000 hectares.

The Dartmoor Commons Act grants certain rights over the land to some 850 landowners, known as ‘commoners’. These include grazing rights and the rights to keep sheep, cattle and ponies.

Monitoring overgrazing on Dartmoor

The Dartmoor Commons Act also contains statutory responsibilities that DCC has to ensure the conservation of the commons. Wild Justice argued DCC failed to meet these responsibilities, alongside general duties under wildlife laws and regulations.

In a July 2025 High Court hearing, Wild Justice successfully argued that DCC failed to make periodic assessments of whether Dartmoor was becoming overstocked. This contravened section 4 of the Dartmoor Commons Act.

In his judgment, Justice Mould found:

Assessment of the number of animals that may properly be depastured on the commons at any given time necessarily implies both quantitative and qualitative analysis. The question for the Defendant is whether stocking levels exceed the capacity of the commons properly to accommodate them.

In order to address that question, among the matters which the Defendant needs to interrogate are the numbers of livestock which commoners are entitled to depasture on the commons, the numbers that are actually depastured in reliance on rights of common, the areas of common in respect of which those rights are enjoyed and exercised, seasonal variations, and so on.

In 2023, the government published an assessment of Dartmoor commons (the Fursdon Review). It found that Dartmoor was “not in a good state”.

In assessing a number of Sites of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI) on the commons, the Fursdon Review found that many of them were in unfavourable condition. It also noted that Natural England had identified reducing stock numbers as a way to tackle overgrazing and return these areas to a more favourable condition.

Wild Justice began its legal claim in July 2024, when the group sent a pre-action protocol to DCC. It detailed alleged issues with DCC’s management of the commons, citing the Fursdon Review.

From DCC’s response it was clear that it had not taken any steps to control livestock. This led to Wild Justice filing a judicial review challenge in August 2024.

In February 2025, the challenge got the green light to proceed to the High Court, with two further grounds gaining permission in April.

Bob Elliot, CEO of Wild Justice, said:

This judgment shows that the Dartmoor Commoners’ Council failed to do the most basic of work needed in order to understand how many animals the Dartmoor Commons can sustain. When such an important landscape is already in very poor ecological condition, this simply isn’t good enough.

The Dartmoor Commoners’ Council must now carry out the proper assessment required by law and ensure that Dartmoor is managed in a way that allows nature to recover. We will be scrutinising that assessment and, importantly, how DCC acts upon it in areas where overgrazing is apparent.

Senior environmental solicitor Carol Day, of Leigh Day, was a member of the legal team representing Wild Justice. She said:

Wild Justice is obviously pleased that the judge has found that Dartmoor Commoners’ Council has failed in its statutory duty to properly assess the number of livestock grazing on Dartmoor. It has been clear for years that overgrazing is one of the major issues leading to the ecological decline of Dartmoor’s important wildlife habitats.

Wild Justice ‘s legal challenge means the DCC must now comply with its minimum legal duties as the regulator of grazing levels on the commons. The DCC must now urgently carry out a qualitative and quantitative assessment of the number of livestock on the commons so that it can consider whether it must take steps to reduce that number.

Featured image via the Canary