PRIME Minister Tony Blair has been told to open up thousands of acres of East Lancashire countryside to ramblers.

Pendle MP Gordon Prentice said the policy of seeking voluntary agreements with landowners was doomed to failure.

The keen walker, who quit as a ministerial aide over cuts in lone parents benefit last year, went to the rostrum at the Labour Party Conference to urge action.

He told Mr Blair and Environment Minister Michael Meacher that the attempt to achieve a "right to roam" through voluntary means would not work and the law was the only answer.

He said: "If Michael tells me that the Duke of Westminster will allow people open access to his land, I simply don't believe it."

He said that the Duke controlled thousands of acres in Lancashire but little was available to the ordinary people who live there. Mr Prentice said that last weekend he stood on Pendle Hill on one boundary of his constituency on a lovely sunny day, looked across the seven towns and thousands of people who made up his seat, to Boulsworth Hill on the opposite side.

Unlike Pendle, only a tiny part was open to walkers there. Beyond it lay many more closed acres.

He told the Conference that he had been reading Mr Blair's pamphlet, The Third Way, which said: "The third way is not about splitting the difference."

Mr Prentice ponted out that you could not split the difference on the issue of the right to roam.

By the end of this parliament the government would either have legislated and he would be able to walk on the land, or it would not and he would be denied.

And he told Mr Blair that sometimes even New Labour had to come off the fence and act and bring in a legal right to roam. This was one of the occasions when it had to do so.

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