IN 1949 when the first National Parks in England and Wales were created, the South Downs were a hot tip to be among them.

But unlike places such as Dartmoor and the Lake District, the downs never made it - they remain the only area earmarked as a National Park still without the protection it would bring.

National Park status was first proposed in the Thirties, put on hold during the Second World War, in the balance during the late Forties and finally abandoned in the Fifties.

The downs missed getting what many still believe they deserve when the old Countryside Commissoon rejected the proposal.

Today's supporters of a National Park talk darkly about three commissioners spending less than a day on the downs before deciding the land had been too intensively farmed during the war and too little of it was accessible to the public to warrant protection.

Half a century on, the arguments are raging with renewed force as Environment Minister Michael Meacher decides whether or not the downs should finally become a National Park.

He was expected to make an announcement last autumn. It never came and the only hint the Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions now gives about when he will make the decision is "soon".

For backers of a National Park it cannot come soon enough. Pressure from development, especially from building new homes, from farming and from tourism, will be too great if they are not preserved.

As an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AONB) the downs are not given the same level of protection they would have as a National Park, although placed where they are in the South East they already perform many of the functions of a park.

An estimated 32 million people visit the 1,000 square kilometres of the South Downs every year, visiting the honeypots like the Seven Sisters County Park or walking the remoter parts of the South Downs Way.

Walkers should soon be able to reach some 50 per cent of the downs if the Government's Right To Roam proposals become law - neatly ending one of the Forties' vintage arguments that too little of the landscape was accessible.

The alternative to a full-blown National Park is the so-called Super-AONB, backed by Sussex Downs Conservation Board chairman Lord Renton.

His private member's bill, launched in the House of Lords this week and intended to spur ministers into some kind of action, would build on the experimental conservation board and give all AONBs new, and greater, powers.

The board's chief officer, Martin Beaton, said an AONB had the same conservation status as a National Park and if local authorities kept control of planning, the proposed Super-AONB would be free to take an overview on how best to preserve the downs.

He said: "There is more to this debate than simply the words National Park. The words National Park carry with them the assumption that it is this all-powerful body - it ain't.

"Everybody wants to protect and conserve the downs, we want to find the best way of doing it."

It is somewhere around here that conservation and power politics meet.

Only one council in East or West Sussex, Brighton and Hove - where a public opinion poll found 60 per cent of voters backed National Park status - supports a park, the rest seeing too many of their powers draining away.

Powers to control planning are crucial.

At the moment the conservation board is consulted on all planning matters, but councils still pass unchanged 20 per cent of the applications the board has objected to.

Likewise the Countryside Agency, which has now superseded the Countryside Commission, is opposed. The downs are not remote upland like other National Parks it says, although critics point to the agency's own role controlling AONBs as the reason.

Among the minority of the conservation board's members who back a National Park is Paul Millmore. He says funding for a National Park would be more secure, it would be more accountable to local people and it would be far more difficult for developers to nibble away at parts of a park than if the downs stayed an AONB.

He said: "We probably only have one chance in 50 years to make a visionary decision - so I would hope it would be a Labour government which would be remembered for making the South Downs a National Park, rather than attempting a fudge."

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