SIR — For the last two years Exmoor Uprising has been working directly with Exmoor National Park Authority on behalf of Exmoor people.

We do have disagreements sometimes, we assure you, but also get agreement and we feel that, overall, we have had some success in influencing the work of the national park.

We have gradually come to respect a large proportion of the committee members and can work well with them.

Following a consultation in the spring of 2012, Defra were clear that they wanted to avoid "cliques" and "chair hopping" among the committee members and chairmanships of national parks so it suggested a time limit on membership to mean that there would be regular "fresh blood" to avoid this.

Exmoor Uprising suggested that rather than limit the time any person could be a national park member, there should be a maximum of six years on and four years off of any chairmanships.

This would prevent musical chairs and stop any cliques forming.

We also wanted the time to be retrospective but, unfortunately, the solution the chairman put forward proposed that there should be a limit of six years on any of the chairs, but the new approach was not be retrospective and there would be no "break" time between stepping down from one chair role and being appointed to chair a different committee.

This could mean that anyone who has perhaps done seven years on one committee already could do five years more, then six years' chair of resources and six years of planning then "chair hop" once again, which was not Defra's desire.

But for the moment we are stuck with this decision.

On behalf of Exmoor people, we earnestly request that the members of the committee of Exmoor National Park take this into account and make sure that "fresh blood" is brought into the three chairman's posts this year, as suggested by Defra last year.

Molly Groves,

Exmoor Uprising.