Western Daily Press (Saturday)
This flawed regime now a threat to our wildlife
Anger in the countryside is mounting at Natural England’s foot-dragging over issuing licences to control predators which are decimating some of our most highly protected bird species,
Bridgwater and West Somerset
Conservative MP Ian Liddell-Grainger tells Defra Secretary George Eustice
DEAR George, It is my solemn duty to inform you that as the countryside starts gearing up for the next game shooting season (value to the economy: £2 billion per annum, I might remind you) the ILG inbox is echoing regularly to the thud of complaints arriving relating to the current fiasco surrounding wildlife licensing.
In case none of these have yet popped up on your personal radar, let me summarise their gist: the system is in chaos and is now threatening some of the very species at the top of the nation’s conserve-at-all costs list.
You will not be unaware of the nonsense we had last year when Natural England decided to withdraw certain general licences leading to an uproar into which your own department had to step to restore some kind of order.
But the muddle and mess continues: there have been 160 applications to control corvid species on, or close to, European protected sites since January. To date, just 26 of these applications have been granted and eight rejected, with 126 still to be determined or which have been withdrawn. This is utterly unacceptable.
It seems to me that Natural England is playing for time in each case, hoping that if it can stall the process long enough then the applicants will simply give up.
But all it is doing is blasting both barrels at its own foot because out there in the countryside uncontrolled predators are wreaking havoc among vulnerable species.
And what, I ask you, is the point of HMG on the one hand shelling out money to support farmers who introduce wildlife-friendly but less profitable regimes in order to favour wildlife if the very species – such as curlew – they are meant to be nurturing cannot be protected from the attentions of predators?
This all seems to have come to a head since Tony Juniper was installed as the head of Natural England. I am sure his conservation credentials are impeccable. It may well be that he regards game shooting with a degree of distaste and would rather it were abolished, even at the cost of taking the whole-time equivalent of 74,000 jobs with it. But if that is indeed his view he has no right to turn it into Natural England policy.
It is the Government, rather than its quangos or their handsomelyremunerated bosses, which sets policy in this country and the current policy is that game shooting is a perfectly legal activity and the general rule is that we rely on gamekeepers and shoot managers to limit the levels of predation inflicted not only on game birds but on vulnerable native species.
This has been the case long before protected sites and species were even designated (or Tony Juniper was born), and has always served us well. I suggest that when land managers are unable to protect curlew because Natural England will not issue individual licences to control predatory corvids on protected sites, something has gone very wrong.
The country’s skies are darkened by a massive combined population of 4.63 million predatory corvids. The jackdaw population alone (last time they kept still long enough for anyone to count them) was put at 1.55 million, a trebling over the previous 16 years. None of which suggests to me that some judicious, licensed control represents any threat to their numbers.
I now have to ask you to honour your recent commitment to ensuring that we have a licensing system that is workable and efficient by restoring to Defra overall control of all licensing because there are unacceptable implications for British wildlife if Natural England is allowed to continue a regime which is not only flawed, not only creating, instead of removing problems but appears to be unduly influenced by the ninnies who produce Countryfile.
Yours ever,
Ian