Earl of Kinnoull
Main Page: Earl of Kinnoull (Crossbench - Excepted Hereditary)
The Earl of Kinnoull (CB)
My Lords, I too thank the noble Baroness, Lady Miller, and congratulate her on tabling this excellent Question. I must declare not only my interests in the register but I am chairman of the Red Squirrel Survival Trust, chairman of the United Kingdom squirrel accord, of which I will say more later, and I am on the council of the Royal Scottish Forestry Society. Biodiversity offered by well-managed broadleaf forestry is not something on which I need to lecture your Lordships. It is very special and very diverse. The trouble is that the grey squirrel problem in the United Kingdom is making this idyll very difficult and well-nigh impossible.
The United Kingdom squirrel accord came together last year as a response from a number of pretty desperate, fairly large organisations. There are 33 signatories covering every part of the United Kingdom, including governmental bodies, voluntary bodies and the private sector. Defra is one of the signatories and has a very good and active official on the accord. The private sector organisations have around 6 million members, so they are big, meaty bodies. People are worried about the twin difficulties of red squirrel numbers being severely impacted because of the disease they catch from grey squirrels, which I am not going to talk about today, and the threat to forestry posed by grey squirrels. For those who do not know, grey squirrels will ring-bark or peel back the bark on our native broadleaf trees, particularly on oak and beech which are delicious to them. They do that when the trees are semi-mature and at a height of about 10 to 15 feet. That introduces disease and insect damage to the trees which either kills them or certainly renders the trees economically useless. That means that considerably less planting is going on throughout the United Kingdom for broadleafs at the moment. There is less land management and, therefore, less biodiversity.
I want to make a number of points on which I hope that the Minister will be able to help. First, immuno- contraception is essentially a science whereby you give grey squirrels a drug and it makes them infertile. The delivery method would be something like medicated nuts. The major research on this type of technology for mammals is going on in the States. Britain’s only expenditure on this at the moment is around £10,000, which we pay to receive research from the United States into white-tailed deer, which are doing damage to American forestry.
The outstanding Pirbright Institute is doing research with very good immunocontraceptive credentials, as it has been big on insect immunocontraceptive. Will the Minister consider taking the lead in commissioning research in this area in Britain now? The voluntary sectors and the private sectors to which I have referred within the UK squirrel accord would certainly help with funding, but Britain should take a lead in this area of science and I hope that the grey squirrel could be the first port of call for that.
My second point is about warfarin, which was pretty well the only weapon that could be deployed against grey squirrels. In a very unusual way, warfarin has been withdrawn from land managers as an effective measure. Its use will not be allowed from later this year. This is entirely due to a vagary of EU procedure points, which I will not go through now. It is pretty odd seeing as it is our private battle in Britain—only Britain and a small part of Italy are impacted by the grey squirrel. Would the Minister consider looking again at the warfarin issue and having another go at seeing whether it would be possible to reintroduce this important weapon in the control of grey squirrels?
My final point is on traps. There are a number of commercially available grey squirrel traps but the world is, in fact, a wonderful place and lots of inventive people are inventing new traps all over the world and, in particular, in New Zealand and Canada. With adaptions, these traps could be more effective in Britain. The trouble—I am advised by the BASC—is that if you introduce a new trap in Britain, you would have to pay between €30,000 and €100,000 to license the trap. The difficulty is that none of the people inventing these traps has that sort of money available. Would the Minister consider sponsoring a trap or two through the process so that we could have access to the latest trapping technology, which would greatly help the broadleaf forestry industry?
As I have said, there is nothing better in our green and pleasant land than a well-managed broadleaf woodland and there is nothing better for biodiversity. These woodlands need our help.