Bird Control Licences

Debate between Lord Harlech and Lord Benyon

Thursday 3rd February 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Benyon (Con)]

The species of birds on general licence are ones for which it is estimated that there would be no impact to their conservation status if they were controlled. Certain species are controversially not in the general licence, such as rook and jackdaw. This is constantly being looked at by Natural England. It is very important to understand that they are controlled not just for game bird management but very often for the protection of crops and livestock. We must be mindful of that and make sure that farming businesses around the country have the protection that they need.

[Lord Harlech (Con)]

My Lords, independent scientific research in numerous case studies by the Game & Wildlife Conservation Trust shows that proper game bird management has a net benefit to songbirds and biodiversity in general. How will the Government be compensating farmers and land managers for increasing those songbird numbers?

[Lord Benyon (Con)]

Under our environmental land management schemes farmers will be rewarded for doing what we call public goods, and that includes creating habitat for wildlife and protecting species which will otherwise, on our watch, become extinct. I could go on about the curlew, as I do every day in Defra, a species for which you can map the point at which it will become extinct in a decade or two’s time. We do not save it then, we save it now, and so we must deploy every measure that we can, whether it is in government grants or activities that we allow land managers to perform to protect them.

Food and Farming: Supply Issues

Debate between Lord Harlech and Lord Benyon

Thursday 20th January 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Benyon (Con)]

The noble Lord is absolutely right. We have worked with other departments, including the Department for Transport and the Home Office, in the development of our scheme to encourage more drivers, to ease the difficulties caused mainly by the pandemic but also by our withdrawal from the EU, which have resulted in a shortage of drivers. The noble Lord is right: it is the quality of their lives that we need to look at, alongside all the generous incentives that we are giving to encourage people to come here and fill this gap.

[Lord Harlech (Con)]

My Lords, what measures are the Government taking to prevent the scene of edible vegetables being ploughed in rather than being harvested and entering the food chain?

[Lord Benyon (Con)]

My noble friend raises an important point. Vegetable producers will always try to produce slightly more than the demand because that is better than being short of supply to the next stage of the food chain. Every year, some vegetables are ploughed in, but it has increased recently, for reasons that we are all aware of. We are very mindful of encouraging a much more stable supply chain. That is why we have increased the number of drivers and brought in a variety of different skill sets through the seasonal workers scheme. We hope that this problem will ease in the coming months.