Hunting Trophies (Import Prohibition) Bill

Debate between Lord Robathan and Lord Roborough

Committee stage
Tuesday 12th September 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Robathan (Con)]

I am grateful to my noble friend because I will come on to a compromise in a minute.

This Bill is of course a manifesto commitment left over from 2019. It was probably put in, rather surprisingly, by a former Prime Minister to placate somebody close to him. As somebody who was a Member of the House of Commons for 23 years, I can promise those who talk about 86%—or whatever it is—of people asked about trophy hunting not approving of it that this is not something that exercises most people on the streets of London, Manchester Blaby or Leeds. Furthermore, the Bill ignores the advice of the Government’s own body, the Joint Nature Conservation Committee.

I go back to what my noble friend just raised. Let us have a compromise that promotes conservation—I am absolutely a conservationist on my farm—fulfils the manifesto commitment to ban the importation of endangered species and listens to the Africans and others who oppose this Bill. Let us not listen to the arrogant zeal of activists.

I turn to the specific amendment. It goes to the heart of the issue, which is conservation, and asks us to listen to the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s red list, which concerns species that are seen as threatened by trophy hunting—if they are. The Minister just mentioned CITES. Let us stick with that, then; that would be something useful, although I do not think that you are allowed to trade in anything that is on a CITES list anyway. Let us stick conservation at the heart of this Bill, not the sort of patronising, arrogant zeal that we see from a lot of people on this. I beg to move.

[Lord Roborough (Con)]

My Lords, I rise to speak in support of my noble friend Lord Robathan’s Amendment 5. I declare an interest, as stated in the register, as a partner in a sporting estate in Scotland.

I note my noble friend the Minister’s earlier words. However, I echo other noble friends in the Chamber: this is a critical amendment that would return the Bill closer to the original Conservative Party manifesto commitment and ban imports from the trophy hunting of endangered animals. When Henry Smith proposed this Private Member’s Bill, he stated:

“The world’s wildlife faces an extinction emergency of extraordinary proportions. We have to do everything we can to support conservation”.


We now understand that we all support that, but I am familiar with the high importance of hunting, which can involve taking trophies in financing conservation efforts and in the protection and restoration of habitats and ecologies that support the species being hunted.

In this country, it is of limited national economic benefits, but it can make a material impact at a local level in relatively disadvantaged communities. When we look overseas—to countries in Asia and Africa, for example—the impact is much greater. Revenues from hunting can be the key financial support for conservation efforts. I understand that hunting may be distasteful to many, but conservation efforts funded by that hunting are universally welcomed. What right do we in this rich country have to cut off that funding and send a signal to the rest of the world that they should do likewise? Why should we make decisions that put out of work people around the world whose interests are also best served in ensuring a surplus of these species, potentially turning hunters into poachers?

The globally accepted definitive authority on threatened species is the IUCN red list. This classifies species into nine categories according to their level of endangerment, from “not evaluated” to “extinct”. The amendment identifies “threatened”, which incorporates “critically endangered” and “vulnerable”. That is one more than the manifesto commitment. Dr Challender of Oxford University, and colleagues, showed that less than a quarter of the 73 CITES-listed mammal species that have been imported as hunting trophies since 2000 fall into the “threatened” definition and 60% are of “least concern”. The same work showed that nearly 80% of imports were from countries where populations of the hunted species were stable, increasing or abundant.

The amendment brings in the concept of trophy hunting itself as a threat to the species being hunted. Analysis of the red list by Challender, Dickman, Roe and Hart showed that

“legal hunting for trophies is not a major threat”

to any of the species imported to the UK as trophies since 2000. In fact, the analysis concludes that trophy hunting is not listed as a threat to the survival of any species. The positive impact of hunting on threatened species is well illustrated by Michael ‘t Sas-Rolfes and Dr Emslie in their article in the Conversation:

“South Africa and Namibia are the two countries with the most African rhinos. In 1970, before legal hunting was introduced, they jointly held about 1,950 white rhinos … That number had risen to about 16,600 by 2017 … the biological and socio-economic benefits generated by these hunts … can boost conservation performance through enhanced population growth and funding”.


Returning to the Challender analysis, only 10 endangered species have been imported to the UK as hunting trophies since 2000, including ranched animals, which would not have been bred without hunting as an objective. Therefore, I question why this Bill is identifying over 6,200 species. How will our Border Force cope with this burden of determining which species or subspecies an animal part may be from and whether it is a trophy, has been hunted, or where the importer lives? How much simpler and more targeted to rely on IUCN red list designations.

This is an important amendment, returning the Bill to its original intention and supporting conservation efforts globally. Further to comments on earlier groups, these amendments, and this one in particular, are carefully designed to turn a damaging, emotionally driven Bill into legislation which genuinely will support conservation.

[Lord Mancroft (Con)]

My Lords, I support this amendment. We have been told that the motivations behind this Bill are the manifesto commitment and public opinion. I am not particularly enthusiastic about either of those things, but there is no doubt that this amendment does return the Bill to the manifesto commitment that was given. If that is what the Government are hanging their hat on, as they appear increasingly to have done during the summer, then they should accept this amendment. If they say, “Well, we can’t do that because that will return the Bill to the House of Commons”, well, they have had the timetable for this Bill, as they have for any Bill, in their gift throughout, so it is their fault and not ours that we are debating it at this late hour.

A point was raised earlier about public opinion. We have had “public opinion” thrown at us—that 80% or 90% of people support this. The reality is that the people support it because they think it is a conservation measure. When it is explained to them—as it has been by the IUCN, with its rather more nuanced and in-depth research into public opinion—that actually, it does not help conservation, less than 50% support it. The number goes right down.

The polls that put it up at 80% or 90% are the usual incredibly biased animal rights polls, which we have seen for 20 or 30 years in this country. They say, “Do you want to rip a small animal to shreds and enjoy every minute of it, relishing in its blood?” You get 99% on that one; if you have these sorts of ridiculous questions, of course you do. The reality is that we should not and must not run our country by public opinion poll.