Woodland Cover Protection and Grey Squirrel Control

Earl of Kinnoull Excerpts

Thursday 25th May 2023 Grand Committee

[The Earl of Kinnoull (CB)]

My Lords, I declare my interests as set out in the register, in particular as chair of the UK Squirrel Accord. I, too, congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Redesdale, on his excellent introduction and on getting this debate at an important time in what is going on in the world of trees and squirrels.

On Monday, the Minister said,

“you cannot have net zero without talking about trees”.—[Official Report, 22/5/23; col. 598.]

That was a prescient thing to say in view of the debate that we are having today. Indeed, many sources have concluded what the UK Squirrel Accord knows to be true: the biggest threat to our broadleaf woodlands is the grey squirrel, ring-barking as they do trees aged between 10 and 40 years and effectively killing them.

The UK Squirrel Accord is the coming together of 45 organisations of the United Kingdom to address this unpleasant truth, comprising the four Governments, their nature agencies, the main voluntary sector bodies and the principal private sector players. The accord has not only ensured good communication among the member bodies but allowed scientific research to be commissioned together. Quite a lot has been achieved in laying the groundwork for a major initiative in reducing the number of grey squirrels, in large part through the use of fertility control.

This exciting research is being led at the Animal and Plant Health Agency—APHA—and includes strands on the fertility control substance, the hoppers that contain it and, most important, the rigorous computer modelling that underpins the rollout strategy. The research phase is approaching its fifth and final year, which will give way to the landscape trials phase and then a licensing phase before the rollout. The Minister has ministerial responsibility for APHA. The Defra family and APHA have been very helpful and involved in the accord. Does the Minister agree that this fertility control research represents the outstanding near-term option as a key weapon for grey squirrel control?

The APHA research has been funded in part by the Defra family, but just over £1 million has been raised from private UK individuals and trusts. I thank those people very much. There have been some really generous people and they have brought with them a lot of knowledge and the ability for us to do the large-scale field trials when the time comes. I hope that it is not ungrateful to the Minister, who is such a good supporter of ours, to observe that larger sums of government money are being spent in other areas of disease and invasive alien species. Given the central need to deal with this issue for net-zero reasons alone, I urge the Government to consider upping the resource that they devote to this issue.

There are two areas where the Government can help. The first is the cost of the licensing process that we are about to undergo, for both the hoppers and the substances that will be left behind in them, and the second is increasing the co-ordinating resource that the UK Squirrel Accord has available for the next phases. We have been well resourced in people and in monetary terms up to now, thanks to generosity and the 45 organisations, but there will be a step change in what we need to do going forward and this needs more bodies. It will take a lot of effort to deal with further planning and the engagement and education of everyone up and down the country and there will be many other issues as well. If we have more bodies now, we will make a better job of it. I would be grateful if the Minister could comment on that.