Open Season for Woodcock

Greg Smith Excerpts

Monday 27th February 2023 Westminster Hall

[Greg Smith (Buckingham) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Dame Caroline. I will not take too much time, because repetition—as I was reminded when Timmy Mallett joined me at a charity event in my constituency yesterday—can bring that famous foam hammer down on one’s head.

The point I really want to make—which builds on the arguments made by my hon. Friends the Members for North Herefordshire (Sir Bill Wiggin) and for Ruislip, Northwood and Pinner (David Simmonds), my right hon. Friend the Member for Scarborough and Whitby (Sir Robert Goodwill), and the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon)—is to ask: why? Why do we need to legislate for something that, as my hon. Friend the Member for North Herefordshire has just said, is not actually a problem?

The shooting community shoots up and down the land. I fully accept that there are one or two irresponsible shoots, which we need to clamp down—the sort of shoots that bury the birds afterwards, rather than putting them into the food chain. However, the vast majority of shoots are entirely responsible and entirely focused on, yes, shooting the birds and getting them into the food chain, and more than anything else they are focused on conservation: looking after our countryside and ensuring that these habitats are there, not just for woodcock but for every species we could care to imagine.

That is clear from the statistics already quoted this afternoon. As it is, and with a very high rate of compliance, shoots up and down the country are not shooting woodcock until after 1 December. With an ever-expanding statute book in the United Kingdom, I put it to hon. and right hon. Members that there is no good reason to add to it yet further. Shooting in the United Kingdom, as has already been said, provides a massive net benefit to our economy and many thousands of jobs. As is clearly evidenced by the Aim to Sustain coalition, which involves the BASC, the Countryside Alliance, the Game and Wildlife Conservation Trust and many more, the shooting community is involved in a voluntary transition from lead to steel shot. Indeed, many game dealers will not take meat from shoots that do not have British Game Assurance accreditation, which requires that birds by shot with steel, not lead.

This voluntary transition is leading to much sounder and more sustainable shooting in the United Kingdom. The longer that transition is left as voluntary—I stress the word “voluntary”—then the future benefits of shooting will be all the greater, not just to the economy but to getting more game meat into the food chain. I should say in passing that it is sometimes overlooked and forgotten that game meat is often healthier and a better protein than many of the meats we all buy from supermarket shelves. More people should be encouraged to eat game; I am encouraged by BGA’s success in getting more game meat served on national health service hospital wards, providing healthy protein.

We must ask ourselves this question: what good would it do to put another piece of legislation on the statute book? What would it achieve? Would it change anything on the ground? The answer can only be no. As others have said, between 1.4 million and 1.6 million woodcock migrate to the United Kingdom annually. The International Union for Conservation of Nature red list clearly lists the woodcock as a species of least concern, with a stable global population trend. This is not a bird that is about to die out or on the precipice of extinction; shoots and famers up and down the land look after the habitats that sustain all these species which we care so much about.

While the petition looks at specific dates around the shooting season, there is no question but that there are those out there who want to stop shooting altogether. They want to stop the British public shooting game and, more importantly, eating that healthy, nutritious source of food. But there is a reality that underpins that mission, and it is fantasy-land politics to believe that, if it were successful and we no longer shot and ate game, that would suddenly lead to a massive growth in the woodcock population or any other species—that somehow deer will neatly pat down the soil around newly planted saplings, or that predatory birds would bring down tasty worms and gift them to the woodcock.

[Sir Robert Goodwill]

Does my hon. Friend agree that even the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds understands the importance of predator control? In 2018, it controlled 598 foxes and 800 crows, and it also controls barnacle geese and Canada geese to protect terns and avocets, so it understands the importance of managing the countryside in the way that gamekeepers have done for generations.

--- Later in debate ---

[Greg Smith]

I absolutely agree with my right hon. Friend; he is spot on. The deer population in Buckinghamshire is now completely out of control, and damaging farmland, habitats and the safety of biodiversity across the county, left, right and centre. Of course, foxes and other predatory animals do enormous damage to our wildlife.

That is the point I was building up to. These factors are so much more important in the decline of the native species. If we take shoots and people interested in shoots who have a passion for conservation out of the picture, the habitats will get worse, not better. I respectfully disagree with the petitioners that this is a problem that needs legislation. Conservation is inherent to the shooting community in the United Kingdom. If shooting declines and more and more unnecessary restrictions are put on the shooting community, species will go into a much worse decline.