International Wildlife Crime

Oliver Letwin Excerpts

Thursday 6th February 2014 Commons Chamber

[The Minister for Government Policy (Mr Oliver Letwin)]

It is a pleasure to participate in a debate in which there is considerable consensus. I am enormously grateful to my right hon. Friend the Member for Arundel and South Downs (Nick Herbert), my hon. Friends the Members for North Thanet (Sir Roger Gale), for Newbury (Richard Benyon) and for Richmond Park (Zac Goldsmith), my right hon. Friend the Member for Uxbridge and South Ruislip (Sir John Randall) and my hon. Friends the Members for Mid Derbyshire (Pauline Latham) and for Southend West (Mr Amess) for illustrating extraordinarily well the issues before us. In every case, they did so with personal commitment and passion, and also with some charm. It is notable that so many Members wished to participate in a debate of this kind.

I also very much welcome the contribution of the Chairman of the Environmental Audit Committee, the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent North (Joan Walley). She and others pointed out that is was an auspicious day on which to hold this debate, given that it is the day on which France has joined China and the United States—in anticipation, we think, of Hong Kong—in destroying stocks. We should be very glad that is happening, but we still face considerable danger. Many points were illustrated beautifully in the speeches made, but one did not emerge and everyone in the Chamber is conscious of it: the appendix II countries are prohibited from further sale only up to 2017 and, as we saw from the one-off sale in 2008, that presents a significant risk. I understand that there are some 300,000 elephants in appendix II countries, so this is a serious issue.

Everyone who spoke in the debate is aware, as I suspect are many hundreds of thousands of our fellow citizens, of the extent of the impoverishment of our world that occurs as biodiversity reduces. We are not just talking about some striking animals; we are in serious peril of major extinctions. Rhino extinctions may happen very soon, but even elephant extinctions may not be too far off if we do not act properly. So it is right that the Government, the European Union and the world should take action, and those are the three levels at which we are trying to act.

As for cross-government participation in trying to solve this problem, an issue that has come up repeatedly, the first point to make is that this Government have, for the first time, established the right kind of machinery, with the inter-ministerial group, to which attention has been drawn. This is not just any old ministerial group; it is chaired by the Foreign Secretary, and relevant Secretaries of State serve on it. We are systematically going through all the issues that emerge, and it is out of that group that the idea of the international conference was carried forward by the Government. Many hon. Members have rightly paid tribute to His Royal Highness and to the royal family as a whole. They are, of course, an inspiration on this, but it is through the inter-ministerial group that the Government have taken the idea in hand and organised what will be a major conference.

It is also through that group that we are monitoring the activity of government in the domestic sphere. I will deal with that first and then return to the issue of the international conference towards the end of my remarks. The great bulk of the Environmental Audit Committee’s recommendations have already been responded to positively. That is the case, above all, on the funding for the unit in the Home Office and, indeed, the recreation of an internet monitoring post within that unit. I take the point made by several of my hon. Friends, the Chairman of the Committee and the Opposition spokesman, the hon. Member for Brent North (Barry Gardiner), that the unit needs to be a permanent feature of the scene. I am personally committed to that view, although I cannot commit the next Chancellor of the Exchequer to it. I do not know who that is going to be, although I very much hope it will be the current one, but I cannot commit whoever that is to what happens post-2016, nor can anybody else in this House yet. However, I can certainly say that wherever I am sitting in this House and whatever I am doing at that time, I shall be arguing for a continuation of that unit. I rather suspect, having listened to the remarks made by hon. Members from across the House, that that is a matter of some consensus, so I guess that whoever is in the next Government will continue that unit, and I certainly think they need to do so.

A great many questions have been asked about the consolidation of the various laws. That comes in two parts, the first of which is the Law Commission activity. That is the easy bit, for us here at least, because the Law Commission is in charge of that, not the Government. As everybody in the House will be aware, the Law Commission intends to complete its work by the summer, and it would be an impertinence for me to say anything further than that that is what we have been told. I can certainly give the Opposition spokesman the undertaking that once it has produced its recommendations, we will seek to find a means of those being subject to proper pre-legislative scrutiny. That is a sensible thing to do with a Law Commission product.

The second part falls to us, as the Government, to conduct, and I refer to the consolidation of regulations. The Select Committee rightly drew a good deal of attention to that, and it is part of the red tape challenge. The hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent North and I were both involved in the debate on the Deregulation Bill just a few days ago. I have spent a good many hours of my life in the last few years pursuing the red tape challenge, and one part of that is the consolidation of these regulations. We intend to pursue that. I am applying some gentle pressure on my colleagues in DEFRA to proceed with that at pace and I hope that we will be able to issue a consultation paper in the spring. I fully intend that we should complete the process by Christmas. I can therefore give the undertaking that the Opposition spokesman seeks—that we will seek to complete the process by the end of this Parliament.

It is also strikingly important that we continue to work on these issues of domestic enforcement and regulation across all Departments. As my hon. Friends and Opposition Members have said, every Department of state has to participate in that effort in different ways. The point of the inter-ministerial group is to ensure that happens.

I turn now to the international conference, the international leadership that this country is demonstrating and the question of what we hope to achieve. My hon. Friend the Member for Richmond Park, in a characteristically charming and vivid presentation, rightly said—echoed by others—that we should not assume that a conference is enough. Of course it is not, and nor would a series of conferences be, although incidentally I hope that the conference will become an institution and happen year after year, in parallel with the CITES conferences of parties. Nevertheless, the conference can, if we are both lucky and active, become a major watershed. We can achieve things by ending the conference with some clear statements of ambition and intention on the part of the very wide set of countries attending. It is not a conference of a few countries—many are coming and at very senior levels.

What are we seeking to achieve? As several hon. Members have said, there are three parts to this and I shall dwell briefly on each. The first is better enforcement, which has to be done on a global scale. We are contributing significantly to what I might call the war effort. My hon. Friend the Member for North Thanet described the extraordinary courage of some of the people involved in enforcement. It is not an easy thing to do—I think someone mentioned that around 1,000 law enforcement officers in this area have been killed. It is not a pleasant kind of policing. It requires money, political will and activity on the ground. We very much hope that the conference will bring together all those elements and take us forward into a better, more permanent enforcement, which should also include the permanency of limitations or bans on trade. That is what we want to see.

To make that work, the two other elements have to be in place. I was gratified that I was unable to discern any disagreement between hon. Members on either side on this point. We have simultaneously to achieve some significant and lasting reduction on the pull side—demand—and a serious-minded, sustainable alternative for indigenous populations that rely at present on this trade, in one way or another, for a large part of their income, with all the ghastly consequences that have been so well sketched by many hon. Members today.

The question of demand reduction is extraordinarily sensitive, especially for us, because it is not in the UK that the demand exists. It is not for us to lecture other countries about how to conduct their affairs, as that would not be right or productive, but we do have to show some leadership. We hope to work with other countries that are demonstrating increasing concern in this field and come up with solutions acceptable to countries where the demands are greatest and that therefore can be sustainable. I certainly do not want to prejudge how that will look—we are not in a position to do so—and I am sure that this conference will not be the end, but will be the beginning of a process that leads us there. I am very hopeful that over the course of the next few years we will get to the point where, by one means or another, demand reduction is baked into the future.

That brings us to the most difficult and most important thing of all: the provision of sustainable alternatives. Many years ago my hon. Friend the Member for Richmond Park and I found ourselves in Brazil talking about the Amazon with the amazing Mr Unger, then Minister for the Amazon, who I think rejoices in being the only Minister for the Amazon who was also a leading Harvard political theorist—and, I may say, a leading Harvard political theorist who would be a delight to the father of the current Leader of the Opposition and who disagrees with me on just about every aspect of political philosophy I have ever come across. Nevertheless, the Brazilians were serious in this pursuit and my hon. Friend and I were there to work with them on that question, and to understand better what they were up to. The point Mr Unger made repeatedly and very effectively to us was that it is all very well telling the population in the Amazon that they cannot cut down so many trees, but the truth is that that is how they feed themselves and unless we offer an alternative route to their feeding themselves and leading a halfway decent life, we cannot expect them to stop. The same is true in other contexts.

There are two routes to the achievement of what we seek. One is the route of trying to find alternatives—other forms of activity which have nothing to do with animals. The second, which was beautifully illustrated by my right hon. Friend the Member for Arundel and South Downs, is to find a way of placing a value on the living animals and offering an economic prospect for those who help the living animals to live rather than causing them to die. We need to go through both those routes and we need to try to forge an international consensus about how to carry those goals forward, which also will involve money, which is why I so welcome the fact that this Government have upped the ante by giving a total of, I think, £18 million in this domain. It is part of the Darwin initiative, and because of our immense commitment through a very large and growing DFID budget we can participate and show leadership in raising money around the world to deal with this issue.

The elements are all in place, therefore, and the last comment I want to make is that it seems to me that we have an extraordinary opportunity as a country. We are leading the charge in having this conference. We are a country that has had a long tradition of involvement in this area. We have the greatest stars globally that we can offer, namely the royal family, up front. We have a clear vision of what we are trying to achieve and we have budgets that can support the activity as well as a co-ordinated approach from Government. It would therefore be a terrible shame if we were not over the next two, three, four or five years to make use of all of that and build on it to lead the world in solving a problem that if it is not solved will very much diminish our globe.