Driven Grouse Shooting

Lord Benyon Excerpts

Monday 31st October 2016 Westminster Hall

[Richard Benyon (Newbury) (Con)]

I refer hon. Members to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests. I had the honour of holding a similar job to that which the Minister currently holds at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. I sought, as I am sure she does, to ensure that the fact that there is more that unites the forces involved in biodiversity and conservation, land management and field sports than divides them, was prevalent in policy making. It is absolutely imperative that reversing the decline in biodiversity continues to be a priority for the Government and for future Governments.

I formed my opinions on this subject through my experience of managing an area of upland for many decades, and also, as a Minister, through working with grouse moor managers, NGOs, national parks and other organisations to restore peat land and to see what water companies and others were doing in the constituencies of Members such as the hon. Member for Penistone and Stocksbridge (Angela Smith). Her excellent remarks about the depleting state of some of the moorlands over many decades were entirely right.

Good stuff is happening and we do not want to see that reversed, but before we go any further let us accept that there are enormous challenges here. I am the first to say that those who are breaking the law deserve to feel the full force of the law. They are doing shooting no good; they are doing their peers no good; and they are doing the name of conservation no good. We need to make that very clear.

Very little in this place is certain to me—very little in life is certain to me—but one thing I absolutely know is that, if the aims of the petition were realised, it would be a catastrophe for the biodiversity of the uplands. I know that because I have seen at first hand how good grouse moor management results in more curlews, more lapwings and more oystercatchers. In an area that I know well, I have seen eagle chicks fledged and I have seen hen harriers and other birds of prey thrive. However, the most important thing is that no one in the House should take my word for it. A number of people have referred to an excellent piece of peer-reviewed science, “Changes in the abundance and distribution of upland breeding birds in the Berwyn Special Protection Area, North Wales 1983-2002”. What slightly surprised me when reading the transcript of the Petitions Committee’s evidence session for the petition was that the main perpetrator of the petition, who has a desire to ban driven grouse shooting, admitted that he had scant knowledge of that report.

As has already been mentioned by right hon. and hon. Members, the report provides a bleak vision of what would happen to our uplands if there were a ban. Berwyn is a 242 sq km area of blanket bog and upland heath, similar to the one described by the hon. Member for Penistone and Stocksbridge. No driven grouse shooting has taken place there since 1990, and I need not repeat the details of the catastrophic decline that we heard from the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon). Coincidentally, there were increases in carrion crows, as well as peregrines and buzzards, although that is a national phenomenon—a conservation triumph owing mainly to the exclusion of certain chemicals from those areas. Most tellingly in that special protection area, hen harriers declined by 50%.

There is another piece of science that we should consider. It is a very good, peer-reviewed paper, produced by the Game and Wildlife Conservation Trust, called “Waders on the fringe”. I could go into great detail about the paper, but if I could sum it up in one phrase it would be, “If you want to see waders and red-listed bird species, go to a managed grouse moor.”

I will tackle the important point about flooding, because it will be much in the Minister’s mind as winter sets in. I spend a lot of time looking at the devastation caused by floods in places such as the Calder valley, and I am absolutely certain that the arguments around grouse moor management being a cause of flooding are very thin indeed. There may be small areas in certain circumstances but, when I was a Minister, the main problem for the grouse moor owners who battered on my door was that Natural England was being slow or over-bureaucratic in allowing them to block grips or drains. For them, on grouse moor management, “wetter is better”. That phrase resounded in my mind, and I personally have experience of trying to make a grouse moor wetter. We forget at our peril that decisions taken in Parliament or in Whitehall have had devastating effects on our uplands—not least 80%-plus grants for moorland drainage schemes.

I believe that, if many of the people who signed the petition listen to the debate and to some of the experiences of hon. Members, they will feel that there are two very different sides to this argument. I have great praise for the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. I worked very closely with it as a Minister and I continue to support much of what it does. Its caution on the call for a ban is something we should listen to. I think movement could be made by both sides, but it is sad when issues are polarised in the way the petition has forced them to be. I believe much more work can be done to get to where we can all agree and can take this forward, as other hon. Members have already said.

It is totally wrong to say that this is an argument between a ban and the status quo. The countryside and the natural world never stand still. Grouse moor owners and managers are constantly trying to find new ways of restoring peat and of increasing the quality of the habitat, not just for the birds that they want to use for sporting purposes but for the wider biodiversity of the uplands. We in the House should be obsessed with reversing the decline of biodiversity in this country. If the petition were enacted, it would work in the opposite way. That would be a disaster for my generation and for my children, who would not be able to see the kinds of birds and wildlife that I have had the privilege to enjoy seeing in our uplands.