Question to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs:

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what assessment he has made of the potential merits of amending the Invasive Alien Species (Enforcement and Permitting) Order 2019 to permit grey squirrels to be released by vet practices and wildlife rescue centres.

It is the Government's position that the release of rehabilitated grey squirrels is not a harmless act and would actively work against efforts to manage this species. Grey squirrels negatively impact forestry and infrastructure, causing at least £37m pa. worth of damage to trees in England and Wales. Grey squirrels also have a disastrous impact on the native red squirrel population due to competition and the fatal transmission of squirrel pox virus. This has contributed to red squirrel populations reducing to approximately 38,900 from an estimated 3.5m.

The Invasive Alien Species (Enforcement and Permitting) Order 2019 (the Order) implements the retained EU Invasive Alien Species Regulation. The retained Regulation establishes a list of species of special concern and provides for restrictions on these species so they cannot be intentionally brought into GB, kept, bred, transported, sold, used or exchanged, allowed to reproduce, grown or cultivated, or released into the environment. In advance of the Order coming into force, a full public consultation was run in summer of 2019 seeking views on the management measures being considered by Defra for the widely spread 'species of special concern', which includes grey squirrel.

In June 2020 HMG published their response to the public consultation on 'Invasive Alien Species: Management Measures for Widely Spread Species in England and Wales'. This confirmed the Government's view that there is no provision under the retained Regulation which would enable the Government to allow the species concerned to be taken in from the wild, rehabilitated and released back into the wild.