Dear Marian I am writing to you to ask that you carry out an urgent, independent review of the functioning of Natural England’s wildlife licensing work. I believe that is clearly underperforming and in some very serious ways. Since the bits of your licensing system that I can see are only a few, and since…
BLOG
The 2019 Natural England licensing scandal – a few bits of context.
It’s helpful to remember that all wild birds are protected by law in the UK. There are few exemptions and even those exemptions are carefully prescribed. So, you can shoot gamebirds but only in season (apart from that there aren’t many constraints on shooting wildlife for fun, unlike in many European countries). If you want…
Rule of six? Hit for six!
It was such a bad move from the shooting industry to lobby for exemption from the Rule of Six for gamebird shooting. Drawing attention to yourself when you are in such a poor position is never a good idea. Just now, and it may only last for a while, millions of people are sensitised to…
Lots of Knots at Snetts
Snettisham Beach this morning as the mist cleared and the tide rose – brilliant. We didn’t exactly have the place to ourselves as there were lots of people with binoculars and telescopes (maybe 100 or so) but we were all outnumbered by around 100,000 waders or more – probably more than half of them were…
Revealing more details of the 2019 Natural England licensing scandal (2)
We know that last year Natural England was shovelling licences out of the building authorising all and sundry to kill unlimited numbers of any of the species formerly listed on the general licences anywhere in the UK (see earlier blog today and links therein). Is this because the applications described in detail and clearly the…