Today the RSPB has withdrawn its support from the Defra Hen Harrier Plan. Well done them!
Martin Harper explains in his blog that the voluntary approach (to abiding by the law!) has failed.
Essentially the RSPB is saying that they do not trust the grouse shooters and have no confidence that the words they speak in Whitehall have any force in the hills of northern England. The representatives of the grouse shooting industry (it’s just a pointless hobby really) either went into the Defra Hen Harrier Plan discussions in bad faith all along or, if not, then they have no clout with their own members and supporters and cannot deliver their commitments on the ground.
Either way, the RSPB is right to walk away from an untrustworthy industry, with failed leadership which cannot deliver its promises.
Read Martin Harper’s statement and leave a comment approving of the RSPB action.
I will return to this matter during the day. It’s a good way to start the week. Well done RSPB!
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At last, they can smell the cofee….over the smell of bullshit, bollocks and filibuster.
Well done RSPB….. now just send a wee e-mail round your members telling them what you have done, why you have done it and suggest a sensible way forward….
Absolutely.
Well done at last RSPB. Now ask members to sign the petition.
I’m missing something – can’t find how to comment on Martin Harper’s blog – I keep getting to a techie note abut what an RSS feed is, can’t find what to click to make a comment myself. Can anyone advise?! Thanks.
jbc – it’s not you, it’s them! You need to register, and you need to be on the page of the particular post on which you wish to comment. It’s far from intuitive. Good luck.
Of course this is good news but I cannot see how the licensing proposed by the RSPB does anything to reduce the water pollution, greenhouse gas emissions or flood risk that all result from management for grouse shooting. Nor will it end the legal persecution of terrestrial predators, corvids and mountain hares that yields grotesque piles of corpses on every grouse moor that M&S thinks is ethical! Now is the time for ambition as momentum is growing and I just wish the RSPB would really grasp this issue and show leadership in joining the calls for a complete ban. Nobody thought licensing tiger hunts was the way forward.
Licensing would require the compliance with standards. Agreeing the standards would become the next great procrastination/filibuster.
Not killing raptors is easy…. but there would need to be other environmental standards….open to a much wider interpretation with more scope for argument. Standard rules or codes of practice? How would the licence be monitored, annual reporting?
A ban is much simpler.
Hmm, licencing! Sounds straightforward. A few weeks ago I wrote to Scottish Natural Heritage about them issuing an Individual Licence to Raeshaw Estate after they’d implemented a General Licence restriction because of alleged wildlife crime. Apparently a G L restriction “is not aimed at preventing licensable activities from being carried out by a person or on a piece of land, but rather to remove this very light-touch approach to regulation in situations where we have lost confidence or trust that this approach is appropriate”. I also questioned SNH’s ability to enforce the specific conditions and controls of this Individual Licence and found out that “the licence holder must notify SNH of the location, numbers and types of any trap they propose to use in advance of using them” and the licence “gives SNH the ability to inspect traps and accompany licence holders whilst carrying out activities under licence. We fully intend to monitor use of the licence and adherence to its conditions accordingly”. Also “In the event that species are taken on the land in question which are not permitted by the individual licence, and/or in a manner which is not permitted, it would constitute a breach of the licence conditions and [would be] a criminal offence ….. we intend to monitor its use and adherence to conditions accordingly”. We all know that offences take place but first catch your offender! And really, does any licensing authority have the manpower to make sure the conditions are adhered to on those huge estates?
Kathleen – you are very wise indeed.
Pity the RSPB does not go the whole hog and support your petition for an outright ban.
Hugh
Without going into loads of detail, you could use a licensing system to target any or all of those things. Essentially all a licensing system does is say “here’s a list of things you have to comply with if you want to be allowed to operate”. While line 1 of that list would presumably be compliance with the law, you could also include requirements targeted at the other environmental issues associated with intensive driven grouse shooting, which you mention.
Best wishes
Jeff
RSPB
Jeff, thank you for appearing here as an official RSPB person. There are many reasons why I’d prefer a ban anyway, but just as I can see why RSPB might have legal/enforcement issues with a ban I’m also vexed as to how you see licencing working. Here’s the scenario. Moor X is licenced. Birds of prey keep disappearing, here and perhaps on neighbouring unlicensed ground. NE (or whoever) therefore seeks to withdraw the licence. The estate appeals to the high court, as they have deeper pockets than NE and seek to wear them out. How do you prove that estate X is responsible? They will appeal on the grounds that the withdrawal of the licence, which is intended to have a significant financial impact, cannot be shown to be justified as they cannot be held responsible for third party actions. They will throw money and lawyers and “experts” at the case and probably completely outgun anything NE can muster.
On management, which is at least as problematic as predator control, NE is already incapable of policing ES/HLS agreements effectively and the financial consequences are rarely severe when someone is found in breach. At best it’s a huge new regulatory burden to place on a struggling organisation, esp one that is already very wary of upsetting its political masters by doing its job too effectively.
NE only has to loose in the High Court once and the licencing scheme really is just extra red tape, and red tape, as we know all too well, is not flavour of the month right now.
How does RSPB see licencing working legally and on the ground? I can see potential legal issues with a ban too, I’m genuinely open to persuasion, but RSPB has not yet done anything to persuade me, as a member, that licencing is workable. It’s much more complicated than a ban and for that reason alone much more costly to police.
So please do tell us either here or on RSPB’s own blogs or in Nature’s Voice. How does RSPB see licencing working in practice and in law? Thanks.
jbc – very well put. Thank you.
Jeff,
Thank you for that clarification. I am encouraged that the RSPB might attempt to include some or all of these issues in their proposed licensing system but even IF this were somehow achieved cases like Walshaw moor convince me that compliance with the licensing conditions would be continually abused and simply too hard, if not impossible, to police and enforce. Thus a licensing system risks offering an industry reliant on criminality a fig leaf of respectability. A ban is the only way to get the criminals off the hills. I suspect many at the RSPB secretly must know this, but fear being portrayed by the shooting lobby as unreasonable. The RSPB must decide which is the greater evil, being complicit in a flawed licensing system or being lambasted by the shooting community. Given the latter scenario is already the case what is there really to lose?
Hugh – very well put, if I may so so? thank you.
In addition, the RSPB’s proposal (or vague idea – I haven’t seen anything written down) includes pheasant, partridge and duck-shooting too – so it opens up several cans of worms at once. It is not a surgical strike against the worst offending ‘sport’.
Really? All forms of shooting? I didn’t know that – first I’ve heard in fact. That’s got to be a dead duck before it ever takes off (all puns intended). That’s a huge new bureaucracy to be proposing right now. You sure?
Sorry – not doubting your word, just never heard it mentioned here or by RSPB before… that’s a whole different ballgame to licencing DGS.
jbc – I think you will find that Jeff Knott will confirm that. All gamebird shooting.
Steve Ormerod’s guest blog talks about licensing of sporting estates which is much wider than grouse moors https://markavery.info/2016/05/24/guest-blog-rspb-chair-council-steve-ormerod/
My response to Steve points out that including all game shooting makes it rather complicated https://markavery.info/2016/05/25/thank-steve-no-cigar/
the e-petition launched in Scotland by the raptor Study Groups, but with great RSPB support, is clear that it would apply to all shooting of wild birds for sport. https://markavery.info/2016/07/13/game-licensing-scotland/
Essentially its difficult to legally distinguish between types of gamebird shoots, but pragmatically you could easily create exemptions, equivalent to the open general licence, for forms of shooting without conservation problems associated with them. That way you could target the system to wherever evidence showed major problems.
Again, I’m not offering definitive right or wrong answers here, just suggestions for how it could work really. A starter for 10?
Jeff
RSPB
Jeff – great to see you (the RSPB) engaging in conversation here (or at least clarifying points) – keep it up.
Licensing appears to me to be impractical & unworkable.
Hi folks
Lots of questions on licensing and I can’t answer them all. As with any new system, lots of the detail would have to be worked through during the inevitable debates and process.
The main challenges seem to be it would be too complex and would be unenforceable.
On the first point, its as complicated or as simple as you want to make it. The more lines of things to comply with you put in, the more complicated it would be, but arguably the more complete. There’s a balance to be had there. Maybe have levels of test, so a level 1 offence (eg. wildlife crime) requires high evidence but results in immediate loss of licence? Level 2 action (eg. burning out of season/against guidance) results in 12 month suspended loss of licence? Don’t know, just ideas.
Enforcement is and will always be a challenge. But the theory would go, at least some of the aspects of a licensing scheme could be based on obvious measures (eg. pretty obvious whether or not burning is going on), so perhaps easier to enforce?
Licensing is what I’d suggest the next step is. It might not work, in which case there might end up being no option but a ban, and Mark can then say I told you so (again!).
Licensing is effectively a targeted ban.
If I was running a law-abiding estate, I’d be championing licensing as a way to make sure my sport did have a future and the bad guys weren’t sullying my reputation. Whether they do or not will be interesting to see. The longer we get blanket denials and a refusal to engage in developing positive ways forward, the more it plays into the hands of those who favour a ban.
Jeff
RSPB
Jeff – much appreciated that you are responding here. Thank you.
‘it’s as complicated or as simple as you want to make it’ – that’s not quite true as it’s not in your gift. It’s as complicated or simple, and as good or bad, as politicians lobbied by game shooters want to make it. An analogy is the agri-environment Entry Level Scheme in England which was watered down under pressure from NFU under a much more benign political regime. A good licensing scheme could be very good, a poor one would be very poor.
You notice that no landowner, as far as I can see, is championing licensing – does that mean that none of them is law-abiding or just that they are pretty confident that they will be able to do what I suggest above?
Licensing would be good – the RSPB could have had it included in this current e-petition if they had wanted back in January…
True, although that’s the case for anything which would go through parliamentary debate. No doubt politicians would be lobbied by all of us too 🙂
Jeff
RSPB
Hi Jeff
I very much hope the RSPB will be in a position to publish some sort of options analysis, and proposed way forward, in the near future. Licensing is the RSPB’s proposed solution, and you have been proposing it (all-be-it rather limply and offhandedly) for some time, so you must have a reasonable idea of a formulation that would be effective.
Let’s see if it’s something we can all rally behind.
I also wonder if it’s time to get other actors in the grouse supply chain behind such a licensing scheme?
Can I add my support to Messi’s suggestion? The unfortunate Jeff is being asked all sorts of questions by awkward so-and-so’s like me and I feel guilty for putting him on the spot. Sorry Jeff!
But it would help everyone, and be a logical next step, for RSPB to set out exactly what it does mean by licencing. Maybe we can all throw our weight behind it, at least it’ll get some constructive criticism. The profile generated by the petition can only help promote awareness of the idea even if RSPB can’t be persuaded to support the petition itself.
I can’t believe – well I’d rather not believe – that RSPB has put so much faith and political capital in licencing without having at least a draft proposal. Otherwise how can RSPB know it could work at all? Let’s see it please.
On which note, I’ve a bit of experience of enforcement action and l Public Inquires in the planning field, which is why I’m viewing licencing through the lens of an adversarial barrister trying to get it struck down. RSPB must have loads of in house experience in relevant criminal cases; please reassure us that that expertise has been brought to bear when RSPB is thinking about a practical, enforceable licencing system. If RSPB Investigations team say they’re confident that enforcement can be effective, I’ll be paying attention.
We can always ask Mike Clarke on the 6th at Rainham…
Yes, currently the review of the Muirburn Code is almost entirely within the control of the Moorland Association. I cant say that I am optimistic about securing reduced impacts…. quite the opposite. I suspect they intend to come up with such a light touch wording that it will be virtually impossible to be certain when a breach occurs.
Thanks for the reply, Jeff. I think it misses the point, though. Under the proposed licencing regime above, you suggest that wildlife crime = withdrawal of licence. Well that’s hard for anyone to argue against until you think it through.
First, we already know that HH and other BoP can be wiped out by criminal activities that are next to impossible to police, even with the best will in the world. Birds go missing, who knows where, when or who. Catching a criminal in the act is a very rare occurrence, nothing like frequent enough to act as a penalty or a deterrent. And even if you do, how can you prove the estate is responsible? Even now the estates always claim that they didn’t know what their employees were up to, and if necessary it wouldn’t be hard at all to arrange for untraceable third parties to get paid for doing the dirty work. Your High Court appeal has just failed.
Birds can be disappeared over neighbouring ground, and then perhaps the estate with the nest is quite genuinely innocent. How are you going to prove who did it? They might disappear over an RSPB reserve, in fact if I were a nasty grouse moor owner I’d try to achieve exactly that result. Or I’d shoot them over the moor of someone whose political support against the RSPB was less than fulsome. Shoot enough birds and disturb enough nests and HH numbers can be kept at zero regardless of geography.
Bottom line this version of licencing amounts at best to a significant but flawed increase in the penalties for illegal persecution, possibly coupled with vicarious liability. However as with so many crimes it’s not the penalty but the likelihood or otherwise of getting caught that deters (or not). The likelihood of ever having evidence pinning the dead HH on the offending estate will remain vanishingly small and hence no deterrent at all. And that’s before the lawyers get to work.
It can’t work in practice, in terms of enough evidence gathered in the field in enough places often enough, but the legal obstacles, proving a chain of culpability, seem to me to be even more of a challenge.
It’s a licence for lawyers to bankrupt NE (or whoever) , not to effectively regulate DGS.
How is a licensing system any good at all how ever one designs it? Even with “law abiding” estates surely the whole point is that a landscape designed for driven grouse shooting is as much a desert as any lowland mono crop field. It only supports a limited amount of wildlife, damages the moisture retention ability of the moorland and allows carbon release rather than carbon capture to say nothing of the wipeing out of all sorts of competing wildlife which actually belong there more than the shooters. How much destruction do you licence for, 25%,50% 80% because make no mistake you will have to compromise somewhere and I doubt the sort of people who own grouse moors are much given to compromise they are more used to getting their way.
Jbc / Gerald – You’re right in that if it was done badly, a licensing system wouldn’t have much impact, but then that’s true of pretty much anything. If done well, it could work and once the system was in place, could be improved over time as evidence changed.
It also has a realistic chance of being progressed soon, at least in Scotland, so fingers crossed there.
And in England, the more pressure we can all keep on for progressive change, the better….
Jeff, your words ”…has a realistic change of being progressed soon, at least in Scotland, so fingers crossed….” just about sums up why I don’t think the RSPB really has fire in its belly over this one. If the RSPB really has its fingers crossed that we might get somewhere, in Scotland at least, sometime time soon, maybe, then we can say goodbye to hen harriers in England. I want to see a forceful RSPB campaign to make effective licensing real in England, quickly. You come across as far too laid back.
As we approach the 100,000 mark (and I would suggest that some MP should take it forward even without that number) we will need to discuss what we want to achieve.
There seems to be a misunderstanding over exactly what licensing is and Jeff is getting some hard questions.
The overall aim of this process is to decrease flood risk and greenhouse gas emissions, remove the killing of predators and the illegal killing of protected birds of prey. Everyone agrees with that and the aims are laudable but the means of doing so is a matter of discussion.
Mark believes this is best achieved through banning DGS. It doesn’t seek to ban all grouse shooting.
The RSPB have addressed the same issues by believing that licensing is the right way forward. This does mean that the shooting of grouse has to be made illegal in its entirety first. You cannot licence a legal activity or there is no penalty involved in losing that licence. The simplest way is to place the grouse within the fully protected element of the WCA.
We need to get something that ensures that the activities behind grouse shooting are eliminated or reduced. Banning DGS will still allow those activities to continue in support of what may be an enhanced form of walked up shooting. Licensing could and should involve clear guidelines over what activities would be allowed (or otherwise) if a licence is to be granted.
The difficulty with licensing is that a lot of work is needed in making sure the legal process behind the licence and way it could be removed is understood.
Hope is not a strategy.
‘To live in hope is to live in despair’ Argentinian proverb.
…. and I live in despair…..because I only have the one pair. (sorrry)!
The best thing the RSPB could do now is promote the petition and bring it to the wider attention of the general public. With their membership it will certainly reach 100,000. One single RSPB worker/volunteer speaking about it in every car park would certainly help.
The nest best thing is to work towards ensuring that no estate without viable raptor populations receive Government subsidy.