Dear Mr Pursglove

Dear Mr Pursglove

I hope you are well, particularly at this time of COVID-19 and particularly as our local area of Northampton, Wellingborough and Kettering all seem to be hotspots for the disease. I feel that your government has dealt very badly with this emergency but that is not why I am contacting you.

I sent you one of those irritating e-action emails recently – it was about grouse shooting, a subject about which, if you recall, I feel strongly. In fact, I was one of the organisers of the e-action so I am pretty familiar with what it said too.

I’m not chasing you for a response: it is the holiday season and it has been stinking hot here and I know you will be busy anyway, but I thought it worth pointing out some things about this e-action to help you and your team deal with it.

First, the email you received specifically asks you to contact an environment minister on this subject. I am expecting you to do that on my behalf and the fact that the request arrived as part of an e-action, and that you might have received quite a lot of them, does not absolve you from that responsibility and I shall certainly keep chasing you for that.

Second, I’m quite happy that you post a generic response on your website to a generic bunch of emails. That seems a reasonably efficient way to do things. However, the generic response being used by Conservative MPs at the moment is evasive and misleading. If you use that response I, and I hope others, will be coming straight back to you pointing out the errors, asking you to do better and asking for real answers. I thought you might find this helpful to know.

Third, arising out of that issue, please tell me where you, my MP, get your generic replies. I fully appreciate that you cannot possibly write them yourselves, nor can every MP have a personal team on hand that knows about every subject under the sun, so where do they come from, please? Do you get them from Conservative Central Office? Do you subscribe to some service that provides them? If so, which one do you use? Does DEFRA provide them? I’d like to know please. The e-action that I am particularly interested in right now was produced by two conservation charities (the RSPB and Hen Harrier Action) and a not-for-profit conservation company (Wild Justice – of which I am one of the three founders and our registered office is in your constituency).

I’ll look forward to:

1. your assurance that you are going to contact DEFRA on my behalf
2. seeing your response to the other e-action points raised
3. hearing from you on the source of your generic responses

And antepenultimately, may I remind you that you have never responded to my request sent to you on 30 October 2019 at 11:26 despite assurances from your team that it would be acted upon by you. Do you need reminding of it?

And penultimately, you never have got back to me on the question of quite why Offshore Group Newcastle (now liquidated, former director Alexander Termerko) and Alexander Termerko were so impressed by you that they donated over £20,000 to your funds.

But lastly, thank you for your attention and I do hope you stay safe and well (and reply to me)

Dr Mark Avery (address supplied)

And if you want to give your elected politician a nudge to act for change then please join over 36,000 others in sending them a message through this e-action which is a joint campaign by the RSPB, Hen Harrier Action and Wild Justice. Click here to have a look please thank you!

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