If you read the DEFRA witness statement (paras 11-21) you’ll find that Natural England has a lot of work to do checking sites before DEFRA can be sure that gamebird releases are not wrecking our best wildlife sites. If only there were a regular and frequent programme of assessing important wildlife sites which was properly funded by government! Some of the slashing of Natural England’s budget will have to be revoked otherwise we’ll never know what the position is on the ground and restrictions on gamebirds will never be relaxed (they may never be anyway).
In the DEFRA statement you’ll find a very dull but important sentence in para 20:
The problem is that Natural England cannot rule out the possibility that there are cases where gamebird release is having, or has had, an adverse impact on a European protected site of which Natural England is not aware.
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/931392/defra-witness-statement-gamebird-release.pdf
That’s because Natural England has been prevented from doing its job by budget cuts. It hasn’t been monitoring sites frequently enough, and so it doesn’t know there condition well enough.
But the DEFRA version is very anodyne compared with the Natural England document EB3 . There’s a load of stuff here which commits Natural England to up their game and, you’ll see at the bottom of page 7, a programme of site visits in March-June next year. The shooting industry will want all that work to be completed rapidly and they will be hoping for a clean bill of health – we’ll see. But then on page 8 Natural England drops the bombshell that they have assessed 263 sites of high nature conservation importance as being vulnerable (see Annex B) to damage from gamebirds: some of these sites are quite big eg the North York Moors, the New Forest, Breckland, Dartmoor etc etc.
There will be all sorts of benefits to nature conservation provided Natural England is given the resources to visit such sites, as they should be anyway, and assess their condition, note problems and require remediation. Not all of the problems will be gamebird related.
It would be surprising if Natural England were not asking DEFRA for money to carry out the necessary monitoring and impact assessments. And to get itself of a hook DEFRA needs to make sure that this work is done. I have a feeling that Natural England will respond quicker than usual to information requests designed to discover what resources have been made available.
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NE’s list of sites that they will assess seems at first sight to be a bit odd. I wonder what the process is to challenge them over omissions?
I posted the below in the previous blog. I hope I’m not thought a nuisance popping it in here where it perhaps is more appropriate.
Thinking further about the assessment, I’m unclear who the proposer is in this Project. It seems as if the taxpayer is picking up the tab for research work to enable an assessment, when it is the proposer should come to the Appropriate Authority with all that information.
And, going back to the ‘General Licence if within a certain distance of a sensitive sit’; it seems to me, at least with Natura sites, that almost the reverse should apply: a General Licence is available if further than 5km, but within 5km the proposer – perhaps some of those august ‘Interested Parties’ in the case – would need to research the impacts of their proposal in order to demonstrate beyond reasonable scientific doubt that there will be no likely significant effect.
It’s an interesting discussion who should pay for this! Why, as a taxpayer, I should pay for NE etc to visit hundreds of sites which are intended for sport/income/profit (for the big ones). Shouldn’t the shooting industry start to cover it’s costs – like shotgun licence costs etc. They will argue any additional costs would make it uneconomic – well that’s because we are subsidising it directly and indirectly. They need to pay the real cost for their pleasure !!