What now, DEFRA?

Yesterday’s announcement by the Scottish government makes DEFRA look like it is still run by throwbacks to the Edwardian era.

No DEFRA minister with responsibility for wildlife conservation has ever condemned wildlife crime in the terms that we heard from the Scottish government yesterday; not Richard Benyon, not Rory Stewart, not Therese Coffey and not Rebecca Pow. None of their responses to petitions of various sorts about driven grouse shooting has ever acknowledged the need for radical action on wildlife crime. While the Scottish government has been moving through the gears with vicarious liability, increased fines, a poisons disposal scheme, provisions to withdraw general licences, an expert committee and now the coming of licensing DEFRA has come up with: practically zilch, except a Hen Harrier Inaction Plan that gives the wildlife criminals what they want.

Note too, that in the ministerial statement yesterday Mairi Gugeon said;

…in future Muirburn will only be permitted under licence from NatureScot, regardless of the time of year it is undertaken. And there will be a statutory ban on burning on peatland, except under licence for strictly limited purposes such as habitat restoration.

While some of these measures go further than the recommendations made by the review group, I believe they are necessary to protect our environment and in particular our peatlands, which as I know everyone here understands, play a crucial role in our carbon storage and climate change mitigation strategies.

https://www.gov.scot/publications/werritty/

This should have implications for the England Peat Strategy, which must already been written which is the opportunity for DEFRA to make good its promise on burning on peatlands.

There is the dreadful propect of having a Conservative administration in England forever, but I doubt it. Labour is in favour of grouse moor licensing and with yesterday’s move in Scotland it makes it all the more likely that a non-Conservative government would bring in licensing at least. The longer DEFRA allows wildlife crime to run riot in our uplands the more likely that the inevitable endpoint of a ban on driven grouse shooting will arrive sooner rather than later. As we have seen in Scotland, pressure keeps building because the grouse shooting industry have no corporate discipline – they just can’t stop keepers all over the uplands committing crimes.

This is actually how devolution is supposed to work – Scotland, in this particular case, is no longer held back by an anachronistic English view of what the uplands are for, progress can be made in parts of the UK independently. It might be expected to balance out over a range of issues, but from here it looks as though on so many issues, environmental and not, we’d be better off under a Scottish government. Down here we spend more and more time looking over Hadrian’s Wall and seeing things moving better than under the Tory chumocracy.

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