Contribution
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship today, Mrs Harris, and I thank all the Members who have spoken in the debate so far. It is fair to say that I will take a slightly different approach on this issue.
I am very proud to have a very active community when it comes to people contacting me, particularly about nature. Six hundred and thirty-five of my constituents signed this petition, which is the highest number of signatories for any constituency in the country. That stems from a deep concern about management practices that affect our community, where we have several grouse moors that are managed.
Grouse shooting has a profound environmental and ecological significance. It is a pastime rooted in privilege and exclusion, which inflicts immense harms on our uplands, our wildlife and our communities. It is hard to imagine that it has any place in a modern, fair and environmentally responsible Britain. I saw on one website that £7,000 a day is how much some estates charge for this excursion.
I have been out and about with gamekeepers in my constituency. They have put to me all these arguments and after many hours of debate, we agreed to disagree. I understand some of the points that colleagues have been making, but I will set out exactly why I think grouse shooting is harmful and requires more regulation.
I am really concerned that grouse shooting is seen as a harmless countryside tradition or a nostalgic relic of rural life. It is a highly commercialised industry in which vast tracts of our uplands are intensively managed not for biodiversity or for the public good, but to produce unnaturally large numbers of one bird species, the red grouse, for the gun. In Scotland, there are vicarious responsibilities and a licensing scheme, and I wonder whether the Minister has a view on those.
To achieve such an unnatural level of grouse, landowners routinely undertake practices that are environmentally destructive and ecologically reckless. They include the widespread burning of heather in moorlands, as we have heard; the draining of some peatlands; and—I am sure no responsible landowner or land manager allows it—the illegal persecution of birds of prey, including many protected species, such as the hen harrier, for which I am the species champion, the golden eagle, the buzzard and the peregrine falcon.
According to the RSPB, the majority of confirmed illegal killings of birds of prey in the past 10 years were linked to land managed for pheasant, partridge or grouse shooting, and RSPB figures show that at least one bird of prey is illegally killed or injured every four days in the UK. Given how precious these species are to our biodiversity, that is a shocking statistic.
The petition was signed by 635 of my constituents. The Moorland Association’s website states that just 700 people are directly employed in grouse moor management. I recognise that, as others have said, there are spin-out commercial opportunities. However, given how vast the contribution is—I think somebody mentioned £52 million earlier—if I were a beater, I might be unionising to take more of that profit home to my family.
The environmental consequences are well documented and grave. Burning heather damages fragile peat bogs, which are among the most vital carbon stores in the country. This degradation means that, instead of being locked away, carbon cannot be stored effectively, which accelerates climate change. The poor condition of our peat was recognised by the last Government. They brought in the peatlands strategy, which I welcomed but felt did not go far enough.
Burning heather heightens flood risks for downstream communities by stripping the land of its natural ability to hold water. I invite anyone to go to a moorland, pick up some sphagnum moss and give it good old squeeze—the water drips out of it, showing how much of a sponge it is. It stores water in our uplands, which is so important. I am very privileged to represent a city with so many hills and rivers, and downstream flooding in our region is very important. We want our peatlands to be restored so that that water is held upland, and this practice is holding that back.
We also want to ensure that our landscapes are not impoverished, stripped of biodiversity and managed for a single commercial interest.