Contribution
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mr Stuart. I thank the hon. Member for Eltham and Chislehurst (Clive Efford) for showing such passion and determination for bringing about these much-needed changes.
As the hon. Member for Aberdeenshire North and Moray East (Seamus Logan) said, this matter strikes a deep chord not only with my Strangford constituents, but across the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. My constituents have contacted me in large numbers about the archaic, barbaric and utterly indefensible practice of importing hunting trophies from endangered animals into the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
Let us be quite clear: this debate is not about traditional, sustainable hunting for food. If it was, and if people were starving, there could be some justification. It is about the execution of some of the world’s most iconic and vulnerable species for nothing more than a sick thrill, a photo opportunity and a gruesome souvenir to put on a coffee table or to hang on a wall. Society has moved on. What may have been acceptable in the past is certainly not acceptable today, and that is the reality. Yet despite years of promises, manifestos and cross-party consensus in both this Chamber today and the main Chamber, the UK’s doors remain wide open to this vile and barbaric trade.
Recent figures from the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs paint a deeply concerning picture. Between July 2024 and September 2026, the Animal and Plant Health Agency issued no fewer than 41 import permits for hunting trophies, which the hon. Member for Banbury (Sean Woodcock) mentioned in his intervention. Let that sink in: 41 permits in just over two years.
Those permits cover animals that are on the brink of extinction, with some 21 permits issued for African elephants. For the life of me, I cannot understand how anybody would want to shoot an elephant—I cannot get my head around that one. Five were issued for lions and four for hippopotamuses, and there were others issued for leopards, polar bears and rhinos. We see lovely nature programmes on TV where animals roam free, but some men—and probably some women as well, unfortunately—wish to kill them. Every single permit represents an animal that died in distress, often slowly, from blood loss or infection, just so a British hunter could boast about it. It is a national embarrassment that, in 2026, we are still facilitating the decline of these magnificent creatures.
The public support for taking action is overwhelming. Up to nine in 10 British people—almost 90%—want to see an immediate, comprehensive ban on trophy hunting imports. I wish the Minister well in the role she plays—she knows that we wish her the best in what she does—but the Government should take the action that people overwhelmingly want. It will go through Parliament without any hiccups or problems whatever. We have seen private Members’ Bills pass through the House of Commons unanimously, only to be stalled, blocked or run out of time because of a small minority. This is something that 90% of people in the United Kingdom believe should be law.
The current Government made a clear commitment in their election manifesto to ban these imports. Yet—I say this with respect to the Minister and the Government—when asked just last month for a concrete timetable to implement this ban, Ministers provided no dates and no timeline. Today the Minister is in the hot seat: I ask her to give us a timescale, give us a date and tell us when it will happen. The permit flow continues at a rate of nearly two dozen a year while the Government drag their feet.
We cannot allow external pressure from international hunting lobbies or administrative inertia to water down the British people’s standards. We should be leading the world in wildlife conservation, but to do that we must stop giving a green light to the destruction of the world’s biodiversity.
I am not the only one who loves David Attenborough’s TV programmes. They are all about the oceans at the moment, and he has done other wonderful programmes in the past. They motivate us to speak out, and today we are doing that. I urge the Minister to please stop kicking the can down the road. The British public are watching; our constituents demand action. The wildlife of this planet cannot afford any more delays. Give this House and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland a date by which legislation will be introduced, and let us finally consign this cruel trade to the history books, where it belongs.