Natural Environment and Rural Communities Bill

I want to pick up the point by the noble Baroness, Lady Miller of Chilthorne Domer, about ballast water. It is perfectly true that there are light treatments that will kill all microbial problems in water, but no light treatment that I have heard of would kill a mitten crab. Some other means of preventing such an invasion would therefore be required, although we know now that in this instance we would be closing the stable door after the horse had bolted and so we have a problem. There is also the other oversized crab marching down or along the north coast of Russia which has already come around the corner into Norway. I have some hope on that one; I found myself slightly amused by the fact that although it was originally a Stalinist programme its control may become a capitalist success because there is a good market for that crab. The real reason I rise to speak is to support my noble friends on red squirrels. There were red squirrels in Essex when I was a boy. I was wild enough to climb up and explore squirrel drays when I was nine or 10 years old. I never had the good fortune to tip a red squirrel out of a dray, so I cannot claim that I am the reason that they left, but they were there and a part of my childhood. That is no longer the case. Now we have grey squirrels; I daresay that we trap them and kill them humanely whenever we can, because they are a nuisance in more ways than one and not just to red squirrels. They are the prime cause for the retreat of the red squirrels into the vastnesses in the north where even now, as we have heard from my noble friend Lord Peel, they are becoming endangered by the spread of the virus that the grey squirrels carry with them. There is no doubt that the reason for the spread of the grey squirrel is that as a society we have neglected to deal with them as the invasive issue that they are. If one goes out into the London parks and watches people treating the greys almost as pets, one realises that there is a huge psychological problem in dealing with the issue because most people regard that pernicious animal as rather a sweet little thing that is rather pretty and nice and think, ““Why should we worry about it?””. So there is a political problem, with a small ““p””, over the issue because the public’s approach is based on sentiment rather than on reality. The reality is that because of sentiment we are losing one of our favourite animals in the country. While I am on my feet I should mention another invasive species that warrants merit in this context: the muntjac deer. We do not see many of them because they are on the whole secretive. They live discreetly; they tend to live singly or in pairs. They do not show themselves in the open much unless they are disturbed. But the fact is that the population of the muntjac deer is rising and one comes across them across all of southern England at the present time, up into the Midlands—it may be that they go all the way up to the north. That is another invasive species. The danger that they pose is not to another animal species but particularly to bluebell woods. We happen to have a particularly fine bluebell wood on our land and so far we have been fortunate; but the muntjac are around and we all know that they are there. Deer are becoming an increasing problem. In this case they are not invasive species: the fellow deer and the roe deer in East Anglia are now said to number somewhere towards the 300,000 mark. In my part of Essex one can go out on almost any evening in the summer and find a herd of 70, 80 or even 90 to look at—that is ordinary deer. But hidden in those ordinary deer numbers is a subversive group of muntjac deer that cause a great deal of harm to plant life in woodland and in open fields. There is a strong case for saying that we should deal with muntjac deer as well. There is less inclination to say that they are sweet, cuddly little creatures than there is with grey squirrels. The muntjac is not exactly handsome; it is rather an ugly little beast, but it is also a pernicious pest that does a great deal of damage to plant life.