Red Squirrels

My Lords, I am rather surprised that the Labour Party opposite, which professes to be the party of animal rights, does not seem to have any speakers down at all in support of squirrels today. I congratulate my noble friend Lord Peel and the noble Lady, Lady Saltoun, on putting the case so strongly for the red squirrel. The noble Lord, Lord Redesdale, seems to want to have it both ways: he wants his grey squirrels and his red squirrels, but that is not possible. If we look 10 years ahead, there will be no red squirrels if we do not we take more urgent action. The indigenous red squirrel will have gone and we will have to put up with the imported grey squirrel from the United States. Every now and again I go there. In urban areas grey squirrels are an absolute pest. They are in and out of dustbins and motorcars; they stand on the roof and do all sorts of things on the windscreen, and they cause accidents by dashing across the road. A large number of grey squirrels, which would be inevitable, would cause a great deal of hardship in this country. Unfortunately, Hadrian’s Wall has not kept the grey squirrel out of Scotland. I note that way back in 2002 the Scottish Executive accepted that there was a significant infestation and an increasing presence of grey squirrels. That then becomes the responsibility of Scottish Natural Heritage, which is now well known for sitting on fences and doing nothing, and that seems to be the present situation. Greys are spreading north from Cumbria and Northumbria and, much more seriously, they are bringing squirrel pox virus with them. The outlook is grim for the reds and they are doomed because, within a matter of days of being infected with pox virus, they die. Further, the rate of displacement accelerates rapidly if the virus is in a woodland. The situation is deteriorating and more action is required urgently. I know that the Government are defending 16 red squirrel strongholds and giving some funding towards that end, but perhaps the Minister can tell us a little more about what is actually being done with the money in these strongholds and how successful they are. As my noble friend Lord Peel said, at the end of February a conference was held in Edinburgh by SNH and the Forestry Commission. The Minister gave those two organisations three months to produce a plan. One month has gone by. What progress has been made? Has news from Edinburgh filtered down to English Nature about what is going on? Has the Minister heard anything? What progress can we hope to see by the end of May? As the noble Earl, Lord Peel, and the noble Lord, Lord Redesdale, said, we need a cross-border mechanism. Living on the border, I get driven mad by those who act as if nature does not cross the border from one country to another, as has been highlighted by the issue of raptors at Langholm and the lack of activity by SNH and the RSPB. We want this to be done humanely, but have we considered a bounty for killing grey squirrels? That is the only way in which we are going to have a dramatic impact on numbers. People who say, ““No, you can’t have a bounty and you can’t kill grey squirrels””, must accept that there will not be any red squirrels in 10 years’ time. Mr Knight, the Minister in the other place, wants this to be carried out through humane targeting and pest control—he thinks that that will enable us to control the threat. I wonder whether that is really technically possible and feasible. I hope that the Minister will tell us how that is going to be done. My noble friend Lord Peel mentioned the European Squirrel Initiative. It is pretty depressed with things but is leaving the situation rather at the status quo. But the International Union for the Conservation of Nature is very cross about the situation and feels that we have to take a great deal more action. CITES, which looks after endangered species, is equally cross that the United Kingdom is dragging its feet, sitting on fences and doing very little to deal with the grey squirrel menace and its spread throughout this country. There is also the Berne convention, which I think I actually signed in 1979. The feeling is that we, as the European leader, are doing very little to deal with a serious issue in our own country. Mr Knight said—I paraphrase—that it is not desirable to eradicate greys completely, but it is. I do not know why people cannot understand that, if we do not deal with this urgently, there will be no red squirrels in 10 years’ time. That would be something that the nation would feel the Government had let us down on.