Red Squirrels

My Lords, perhaps the noble Earl will let me finish: I want to finish within my 20 minutes and to say a word about food, which was raised by a number of noble Lords: the noble Lady, Lady  Saltoun, the noble Lord, Lord Inglewood—with an invitation that is going to be extremely hard to refuse, although he should not see that as an acceptance—and the noble Lord, Lord Livsey. The advice I have received is that grey squirrels are edible; I understand that Gordon Ramsay recently cooked a grey squirrel on television and offered it to the public, but maybe that is where the problem is. Attempts have been made over the years to encourage people to eat them. It always attracts good press coverage but it has not yet caught on as a market. The noble Lord, Lord Inglewood, may change all that. Preservation of the red squirrel is not something that Government can achieve on their own, but we are taking a strong lead, and will continue to do so. Even if we fail to preserve the red squirrel on the mainland of England, we will not have given up without a fight. The passion in this House and, I suspect, of those elsewhere in the country to preserve the red squirrel is obvious. I was asked about grey squirrels destroying our woodland: in most cases they do not; grey squirrels strip bark and can cause severe damage to trees of 10 to 40 years of age; normally less than 5 per cent of damaged trees die, but many have reduced timber value. There has been a great deal of co-operation and joint working in this field. I want to thank all those organisations and individuals, many of whom are present in the Chamber, who are working so hard to preserve the red squirrel in the UK today.