It is a great privilege to be called to speak in this debate about a matter that touches on issues of great importance to this House: biodiversity; the uplands, their fragile economy and the people who live there and make their way of life there; and questions surrounding some of the most magnificent, special wild places in the whole of this beautiful country. May I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for St Austell and Newquay (Steve Double) on the measured and careful way in which he introduced the debate?
I should declare an interest in that I am chairman of the all-party parliamentary game and wildlife conservation group and I am a keen game shot. I have had the great joy of spending a good deal of my time in the uplands ever since I was a child. The heather moorland of the sort maintained by grouse shooting is one of the rarest habitat types and enjoys some of the very highest conservation designations. These moors were not designated sites of special scientific interest in spite of being grouse moors but precisely because they were grouse moors. These wonderful places exist only because generations of owners have refused endless blandishments and huge grants from successive Governments to drain them, fence them, plant them with conifers, carpet them with sheep and cover them with roads and tracks.