I must immediately declare an interest as chairman of the all-party group on shooting and conservation, the sister of the group to which my right hon. Friend the Member for Mid Sussex (Sir Nicholas Soames) referred. In his excellent speech, he described, par excellence, the biodiversity that takes place on a well-managed moor. I will sketch for the House—my hon. Friend the Member for Richmond (Yorks) (Rishi Sunak) got somewhere towards it—what the opposite course may entail.
I have been visiting an estate on the Caithness-Sutherland borders almost continuously for 36 years. When I started, there were a few grouse there. It was decided that the estate would gradually be stocked with more and more sheep. Tick numbers went up. Biodiversity on the moor went down. In the early days, there were raptors, skylarks,
curlew, oystercatchers—the whole range of birds discussed today—but now virtually none of those birds remains. The quality of the moor has gone down considerably: the heather has got rank because it is not burnt; the number of grass species has immeasurably increased; and the amount of bracken, which is no good for any wildlife, has increased hugely. Without managed moors, I say to the hon. Member for Bristol East (Kerry McCarthy), biodiversity would definitely go down. I disabuse her of one other fact: without driven grouse shooting, and without proper management, vast tracts of our precious moorland would degrade in the way I have described—we have already heard that moorland is rarer than rain forest and that in the United Kingdom we have 75% of the world’s heather moorland.
Many others have commented on the economic benefits of grouse shooting, so I will not go over that too much, except to say that the £50 million spent on grouse moors, and the associated £15 million spent on ancillary businesses, supports 1,500 full-time equivalent jobs, according to the Moorland Association—my hon. Friend the Member for St Austell and Newquay (Steve Double) may have got the figure wrong in his excellent speech—and some 125 days of seasonal work. Those are considerable figures in some of our country’s remotest areas.
Some 2,715 miles of moorland drainage ditches have been plugged in the north Pennines alone as a result of revegetation with 120 hectares of bare peat, and there has been a reduction in flood risk. Many Members have commented on burning, but it is a fact that just 0.68% of heather moorland in Britain is burned each year. If it is burned properly under proper conditions—Members have talked about hot and cold burning and about rotation around the moor—it should not create the damage that has been mentioned.
On the hen harrier problem, the RSPB came to see me ahead of this debate and pleaded with me to be reasonable. I will be reasonable to the RSPB if it will be reasonable to the grouse landowners. The RSPB pulled out of the biodiversity action plan earlier this year, and I appeal to it to rejoin that action plan because only talking between the two sides is likely to solve the problems. I do not condone anyone who breaks the law, and it is important that we sort out the problem, but the fact that hen harriers do not breed may not in itself automatically be due to grouse shooting landowners. Many other things may cause hen harriers not to breed, including disturbance and weather.