It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Brady. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Thornbury and Yate (Luke Hall), who serves on the Petitions Committee and introduced the debate. It is also a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Bassetlaw (John Mann), who is passionate about this issue.
It was my birthday a couple of days ago, and although I somewhat dreaded adding yet another year to a number that is already a very respectable cricket score for a batsman, I consoled myself by considering one of the great delights that growing older brings, to which the hon. Gentleman will attest. He has two grandchildren. I am fortunate enough to have five and, on my birthday, I was thinking, as I often do, about my grandchildren, but unfortunately that consideration, so often a source of joy, led me in this instance to distress. I wondered whether all my grandchildren would ever get to see a genuine elephant and, of course, all the other endangered species that have been mentioned. It is an easy and well-worn trick of rhetoric to make such a statement, but on this occasion I really do not think that it is unfounded. Nor is it an unshared concern, because Prince William stated in September 2016 that he fears that Prince George and Princess Charlotte will grow up in a world without elephants—and they are older than my youngest two grandchildren.
In the same month, the International Union for Conservation of Nature stated that Africa’s overall elephant population had seen the worst decline in 25 years, due to poaching. Savannah elephant populations are declining at an estimated 8% a year. Facts and figures applied with cool logic often alleviate my more irrational fears, but in this case they serve only to heighten them. Stark reality makes me more, not less, fearful of elephant extinction and the consequences of that for our world and the people inhabiting it, my grandchildren included.
Since I last spoke in a debate on this issue, which was in this Chamber on 8 December, a minimum of 3,355 elephants have been killed, and that is a conservative estimate; the number could be well over 5,500. Each day, as often as every 15 minutes according to some sources, another elephant is killed, another poacher strikes for greed and gain, another criminal syndicate profits from a corrupt practice, another country sees its rule of law undermined, another ecosystem is degraded and another species comes a step closer to extinction. Between today’s debate and 31 March—I do not know whether my hon. Friend the Minister will tell us when the consultation will start and finish, but let us go to 31 March—another 4,800 elephants will die.