I beg to move,
That this House has considered e-petition 266770, relating to grouse shooting.
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms McDonagh. My role on the Petitions Committee, which I take very seriously, as does every other member of the Committee, is to ensure that petitions with more than 100,000 signatures get debated, and that the arguments put forward by the petitioners are heard and the issue thoroughly debated. That is what I am charged with doing today. As a Member of Parliament for an urban constituency, grouse shooting is not an issue that I know a huge amount about. Not only is it not an activity in Ipswich; it is not an activity in Suffolk, because there are no grouse in Suffolk. However, I am here today.
I thank the 111,965 people who signed the petition. It has taken a while to get it debated, but we are here. The petition calls for a ban on driven grouse shooting, stating that
“Wilful blindness is no longer an option”.
Chris Packham, Ruth Tingay and Mark Avery from Wild Justice
“believe that intensive grouse shooting is bad for people, the environment and wildlife. People; grouse shooting is economically insignificant when contrasted with other real and potential uses of the UK’s uplands. Environment; muirburn impacts negatively upon climate change and drainage leads to flooding and erosion. Wildlife; the wholesale culling of all predators and Mountain Hares has a disastrous effect on the ecology of these areas and the industry is underpinned by a criminal tradition of raptor persecution which shows no signs of abating. It’s time to provide an opportunity to implement immediate, legislative and meaningful measures to address this abhorrently destructive practice.
That is what the petition calls for. For those different reasons, they want grouse shooting to be banned.
There was a debate on this issue in October 2016—I have read the debate in Hansard. To be honest, I do not think the issues seem to have changed much. Probably today we will hear the same arguments put forward from those who want to ban it and probably the same arguments from those who wish it to continue. I appreciate that many colleagues here feel strongly about this issue, which is much more live in their constituencies. I will open the debate and facilitate what I hope will be a scintillating discussion about the issue, but I feel less able to inject personal experience and understanding into it because I have never been grouse shooting and it does not happen in my constituency.
I thought it was only fair to read out the call from Chris Packham and the others who set up the petition, but many people put forward different arguments. Many make economic arguments about the benefits that grouse shooting brings and about the moorland management, effort and expertise that go into preserving these complex habitats. Of course, many of the landscapes are very pleasing to the eye and generate significant amounts of tourism. My understanding is that the North York moors alone often have more than 8 million visitors a year. That does not seem to be an insignificant economic benefit.
My understanding is that grouse moor owners spend more than £50 million a year on preserving these complex environments. Some 42,500 work days every year are generated through this activity, and 1,500 full-time jobs are tied to it—about 700 directly and about 800 indirectly. It is also worth bearing in mind that these are isolated upland communities, so one has to wonder what else would generate that number of jobs. There is that economic benefit, and from my research it also seems that grouse moors often bring people together, so there is a social impact to the economy. Levels of loneliness in isolated rural areas where grouse shooting happens are lower than in other areas.
I did not come across any evidence that said that an alternative use would promote better natural capital than the unique environment that we are dealing with here. I do not really hear what the alternatives would be in those areas, apart from grouse shooting. If rewilding were suggested, we could have pumas, lynxes and honey badgers running wild in these areas. That would be quite an interesting spectacle, so perhaps tourism would continue to be popular, because people would like to see how that happens.