It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms McDonagh. I will try to be a little briefer than I planned, because lots of Members have made great contributions already, and I do not want to reiterate what they have said.
I am very concerned about the petition and the circle of destruction it would cause for the rural communities in my constituency, both economic and environmental. I am afraid I could not disagree more with the petitioners, mainly because of the huge economic value that grouse shooting has to my constituency. It is not just about the shooting itself and the gamekeepers; it is the huge amount of part-time jobs in the season and the huge amount of trade that comes with the industry, particularly for my hospitality sector. That sector has been absolutely hammered by covid over the past couple of years, and we are trying to push domestic tourism, especially in places such as the north Pennines and County Durham. We are not quite as well known as where my right hon. Friend the Member for Scarborough and Whitby (Mr Goodwill) is, down on the North Yorkshire moors, but we should be. This is a real area of growth for us, and something we want to capitalise on, so it is important that we do not start to cut the legs off from under the sector, just as we are recovering from covid.
Another point to make is that almost all our landscapes in the UK are managed to a greater or lesser degree. As hon. Members have said, the danger of non-management is that huge increase we have seen in wildfires. That is the real danger, which comes from the release of carbon into our atmosphere. Heather burning is an issue. When a wildfire catches in deep peat, that really is an issue, and something with which proper management by gamekeepers and the communities in my upland areas is really helpful.
Another issue that is a major concern is over-management, as we have seen in the past. The hon. Member for Bristol East (Kerry McCarthy) wondered whether there might be more productive things we could do with the uplands. Well, we tried that back in the 1950s, when we put grips into the peat moorland to drain it for sheep grazing. We saw an ecological catastrophe, with millions of tonnes of peat washed down the rivers and off the moors over the succeeding decades. Peat is one of the biggest carbon capturers and stores in the country. In January last year, I was lucky enough to have the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs up in my constituency, seeing some of those grips being filled in, so now we have peat returning as a massive natural carbon capture and storage facility.
Recently, I visited the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for Bishop Auckland (Dehenna Davison) to see some well managed moorlands, and the lapwings and the oystercatchers there. It shows a degree of ignorance
of the facts when, clearly, so many communities are involved and so many gamekeepers work on these estates. One of the secondary things that states are increasingly looking to do is to support birding—people doing birdwatching and that sort of thing. That is a major driver locally for a lot of people to come to the north Pennine moors.
I will pick up on something that a couple of my hon. Friends mentioned, which is the game itself. Obviously, we need to make more positive moves—steel shot is part of that—to increase the reusable meat. However, we also need to sell it properly, and that is something that we as parliamentarians could definitely be involved in, including here in Parliament.
From Muggleswick to Wearhead in my constituency, I support those in my villages who work on the moors, whether full time or during the season, and I support my local hospitality sector in North West Durham, which benefits from that. I ask the petitioners and those who support them to think again about the actual economic and environmental impacts of what they propose on communities such as those I represent in the north of England.
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