Standing Committee F
Tuesday 11 February 2003
(Afternoon)
[Mrs. Marion Roe in the Chair]
Clause 6
Deer
Question proposed [this day], That the clause stand part of the Bill.
2.30 pm
Question again proposed.
Mr. Edward Garnier (Harborough): Welcome back to our proceedings, Mrs. Roe. I am sure that you have missed us all terribly.
Before we adjourned, I was talking about the possible need to extend the ownership or use of rifles and firearms—
Mr. Adrian Flook (Taunton): On a point of order, Mrs. Roe. There seems to be trouble with one of the keys to the Room and the people who were waiting outside are not inside. I should hate them to miss the comments of my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Harborough (Mr. Garnier).
The Chairman: I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman. The problem has been noted and I understand that the key is about to be put into the lock to enable strangers to come in.
Mr. Garnier: I do not know whether my hon. Friend the Member for East Devon (Mr. Swire) ever had to perform the ceremony of the keys at the Tower of London.
Mr. Hugo Swire (East Devon): Indeed I did.
Mr. Garnier: I was talking about the possible need for wider gun ownership and wider use of firearms in areas of the west country where the red deer population is highest. If the path that I have outlined were chosen, how will the near extinction of a genetically diverse and truly wild red deer herd be avoided? That arises from the suggestions made by my hon. Friend the Member for Taunton at the end of last week about the change from the understanding that the deer herd was communally owned. If deer hunting were banned, people might consider that the commercial worth of the beasts was worth exploiting and they might want to kill them to stop them grazing down their pastures.
My contact, who owns the Porlock estate, asked how the balance between grazing resources and deer distribution would be found and how the risks of injury would be avoided. How will public safety and security issues be balanced with the need to maintain sustainable horticulture and farming environment? Will grants be available for fencing to prevent the unwelcome movement of deer across particular parts of the country? How will the strong genetic diversity of Exmoor red deer best be conserved? How will natural selection be preserved if the use of guns for the control
Column Number: 950
of red deer numbers is carried out without sufficient understanding of all the varied qualities of the wild red deer necessary for the successful breeding of those deer in a busy holiday landscape? Is it true that shooting of red deer has escalated recently on Exmoor, particularly on land owned by the National Trust? I know that my hon. Friend the Member for North Wiltshire (Mr. Gray) referred to that and I believe that he also referred to land owned by the League Against Cruel Sports.
Alun Michael: I am sorry to interrupt the hon. and learned Gentleman but, as he noticed a moment ago, there was a flurry of noise and I am not sure that I heard everything he asked me. I should be grateful if he repeated his questions.
Mr. Garnier: The Minister will understand that I am relaying to the Committee concerns expressed by the owner of the Porlock estate. I am asking him to assure me—and, through me, the owner of the Porlock estate and those who live on the Exmoor deer land—how the strong genetic diversity of the Exmoor red deer can best be conserved. How will natural selection be preserved if the use of guns to control red deer and others is done without sufficient understanding of all the various qualities in wild red deer necessary for successful breeding of those deer in a busy holiday landscape?
I also asked whether the shooting of red deer had escalated recently on Exmoor, particularly on the land owned by the National Trust. I said that my hon. Friend the Member for North Wiltshire had mentioned that this morning. Both he and my hon. Friend the Member for Taunton referred to the land owned by the League Against Cruel Sports—where there is, I believe, no shooting and certainly no hunting—and said that there were question marks about the health and diversity of that herd. Before widespread shooting, the wild red deer stood proudly on hillsides and surveyed holidaymakers confidently, but the deer are now timid, more secretive and possibly scarcer. The red deer is the emblem of many aspects of Exmoor's life. Would that remain true if the largely healthy, alert, wild red deer population became invisible?
Mr. Hugo Swire (East Devon): Is there not a real possibility of the deer herd becoming gun-shy over a period and spending most daylight hours in woods and coverts and coming out late at night? I suggest that that would have a seriously detrimental effect on Exmoor as both an environmental location and a tourist location.
Mr. Garnier: I am sure that my hon. Friend is right. Night shooting with powerful rifles, in or out of woods, is not sensible in a tourist area.
Dr. Alan Whitehead (Southampton, Test): As is always the case, I want to ask a question in the spirit of genuine inquiry. We established earlier today that the vast majority of deer are shot only. Would that already have made the deer gun-shy if the hon. and learned Gentleman is correct in his supposition?
Mr. Garnier: It could have done, but I do not have any information to give the hon. Gentleman the facts. What I can say is that the maintenance of deer hunting
Column Number: 951
would, I suggest, lead to a far better animal and environmentally diverse picture. I understand that the hon. Gentleman abhors all forms of hunting and wants it to go, full stop. However, the availability of stag hunting in the west country produces a complementary package of ways of dealing with the problem of deer.
Mr. John Gummer (Suffolk, Coastal): I am becoming a little mystified in listening to my hon. and learned Friend because it seems to me that the more he exposes the circumstances, the more he shows that the problem that might arise is perfectly properly solved at the moment and the Government are creating a problem that does not exist at the moment without providing a solution. The matter to which he refers might be better considered by a registrar.
Mr. Garnier: It would be. I have no doubt that the registrar could be persuaded that the utility test was passed. I could go down the list in clause 8 looking at the various aspects of utility with which the registrar will be concerned. I suspect that the registrar, if he were doing his job properly, fairly and dispassionately, would in some circumstances be able to find a case made in one or other of the various paragraphs of clause 8(1). I regret that the Minister seems to have reached a decision on all sorts of grounds outside the issues that we are currently discussing which have led him to conclude that clause 6 must remain as drafted.
As my hon. Friend the Member for North Wiltshire has said on a number of occasions, we are yet to have a fully rationally based argument in favour of clause 6. I may be wrong, but I have the impression that we have listened to a slightly Louis XIV style of argument; ''I have said what I have said, and that assertion provides the basis of the argument.'' I am not sure that I understand it, nor that people in the west country—for whom I am sure my hon. Friend the Member for Taunton will speak far more ably than I—will accept it as an argument worth putting into criminal law.
If clause 6 stands part of the Bill, there will be huge economic consequences for the tourist industry and for the west country in general. I want to be assured that the Minister and his colleagues have done their homework and that their arguments stand up to questions from someone who lives and works there. How can we be sufficiently confident that someone with a gun can assess as perceptively and measure in relevant terms the blend of intuition, instinct and the use of landscape, rivers and havens that has enabled natural selection to develop a truly wild red deer herd on Exmoor?
It is a matter of national as well as local pride that this natural selection has encouraged the selection of the most vigorous and confident herd of wild red deer anywhere west of the Urals. If that ability is lacking or is compromised by whatever factor, what will be the consequences for the wild red deer herds of Exmoor? My hon. Friend the Member for Taunton outlined on Thursday what may happen to the red deer herds. My hon. Friend the Member for North Wiltshire told us what happened to the red deer herds pre–1855 when
Column Number: 952
the Yandle family reintroduced stag hunting on the moor.
What is the Minister's anticipated understanding of what will happen if this clause finds its way into an Act of Parliament? What is our country to do? We are all naturalists in this country. We will look at Exmoor in the future and find that something has gone terribly and avoidably wrong. It cannot be suggested that this is not an anticipated and foreseeable problem. If the confident and vigorous wild red deer herds of Exmoor are weakened or damaged through poor or inappropriate management, who in this country is to bear the responsibility, not only to the diminishing herds, but to succeeding generations of humans who, until now, have enjoyed seeing the herds roaming wild on Exmoor and in other parts of the west country?
One does not have to look too far to see that in other parts of the world shooting has caused terrible damage to wild animal herds. I am not going to make a flippant point because in Africa there were not packs of elephant hounds or elephant hunts in the way that there are in the west country. But unbalanced elephant shooting has led to the development of new populations without tusks. [Interruption.] I know that the hon. Member for The Wrekin (Peter Bradley) is good at sedentary interventions.
Alun Michael: Will the hon. and learned Gentleman give way? I am trying to help him.
| 
