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Earl Peel: I very much support the remarks made by my noble friend Lady Byford and I support her amendment. We had a passionate speech a while ago from the noble Baroness, Lady Miller, about exotic birds. I sympathise with a lot of what she said. I do not suggest for one moment that I can make such a passionate speech about the red squirrel, but I would like to because I feel just as passionately about it. I should declare an interest as having been closely involved with the European Squirrel Initiative and as a patron of a wildlife park trust, which seeks to maintain, among other species, the red squirrel in our lands.
As my noble friend has suggested, the situation in the United Kingdom with regard to the grey squirrel and its relationship with the red squirrel—indeed, with trees and with woodland birds—is worthy of a Second Reading speech, but I will try and keep my remarks as short as possible. The fact is that the Government really have done virtually nothing to try and stem the ever-expanding grey squirrel population. Frankly, unless something is done fast, the situation will result in the extermination of the red squirrel from this country.
I am aware of the policy and action document which has just been published by the Government. Perhaps it at least sheds a small degree of light at the end of a pretty dismal tunnel. We will just have to see how that manifests itself in due course.
In supporting the amendment, I would like to stress the seriousness of the situation. On the dreaded parapox virus, which is transmitted by the greys—my noble friend has already referred to it—there seems to be very little research going into trying to stem its effects. It has only recently been announced—and I think that it is a tragic indictment of the situation—that the parapox virus has now infiltrated Kielder Forest in Northumberland and Whinfell Forest in Cumbria, two of the last bastions of the red squirrel in this country. It now looks as though those two populations face the serious threat of total decline.
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I simply fail to understand why the Government, English Nature or the Forestry Commission have not commissioned research on the impact of the grey squirrel in the demise of woodland bird populations. Most people whom I know associate themselves with that correlation, but research needs to be done so that we know for sure that this is indeed the problem we think it is. Most importantly, I simply do not understand why sufficient funding has not been made available to try and develop an effective immuno-contraception method. It is something which I know has been looked at in this country, and I believe that research is being done abroad. But the Government seem to have lost interest in the subject. Will the Minister confirm that they are at least keeping in touch with what is going on and perhaps helping with the development through government investment?
My noble friend mentioned that Britain is a signatory to a variety of international treaties, including the 1992 Convention on Biological Diversity, the 2004 Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species and the Burn convention. All these call on signatories to tackle the problem of invasive alien species, but as yet the Government seem to have been ducking and weaving and the grey squirrel remains at large without any serious attempts to try and control its further levels of invasion.
The noble Lord, Lord Livsey, and I have tabled many Written Questions on the subject. I am bound to say that it is becoming increasingly clear that the Government and the various agencies have been deliberately prevaricating over the question of grey squirrel control. Unless this nettle is really grasped and urgent and drastic action is taken to reduce severely the grey squirrel population in this country, we will lose the red population completely, which I believe is totally unacceptable. So I am looking to the Minister to give a really positive response to my noble friend's amendment so that we can get a real commitment from the Government that they will finally do something to reduce seriously the impact of the grey squirrel and save the red squirrel in this country.
Baroness Miller of Chilthorne Domer: I simply want to say that I know my noble friend Lord Livsey would have liked to be here this afternoon to speak but he is suffering from a particularly nasty attack of bronchitis. I fear that he will not be with us tomorrow either, but he would have wanted to associate himself with the words of the noble Earl, Lord Peel. I do not propose to say anything on squirrels as I think noble Lords have done great justice to them.
I would like, however, to raise briefly the issue of ballast water. The Chinese mitten crab was cited by the noble Baroness, Lady Byford, in her introduction. Ships can release hundreds of thousands of tonnes of ballast water a year on to our shores. I believe that there are treatments available that do not affect the water because they are not chemical treatments but light treatments, which can kill any organism within that water. They work fairly quickly. Are the
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Government going to consider introducing a requirement that ships releasing ballast water into UK waters shall be fitted with such a device that can treat the ballast water, thereby rendering it entirely harmless to any UK wildlife?
Lord Dixon-Smith: I want to pick up the point by the noble Baroness, Lady Miller of Chilthorne Domer, about ballast water. It is perfectly true that there are light treatments that will kill all microbial problems in water, but no light treatment that I have heard of would kill a mitten crab. Some other means of preventing such an invasion would therefore be required, although we know now that in this instance we would be closing the stable door after the horse had bolted and so we have a problem.
There is also the other oversized crab marching down or along the north coast of Russia which has already come around the corner into Norway. I have some hope on that one; I found myself slightly amused by the fact that although it was originally a Stalinist programme its control may become a capitalist success because there is a good market for that crab. The real reason I rise to speak is to support my noble friends on red squirrels. There were red squirrels in Essex when I was a boy. I was wild enough to climb up and explore squirrel drays when I was nine or 10 years old. I never had the good fortune to tip a red squirrel out of a dray, so I cannot claim that I am the reason that they left, but they were there and a part of my childhood.
That is no longer the case. Now we have grey squirrels; I daresay that we trap them and kill them humanely whenever we can, because they are a nuisance in more ways than one and not just to red squirrels. They are the prime cause for the retreat of the red squirrels into the vastnesses in the north where even now, as we have heard from my noble friend Lord Peel, they are becoming endangered by the spread of the virus that the grey squirrels carry with them. There is no doubt that the reason for the spread of the grey squirrel is that as a society we have neglected to deal with them as the invasive issue that they are. If one goes out into the London parks and watches people treating the greys almost as pets, one realises that there is a huge psychological problem in dealing with the issue because most people regard that pernicious animal as rather a sweet little thing that is rather pretty and nice and think, "Why should we worry about it?". So there is a political problem, with a small "p", over the issue because the public's approach is based on sentiment rather than on reality. The reality is that because of sentiment we are losing one of our favourite animals in the country.
While I am on my feet I should mention another invasive species that warrants merit in this context: the muntjac deer. We do not see many of them because they are on the whole secretive. They live discreetly; they tend to live singly or in pairs. They do not show themselves in the open much unless they are disturbed. But the fact is that the population of the muntjac deer is rising and one comes across them across all of southern England at the present time, up into the Midlands—it may be that they go all the way up to the
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north. That is another invasive species. The danger that they pose is not to another animal species but particularly to bluebell woods. We happen to have a particularly fine bluebell wood on our land and so far we have been fortunate; but the muntjac are around and we all know that they are there. Deer are becoming an increasing problem. In this case they are not invasive species: the fellow deer and the roe deer in East Anglia are now said to number somewhere towards the 300,000 mark. In my part of Essex one can go out on almost any evening in the summer and find a herd of 70, 80 or even 90 to look at—that is ordinary deer. But hidden in those ordinary deer numbers is a subversive group of muntjac deer that cause a great deal of harm to plant life in woodland and in open fields.
There is a strong case for saying that we should deal with muntjac deer as well. There is less inclination to say that they are sweet, cuddly little creatures than there is with grey squirrels. The muntjac is not exactly handsome; it is rather an ugly little beast, but it is also a pernicious pest that does a great deal of damage to plant life.
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