An awful government response to our petition


Wild Justice is campaigning to ban driven grouse shooting. Our petition for a ban is fast-approaching 50,000 signatures and has recently received a badly-written, evasive and factually inaccurate response from the current government.

When a petition to the UK parliament passes 10,000 signatures then this triggers a policy response from government (on the webpage of the petition – click here). Our petition passed 10,000 signatures in a couple of days but was waiting for over seven weeks for a response which came last week. Was it worth waiting for? Well, yes, but only because it showed that on this subject, as in many other environmental subjects, this government is way off the pace.

The government response included one crass, but revealing, error; it perpetuated the myth that ‘75% of the world’s heather moorland is found in the UK’. This is a long-debunked myth which is still shamelessly used in publicity by shooting organisations and here we see it being trotted out by a government department. It suggests that Defra is closer to the shooting industry than it should be and that this government department’s fact-checking is woefully inadequate.

Wild Justice has written to the Petitions Committee pointing out this gross error and asking for it to be corrected (see what we sent at the foot of this post). We’d like you, please, to point out this error to your MP.

If you can, we’d like you also to tell your MP that you are disappointed in the government response from Defra. The response says that government has no plans to ban driven grouse shooting but it is weak on indicating any plans except the status quo on this subject. Labour has indicated in the past that it would introduce licensing of grouse shooting but that got no mention – does that mean that it is ruled out for this government? If not, what does it mean? If you have a Labour MP ask them to find out for you. If you have an MP from a different political party ask them what they would support in England and (if they are not representing an English constituency) in their home nation.

The government response is barely better than those received from Conservative ministers over the last decade and more. And this is a response to the 11th most-signed petition of the 574 open petitions, and currently the most-signed of any environmental petition. Defra ministers are treating the tens of thousands of people who signed this petition with disrespect and you might want to point out to your MP that you expect better from this government.

Please write to your MP to express how you feel (anger? disappointment? dismay?) at the casual, inaccurate and complacent government response to a much-supported petition on a significant environmental issue.

And please sign our petition to ban driven grouse shooting – click here.

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Here is the text of the email we sent to the Petitions Committee a few days ago:

We write to complain about a factual inaccuracy in the government response to our petition https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/700036

The government response published on 16 January includes these words ‘UK uplands have 75 per cent of the world’s remaining heather moorland’. This phrase is widely used by the shooting industry but is untrue. This is not a matter of opinion it is a matter of fact and so it needs to be corrected. 

See a blog by Dr Steve Carver, Director, Wildland Research Institute, School of Geography, University of Leeds LS2 9JT from September 2019 which thoroughly debunked this claim  https://landethicsblog.wordpress.com/2019/09/17/no-moor-myths/  

Included in that scientific analysis is the link to the Game and Wildlife Conservation Trust article which, after quite some pressure from academic commentators, acknowledged that ‘The figure that 75% of the world’s heather moorland, or upland heather moorland (quoted differently in different places), is found in the UK has been repeated by many organisations over recent decades. However, the two occurrences that we found in the scientific literature were not supported by the citations given. We are not aware of published scientific work that determines what percentage of the world’s upland heather moorland is held in the UK.’.  https://www.whatthesciencesays.org/is-75-of-the-worlds-heather-moorland-in-the-uk/ 

We are concerned that Government has perpetuated a long-debunked myth which is used only by elements of the shooting industry and note that this reveals something about the government relationship with the shooting industry and a carelessness in basing government environmental policy on science. We ask that this should be speedily corrected and that Defra should be reprimanded by the Petitions Committee for perpetuating a falsehood and instructed to review its internal procedures to eliminate such gross errors of fact in future.

Chris Packham, Ruth Tingay and Mark Avery from Wild Justice