Driven Grouse Shooting

Robbie Moore Excerpts

Monday 30th June 2025 Westminster Hall

[Robbie Moore (Keighley and Ilkley) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mrs Harris. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Berwickshire, Roxburgh and Selkirk (John Lamont) for introducing this important debate on behalf of the Petitions Committee, and I thank the more than 104,000 signatories to the petition.

Let me be absolutely clear with the many petitioners and other interested parties watching this debate: it is not my view that grouse shooting should be banned. I hope that over the course of my remarks it will become clear why that is my view and, indeed, the view of the Conservative party.

We must begin by recognising that grouse moorland is not a natural habitat. Just as the charm of the British countryside is managed by farmers, grouse moorland is managed by gamekeepers, farmers, estates and shooting syndicates that use it. If grouse shooting were banned, the moorland would not be as it is today. I worked as a rural practice surveyor before entering this place, and I advised and was involved in many moorland restoration projects—as well as spending many a Saturday when I was a young lad beating on grouse moors to earn a small wage—so I know the economic, social, environmental and ecological importance of grouse shooting to our uplands.

Banning grouse shooting would have significant ramifications. Across the UK, 1.8 million hectares of moorland are specifically used for grouse shooting, and they account for about 75% of the world’s supply of this remarkable habitat. Moorland is, in effect, unique to these islands, and we should be proud and protective of it. Red grouse, the species most commonly used in shooting, is also unique to these islands.

It is worth pausing to note that grouse shooting does not involve the specific rearing and release of birds. Grouse shoots use wild populations of birds that are carefully managed to create the numbers needed to prevent endangerment. The fact that grouse management straddles the line between true animal husbandry and wild hunting is precisely why the industry has such ecological and environmental benefits. The activity drives economic incentives to invest in the upkeep of grouse populations, manage their habitat for other species and provide significant environmental benefits.

Just as the careful management of heather benefits grouse, so it benefits other species, such as lapwing, curlew, golden plover and the rare merlin, as many hon. and right hon. Members have pointed out. Such protected species rely on good, healthy heather for food and shelter, and without proper management, their numbers would decline.

Much of our moorland is also peatland, and grouse moor management schemes have restored approximately 27,000 hectares of bare peat in the past 20 years. Colleagues may know that I have been a big champion of peatland to store and sequester carbon, so efforts to restore it are very welcome. Peat in the UK stores 26 times as much carbon as UK forests, yet it regenerates naturally by only 1 mm a year in depth, making its protection and proper management vital to reducing carbon emissions. Through its management of grouse moors, grouse shooting can only contribute towards the success of that, including its economic benefits.

It is right that I pause here to discuss the burning of heather, which was mentioned by my hon. Friend the Member for Thirsk and Malton (Kevin Hollinrake) and other Members. The concerns of proponents of a ban on burning may be understandable, but they fail to consider the full picture and, dare I say it, are sometimes completely ill-informed. Their surface-level analysis ignores the fact that moorland is a managed landscape and must continue to be managed if we want it to remain in the enhanced habitat state that we see it in today.

[Olivia Blake]

Can the hon. Member remind me which Government brought in a partial ban on peatland burning?

[Robbie Moore]

Clearly, the reason why our moorlands are in the state they are in today is the collective management that is taking place, whether by mechanical means or through the moorland management burning plans that exist. If we were to end the burning of heather altogether, we would allow the woody stock to generate that has led to the very fires that were rightly referred to by the hon. Member for Inverness, Skye and West Ross-shire (Mr MacDonald). Right now, gamekeepers are the people on the ground trying to cope with those fires and help our fire services out.

No burning would mean a build-up of vegetation and woody stock, which is itself a negative influence on the sustainability of heather for bird species of all kinds, but what is perhaps worse is that eventually, in the natural cycle, such overgrown heather is much more prone to catching fire. When it does, it will lead to huge and far more damaging wildfires, which are costly to communities and hugely damaging to the environment.

I have seen this for myself in my West Yorkshire constituency on Ilkley moor—another moor that is not managed, exactly the same as Fylingdales moor in the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for Thirsk and Malton. A series of smaller and cooler man-made fires, agreed and signed off via an approved moorland management burning plan, is vital for enhancing the ecological status of moorland, helps to improve the complex and desirable mosaic of the moorland, and significantly reduces the risk of dangerous unplanned fires. Once we understand that burning is the management of a natural process, and not destruction for destruction’s sake, it is far harder to justify banning it.

[Kevin Hollinrake]

My hon. Friend is making an excellent speech. Is he also concerned, as I am, about the proposed change in the definition of deep peat? Currently, it is defined as peat deeper than 40 cm, but there is a proposal to reduce that figure to 30 cm, which would mean that much of our moorlands cannot be managed through burning, leading to a much greater fire risk.

[Robbie Moore]

My hon. Friend makes an excellent point, and I was just going to come to that. Natural England is engaged in that consultation right now. It is not just me who is concerned about the consultation process and the direction that Natural England is going in; the concern is shared by my hon. Friend and by Members across the House who have moorland in their constituencies where it is necessary to be able to burn in order to control the woody stock of heather, so that we can create a mosaic that benefits not just the peatland that sits below it but the many species that want to eat the new shoots of heather that come through. That would benefit not only red grouse but the many other bird species I have already spoken about. Therefore, I urge the Government and the Minister to look carefully at the steps that Natural England is taking, because its current direction is not sustainable for our rural economies.

The benefits of grouse shooting are not limited to environmental improvements. Grouse shooting and the management of our moorland provide an invaluable and highly successful land use for our upland areas that, crucially, relies on not just public money, but private investment. Directly within the industry, 3,000 full-time equivalent jobs are supported, contributing nearly £47 million to the UK economy. Those numbers may seem small compared with other industries, but the importance of grouse shooting is where that economic stimulus is felt.

Upland rural communities are some of the most remote and deprived in the country. It is a huge challenge to promote inward investment or deliver efficient and effective public services in those communities. Alongside activities like farming, grouse shooting provides a vital economic pillar to keep our communities alive. My right hon. Friend the Member for Richmond and Northallerton (Rishi Sunak), like other Members, picked up on that very point. He rightly identified the complex social fabric in the hard-working communities up in Wensleydale, Hawes and beyond. Upland communities are some of the most remote. Banning grouse shooting would cause community centres such as pubs and hotels—like the Star near Thirsk, which I am familiar with—to shut, and those communities would be unable to rely on the positive benefits for employment, for families and for the viability of public services.

The benefits of grouse shooting extend well into our urban areas, as rightly mentioned by my hon. Friend the Member for Ruislip, Northwood and Pinner (David Simmonds), who talked about Holland & Holland. That demonstrates the wider economic impacts of grouse shooting. We know how important access to green spaces is, and the public obviously agree: 3 million people visit the North York moors, the Yorkshire dales and the Peak district annually. Why? Because they love the landscape.

The wider public health benefits of how grouse moors are managed are there for us all to see. Research shows that the perennial leaf coverage of heather helps to reduce air pollution, but that coverage is sustained only by the moorland being predominantly funded and managed for the purpose of grouse shooting. Managed grouse moorland also provides a defence against tick-borne diseases. The management of ticks is in the interest of our groundkeepers and of our farmers, as it protects their livestock, but another benefit is fewer ticks to spread human-borne diseases, some of which can be fatal. If we take away the economic incentives to carry out that work by banning grouse shooting, we lose those additional benefits.

I have covered many of the positive consequences of grouse shooting, but I would like to talk about the petition itself. Campaigners for banning grouse shooting have raised flooding as a concern, yet many of the organisations I have spoken to that advocate for shooting to continue say that the exact opposite is true. In the words that I have heard continuously, the wetter, the better. Indeed, many groundkeepers have spent the better part of the last few decades filling in and removing drains put in in the 1960s and 1970s, specifically to improve the outcomes for grouse shooting and to the benefit of flood mitigation downstream. I have seen that for myself on Keighley moor in my constituency. Without grouse shooting, those ditches and drains would still be in place today.

Another concern that has been raised, not just in this debate but in others that have preceded it, is predator control. We must strike a balance here. Many predatory species, such as foxes, are not endangered, yet many of their prey animals are. While grouse themselves are not endangered, other bird species that benefit from this predator control are. Where the control of predators has been relaxed, numbers of other bird species, such as the lapwing, golden plover and rare merlin, have dropped significantly. We must make a choice about what we wish to prioritise: an unendangered predator species or the endangered prey themselves. Taking no action is not a neutral action. It is heartening to hear that, thanks in part to moorland managed for grouse shooting, hen harrier numbers reached record levels in 2023, demonstrating the positive effect that moorland management can have on our bird of prey species.

We should also be absolutely clear that the harming of birds of prey is a crime, and I have yet to meet a grouse shooting organisation that believes that should change. Once again, the rising populations of our birds of prey demonstrate that grouse shooting works for our environment and not against it.

I am pleased that the Government’s written response to the petition was that there are no plans at present to ban grouse shooting, so I hope the Minister will be able to confirm that this remains the case and, further, that no Labour Government will ban grouse shooting. I would also be grateful if the Minister could say what he will do with his ministerial colleagues to hold Natural England to account, to make sure that it does not run away with the narrative of wanting to reduce the definition of deep peat from 40 cm to 30 cm, as that would have catastrophic consequences for how moorland is managed.

Grouse moorland management is a real success story of balancing economic, social and environmental activities. Those who wish to ban it because they feel that an unmanaged, natural approach would be better should be careful what they wish for. Without the financial incentive of the shoot, none of these environmental benefits for our moorland, our bird species or our climate would happen. I am certain that they would not happen without an agenda driven by private investment.

I thank all those in the sector who work enormously hard around the clock to enhance our moorland—our gamekeepers, our groundskeepers, our farmers, our rural estates, our land managers and our stakeholders such as the Moorland Association, BASC, the Game and Wildlife Conservation Trust and the Countryside Alliance. I thank them for their continued work.

We all know that almost every acre of the UK is managed in one way or another, and has been for hundreds if not thousands of years. There is no Siberian tundra in the UK, no Australian outback, no Amazon rainforest or American wild west. We should not pretend that the land we love is the product of a random choice of nature, but instead we should recognise that it is a collective accomplishment of generation after generation of our ancestors and their stewardship of the land. Britain’s natural landscape is, ironically, a product of unnatural human management. Grouse moorland management might only be a part of that wider story, but it is an illustrative and successful one that I hope will continue long into the future.