Question to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs:

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what recent assessment her Department has made of (a) trends in the level of illegal hare coursing and (b) the potential impact of illegal hare coursing on rural communities.

Wildlife crimes such as hare coursing are not ‘notifiable’ so there are no official Home Office statistics or identifiable trends to judge robustly whether such crimes are increasing or decreasing across the country. Decisions on whether to make wildlife crimes notifiable sit with the Home Office. It is reasonable to assume that measures introduced in the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022, along with improved police tactics, intelligence and information sharing as well as the use of community protection notices (CPN) and criminal behaviour orders (CBO), has had an effect in terms of reducing levels of hare coursing.