DEFRA's Gamebird Call for Evidence: A Solution in Search of a Problem

Today Defra launches a Call for Evidence on gamebird rearing, release and shooting in England. It is dressed up in the language of "strengthening the evidence base" and "future-proofing the sector", but we are not to be fooled.

This is not a neutral fact-finding exercise. It is the latest stage in a long campaign, driven by the RSPB and its allies, to put shooting under a regulatory microscope while the same organisations escape any scrutiny for what is happening on the land they manage themselves.

The Minister's letter says the Government wants to "strengthen the evidence base". Which evidence base, exactly? Gamebird shooting is already one of the most studied land uses in Britain. Natural England licenses releases near protected sites. General Licence 43 already governs release within 500 metres of Special Protection Areas and Special Areas of Conservation, and that regime was reviewed only recently after a legal challenge. Burning on deep peat is regulated. Predator control is licensed. Bird of prey crime is a criminal offence with dedicated police units. Welfare during rearing is governed by the Animal Welfare Act and a statutory Code of Practice.

Nobody has identified a gap that this exercise is meant to fill. The letter itself concedes that "no decisions have been taken at this stage on whether changes are needed". A government that does not know what problem it is solving has no business consuming eight weeks of rural people's time solving it.

Every estate, keeper, syndicate and moorland group will now divert effort from the actual work of conservation into filling in forms to justify their existence, at the tail end of the worst wildfire summer in memory and at the start of the shooting season.

The RSPB has been calling for the licensing of driven grouse shooting since 2020, and has said openly that if it does not get licensing it will campaign for a ban. Wild Justice has litigated on gamebird release. Animal Aid and the League Against Cruel Sports have lobbied on rearing welfare. Look at the topic list in Defra's announcement — biodiversity, protected sites, biosecurity, bird of prey crime, welfare — and you are reading the campaign asks of those organisations, transcribed almost word for word onto Government letterhead.

The independent economic assessment has been carved out of the exercise entirely. That is not an accident. Take the economic value of the sector off the table and the "evidence" that remains is exactly the evidence the anti-shooting lobby has spent a decade manufacturing. The framing is the verdict.

Here is what is not in the Call for Evidence: any examination of the conservation performance of the organisations demanding it.

This summer the RSPB's flagship reserve at Minsmere in Suffolk suffered what the charity itself called the biggest blaze in living memory. Fire tore across RSPB and neighbouring National Trust heathland at the end of July. The RSPB's own statement admits the fire "decimated" the largest area of heathland on the reserve and warns of long-term impacts on Dartford warbler, woodlark and nightjar, with adders, invertebrates and rare butterflies feared to have suffered significant losses. The charity says full recovery could take 25 years and has launched a public appeal to pay for it.

Two weeks earlier, a serious wildfire broke out at RSPB Abernethy in the Cairngorms, a site the charity describes as supporting more than 5,000 species and carrying multiple international designations. The RSPB says it is "too early to understand the impact". Its own staff at Dove Stone and the Eastern Moors have spent hundreds of hours this year fighting fires on and around RSPB-managed ground in the Peak District.

The pattern is not new. For years the RSPB has argued against the controlled cool burning that moorland managers use to break up fuel loads, and for years moorland groups have warned that unmanaged vegetation on "rewilded" land is a bonfire waiting for a match. In 2026 the matches arrived. The reserves that burned hardest were, in several cases, the ones where fuel had been allowed to build up in the name of leaving nature alone.

If a grouse moor had lost 1,500 hectares of internationally important habitat in a single incident, or had a designated site burn for weeks with no one able to say what wildlife had been lost, the RSPB would be demanding a public inquiry, the removal of agri-environment payments and the licensing of every manager involved. Instead the charity that presides over these losses is treated by Defra as an expert witness.

If the Government genuinely wants "the highest standards of practice being consistently applied", they must be applied consistently.

Any organisation managing designated land at public expense, or with the benefit of charitable status, should be held to the same evidential standard now being demanded of shooting estates. That means published fuel-load management plans for every upland and heathland reserve. It means independent, not self-reported, monitoring of breeding wader and ground-nesting bird numbers on reserves, set against the neighbouring keepered ground where curlew, lapwing and golden plover are still thriving. It means answering for wildfire losses in the same forum where shooting is being asked to answer for release pens.

The moorland groups will respond to this Call for Evidence, because the evidence is on our side. Curlew densities on managed moors, the return of merlin and the record hen harrier seasons on keepered ground, the fire breaks that stopped this summer's blazes spreading from open moor into villages: all of it will go in. But we will do so under protest, and we will say plainly what this exercise is.

It is a process nobody asked for except the organisations that stand to gain from it. It is a review of the people doing the work, commissioned at the urging of the people whose own land is on fire. And it is a warning to every rural community in England that "evidence" in Whitehall increasingly means whatever the loudest lobby has already decided.