The tale of the general licence furore
A bite-sized guide to exactly what a general licence is, why Natural England revoked them, and what's happening now
Last week, Natural England cancelled all the current general licences for bird control after a legal challenge from Wild Justice. Buckle up, this is a long one, maybe get a cup of tea and a biscuit before you start.
A bit of legalese background
With the caveat that we are not lawyers, we are ecologists, the current situation is this:
Now, Natural England are the body in England who can issue what are known as derogation licences – essentially these allow people to do things which would otherwise be illegal. So let’s say you’ve got a real problem with carrion crows killing lambs, you get your licence from Natural England, and as long as you comply with the terms, you can now dispatch your crows using a variety of methods. This was covered under one of the general licences.
What’s a general licence?
A general licence is one for activities which are considered to pose a low risk for the conservation or welfare of a protected species. You download the licence, read it, then assuming your activity falls under the remit of that licence and you comply with the terms, you can go and do whatever it was that would otherwise be illegal. There is no application process.
Ok, so what’s the problem?
The gist of the legal challenge (which was a call for Judicial Review) was this: Natural England have a duty to ensure that before lethal methods are used, they are satisfied that no alternative solutions to killing birds exist. There’s a good summary here.
The general licences which were withdrawn put the onus on the individual to fully explore non-lethal methods, and there were no checks being made to determine whether or not people were doing this. Therefore, Wild Justice argued that Natural England should not have issued the licences in the first place.
This led to three general licences being revoked on 25th April 2019.
Right, but what if livestock is being killed now that general licences aren’t available?
Here’s the thing – individual licences, which have the checks and balances built in – have always been available. Yes, they consist of more paperwork, but at no point have farmers been stopped from protecting their livestock. There was definitely a lack of notice that the revocation of general licences was going to happen, but they ceased to be in place on at 11:59pm on 25th April, and the first replacement, specifically to deal with the issue of carrion crows and livestock, went online on the 26th April.
So why are people so cross?
I can see why this rattled farmers and land managers – for a long time they’ve simply been able to do what they needed to with no checks and balances, and I suspect the vast majority did so without breaching the terms of the licences. Killing birds was a method of last resort.
We’ve been saying for a long time that it was only a matter of time before someone brought a legal challenge and this all played out in public. Mark Avery has been talking about issues with general licences for years – this should not have come as a surprise to anyone.
The ugly side of all this
The really ugly side of all this has been the people who’ve viciously and relentlessly gone after Chris Packham. There’s been a petition to get him sacked from the BBC, because apparently he shouldn’t have opinions on wildlife conservation, despite that being the reason the BBC use him (and it’s worth noting, he’s freelance, not a BBC employee). Unless all the people who signed it are prepared to also sign one saying David Attenborough should be sacked for having a view on plastic waste, then let’s all agree that the people involved don’t actually have a problem with BBC presenters having opinions, just a problem with them having opinions they don’t agree with.
If you’re telling me that this will lead to the death of song birds, and you support nature conservation, but you’re also saying that you think it’s bad that people can no longer kill birds without having proven that no other method will work, that feels like an odd kind of support for conservation to me.