Woodland Cover Protection and Grey Squirrel Control

Question for Short Debate

Asked by

To ask His Majesty’s Government what steps they are taking (1) to promote and protect woodland cover, and (2) to control grey squirrels.

My Lords, I start by thanking noble Lords for taking part in this debate just before recess, when everybody is keen to get away. But the number of speakers, and the short time that each then has to speak, shows that a lot of people take this issue very seriously.

I must declare an interest: I am probably one of the few people left in England who has a population of red squirrels but, unfortunately, the grey squirrels are getting quite close. I am not sure how long we will be able to keep them out for.

I will end my speech with two asks of the Government—I am sure that neither will surprise the Minister—to do with grey squirrel control. But I will start on woodland. On an optimistic note, we have an increasing amount of woodland coverage in the country. However, this growth has been caused by increased plantations, mostly of pine, and the Woodland Trust has raised the issue of the falling biodiversity we have in the country because of the threat to our native plantations and a fall in the amount of native trees. The Government have set out plans to increase the amount of native woodland plantations; however, as we have been discussing on the formation of ELMS and other biodiversity schemes, it is very difficult to replant native woodland because of long-term issues. When the grant scheme runs out, how will we create the financial mechanisms to make sure that land taken away from agricultural purposes is maintained?

There are a number of threats to woodland at the moment. One of the main ones is disease. I know that other noble Lords will discuss this, so I will confine my comments to ash dieback. Through a survey of my woodland and from driving throughout Northumberland, I can see that ash dieback has spread throughout the county and that the ash tree will become extinct in the UK in five to 10 years. It is a pernicious disease, because trees still grow with it but, once they have the disease, it is only a matter of time before they die through stress.

I have started planting sycamore instead of ash, because it is fast-growing. I have never understood why people have views against sycamore, because it carries a great deal of biodiversity, but one problem is that grey squirrels particularly like killing sycamore through its bark.

Secondly, climate change brings about stress, especially in the droughts we are facing. Storm Arwen apparently took out 16 million trees and affected about 8,000 hectares of woodland. It did so much damage because the storm came from the north, but trees have grown root systems that stop westerly winds. I have been cutting up very old trees that survived storms in the past but have no root system to provide for storms from the north. This issue will occur more and more because of climate change.

The third issue is grey squirrels. I have spent a number of years battling grey squirrels and set up the Red Squirrel Protection Partnership. I originally wanted to call it the Grey Squirrel Annihilation League but, for PR reasons, that would apparently be a bad idea. I set up the partnership and managed to achieve a £150,000 grant from Defra. I was encouraged not to use the words “killing squirrels” in the application, so the application was actually for a farm diversification fund with a lot of columns saying, “What’s the output?” The only thing I could put was “dead squirrels”, so it was a rather odd form.

Oh!

Well, there is a danger of anaphylactic shock from a creature whose main food source is nuts.

We did this work through trapping. I had a fantastic Geordie, Mr Paul Parker, who knew more about grey squirrels than anybody at the end of the period. He was extremely successful. However, trapping is incredibly labour-intensive. We started off with live trapping and then moved to kill traps. You have to check the traps once a day to make sure that squirrels have not been trapped and are still alive. We expanded throughout Northumberland. At one point we had 900 trapping sites and over 200 volunteers, mostly elderly pensioners who would look out of the window and tell us when the traps had gone off.

There was an enormous support for this, and we did clear areas of grey squirrels. We could tell that we had done so because red squirrels recolonised areas that had been colonised by greys. Grey squirrels are larger than red squirrels and push them out of areas, so if you have reds it is a clear indicator that you do not have greys.

The problem we face is that there are about 2.7 million grey squirrels in this country. Trapping could be effective, but it is a landscape issue. You have to work incredibly hard at it. Some squirrels were breeding up to four times a year. We caught pregnant grey squirrels in December and January. The number of squirrels that can repopulate an area if you do not manage to completely clear a population is amazing.

Although trapping is very useful in a localised area, we have to look at other methods in the long term. The problem is that, with 2.7 million squirrels, we are looking at the landscape changing in the long term, because tree cover will change. As the Minister pointed out about planting, certain types of tree will not survive past 20 or 30 years—we will not see those mature trees.

The bright spot is that two new technologies are coming forward. The first is contraception. I know that this has been pushed by a number of organisations that are part of the UK Squirrel Accord. The work on that is excellent. The real value of it is that, unlike trapping, where you have to monitor traps continuously, you could provide the contraceptive over two or three days, three times a year, which would have a massive effect and could crash squirrel numbers. That work is very important. One of my first asks of the Minister is that I hope Defra will come up with some more funding to push this process further, because it looks like the technology works very well. It is now a question of making sure it goes forward and can be distributed.

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Redesdale, for initiating this important debate.

If we want to promote and protect our woodlands, we need to get much better at forestry in this country. I have said many times that we are overall pretty bad at it. Most of our woodlands are in poor condition and not managed to the proper standard. Our foresters need much better training, especially for continuous cover, which is something that I have been promoting in this House for over 50 years—I hope that its time has come.

The control of grey squirrels should be grant funded, given their impact on the delivery of key ecosystems and services such as carbon sequestration budgets and biodiversity, as well as the loss of timbers. However, grey squirrels are not the only problem and I want to focus on some of the others.

Forestry is not easy. It is easy to say, “Let’s plant more trees”, but it is a jolly sight more difficult to do that in reality. Besides grey squirrels, there are deer and, of our six species, every single one is destructive. At over 1.5 billion deer, there are far too many in this country. They cause an estimated 74,000 car accidents a year, costing £10 million in car repairs alone. Deer kill about 20 people a year and there has been no decline in human injuries in the last 20 years. The sadness is that any deer involved in a car accident will probably die a long, lingering death well away from the scene of the accident.

Those are not all the problems; there are others. I have a list of at least 25 pests or diseases, either in this country or on our doorstep, attacking every single one of our native trees: oak, ash, birch, chestnut, spruce, pine—the list could go on. In fact, one could get quite depressed about forestry, but one needs to look at it more positively.

My Lords, I declare my interests as set out in the register, in particular as chair of the UK Squirrel Accord. I, too, congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Redesdale, on his excellent introduction and on getting this debate at an important time in what is going on in the world of trees and squirrels.

On Monday, the Minister said,

“you cannot have net zero without talking about trees”.—[Official Report, 22/5/23; col. 598.]

That was a prescient thing to say in view of the debate that we are having today. Indeed, many sources have concluded what the UK Squirrel Accord knows to be true: the biggest threat to our broadleaf woodlands is the grey squirrel, ring-barking as they do trees aged between 10 and 40 years and effectively killing them.

The UK Squirrel Accord is the coming together of 45 organisations of the United Kingdom to address this unpleasant truth, comprising the four Governments, their nature agencies, the main voluntary sector bodies and the principal private sector players. The accord has not only ensured good communication among the member bodies but allowed scientific research to be commissioned together. Quite a lot has been achieved in laying the groundwork for a major initiative in reducing the number of grey squirrels, in large part through the use of fertility control.

This exciting research is being led at the Animal and Plant Health Agency—APHA—and includes strands on the fertility control substance, the hoppers that contain it and, most important, the rigorous computer modelling that underpins the rollout strategy. The research phase is approaching its fifth and final year, which will give way to the landscape trials phase and then a licensing phase before the rollout. The Minister has ministerial responsibility for APHA. The Defra family and APHA have been very helpful and involved in the accord. Does the Minister agree that this fertility control research represents the outstanding near-term option as a key weapon for grey squirrel control?

My Lords, I declare my interest as president of the Rural Coalition, although I am not speaking on its behalf today. I, too, thank the noble Lord, Lord Redesdale. I seem to remember that we have debated these issues before and I have always been grateful for his contributions.

There are many reasons why increasing our woodland cover is important. For example, being able to walk in woodlands is associated with mental health, at a time when this is a huge issue for us as a society; it is clearly deeply bedded into the issues of net zero; and it is intimately associated with the need to increase again our biodiversity. It is of inestimable importance.

The threat posed by grey squirrels is therefore an issue that exercises many of us, along with the longing that we might one day be able to reintroduce red squirrels. I have to say that the problem is not just grey squirrels; in North Hertfordshire we have black squirrels. I do not know if the Committee has come across them but they are breeding across both North Hertfordshire and South Cambridgeshire, and are a feature of our local area in my diocese. Sadly, there are now only a few conservation areas for red squirrels left, as we have heard, following the introduction of the grey squirrel in the 18th century and indeed the wider issue of the reduction in woodland.

The damage caused by grey squirrels is huge. According to government statistics, the total cost of grey squirrels and other invasive species to the UK is about £1.8 billion a year. That figure perhaps puts into perspective some of the pleas about whether we may be able to find some modest funding to help with this important work.

Stripping off the bark of broadleaf trees means that we lose much of our woodland. A recent report by the Royal Forestry Society on the damage caused by grey squirrels estimates that they cost about £37 million a year to forestry, and they are identified as the greatest single threat to broadleaf trees in the UK. I have been grateful to hear about the project—others know more about this than I do—by the Animal and Plant Health Agency to develop an oral contraceptive to target the grey squirrel, and about the work that the Government have been doing with the Roslin Institute and the European Squirrel Initiative to breed infertility into the female grey squirrel population. Can Minister give us an update on those projects, particularly what the prospects are for rolling them out more widely and an indication of the timeframe?

My Lords, I too congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Redesdale: first, on his initiating the debate; secondly, on a really interesting speech; and, thirdly, on his work, which we have discussed in the past, of controlling grey squirrels—work that is not yet over.

I declare an interest: I have a farm in Leicestershire on which I plant a lot of trees. I really farm for conservation—for conservation subsidy, probably—but the birdlife has improved dramatically through planting trees and hedges and through various other features, including diminishing the magpie population.

I have been interested in squirrels for a very long time. In our family, when my son was little, he used to refer to “squeals”, so that is what we always call them—I think that is rather a nice name for them. The ones that we see are always grey. I found one on the road when I was bicycling home one night, when I was about 15, which I imaginatively called Cyril. It then escaped. I took another one from a dray—I think I imaginatively called him Cyril as well—and took him up to my rooms in my college in Oxford, where he ran up and down the curtains and frightened the people making the beds. He was sweet until he started biting me.

My father used to call squirrels “tree rats”, and I have to say that, notwithstanding having kept two as pets, that is what they are. Back when I was a boy, and I am one of the oldest people here, you used to get a shilling for a tail, as I recall. I do not know when that finished; perhaps the Minister might tell me.

I have eaten squirrel. Actually, it was quite good. I recommend it on salad on brioche, although it is a bit of a pain to skin. The original Brunswick pie was from New Brunswick, where they put squirrel in it, and that is where they come from.

As I have said, I have been planting trees—some 10 acres or so—on the farm. On one two-acre plot alone, the damage done by squirrels has to be seen to be believed. I should think they have killed one in three trees by ring-barking, and they have damaged a lot of others. If anybody wants to see it, you can see the damage they have done—it is just shocking.

My Lords, I declare my farming interests as set out in the register. I am extremely grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Redesdale, for initiating this timely debate.

First, I thank the Government for introducing and improving a variety of grant schemes, including funding important maintenance for new woodland over 10 years. However, this funding is constrained by the lack of adequate resources for the processing and approval of planting applications, which delays the rollout ofusb woodland creation. There has been an unfortunate side effect on tree nurseries explicitly encouraged by further government support following the Government’s response to the EFRA 2022 report on tree planting. Nurseries have been restricted in the sale of their products by the slow pace of government approvals of new woodland creation. I am most interested to hear the Minister’s response to the question of the availability of manpower resources in his ministry to process these applications.

My second major concern is the effect of the sale of carbon credits on the type of new woodland planted and its location. In East Anglia, considerable prime farmland has been bought up or rented at substantial premiums by investors outside the agriculture and forestry industries for the sole purpose of enjoying carbon credits. The favoured tree is the fast-growing paulownia, or foxglove tree, normally grown in our gardens for either its flower or huge leaves. There is no traditional commercial market for this wood in the UK and it is unsuitable for biomass. Paulownia scarcely meets the recommendation of the Woodland Trust to plant native trees and shrubs. It also fails to accord with the Government’s environmental improvement plan and efforts to reverse the decline of species and wildlife habitats. From the point of view of the Government and the Forestry Commission meeting targets on woodland expansion, this is an easy win, but in establishing appropriate woodland species on suitable land, it is a disaster. Could the Minister explain why this has been allowed to happen, and what can be done to stop the abuse of a sensible long-term government policy to increase woodland using appropriate species on appropriate land?

My Lords, I declare my interest, as in the register, as an owner and trustee of woodlands. I too congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Redesdale, on securing this important debate.

The Government have an ambitious target to promote new woodland planting—all very laudable, albeit currently unrealistic in terms of the numbers forecast—and have made this a keystone of ELMS. What does not seem to attract sufficient government attention, however, is the ongoing maintenance of existing woodland. Rather than having overmature woodland and unmanaged plantations going back and, in so doing, failing to maximise their carbon sequestration potential, the Government should be encouraging much more effective woodland management plans for both thinning and coppicing. A more efficient and vibrant carbon trading market can develop as an additional benefit off the back of this. I have mentioned this to my good friend the Minister in the past and I ask him to look at it again.

I am old enough to remember the issues that farming faced with rabbits before the introduction of that man-manufactured disease myxomatosis. While I do not wish the introduction of a similar disgusting cure to be foisted on the grey squirrel population, the scale of the problem is similar and we need to find a solution that is as radical in its outcome. Both are invasive alien species after all: the rabbit was introduced by the Romans and the grey squirrel by misguided owners of country estates in the 19th century.

Control used to take the form of poisoning, trapping and shooting. The first is now problematic, the second is labour-intensive at a time when labour is in particularly short supply and the third is haphazard. Poking dreys in the spring with aluminium poles also requires a supply of fit men and is no work for the faint-hearted. It is also a filthy occupation if the dreys land on your head.