If government ministers and civil servants are grey squirrels, they may think they can rest easy – the predatory pine marten in the Westminster jungle is leaving them in peace.
A campaigner who has “created a landscape of fear” over the authorities’ failure to protect nature is stepping back from Wild Justice to spend more time with the wildlife – and grandchildren – in his garden.
But Mark Avery has vowed that the campaign group he co-founded with Chris Packham and Ruth Tingay six years ago will redouble its efforts to pounce on broken government promises and law enforcement that fails to restore biodiversity in Britain.
The former RSPB conservation director, who has become an outspoken critic of timid conservation charities, will also carry on campaigning for a ban on driven grouse shooting as a Wild Justice petition for a parliamentary debate gains momentum.
“We create a landscape of fear a bit like pine martens do with grey squirrels,” said Avery of Wild Justice, which he founded with Ruth Tingay and Chris Packham after meeting lawyers Leigh Day following Packham’s walk for wildlife in 2018. “You don’t have to win every legal case to make Whitehall and government agencies think harder about decisions they make, just like the pine marten doesn’t have to catch every grey squirrel to create a landscape of fear.”
Avery, who is a member of the Labour party, said he was disappointed by the government’s environmental agenda so far, attributing its lack of engagement in the biodiversity crisis to a lack of MPs who are interested in the countryside. “Grouse shooting and badger culling are two things that Labour ought to look at as ways that they could show that they are independent and also different from the last government,” he said.
Wild Justice’s latest petition to ban driven grouse shooting looks likely to trigger a parliamentary debate after surging to nearly 50,000 signatures in the new year.
Their previous petition forced a Westminster debate in 2021 but Avery said they were trying again because tighter regulation of grouse shooting – which critics link to raptor persecution and the burning of moorland – could be delivered by the Labour government.
“We want to get a debate under a Labour government with four green MPs in the House of Commons,” he said. Labour has previously suggested it favours licensing driven grouse shooting – as now occurs in Scotland – rather than a ban. “We think the case for a ban on climate change grounds, wildlife grounds, and [preventing] flooding is very very strong but we’re pragmatists,” said Avery. “If we have to get licensing first then let’s have that. It sure as hell won’t happen under a Conservative government.”
Avery said he was sure driven grouse shooting was “fading away” because climatic changes had caused very low numbers of grouse to be shot in the last five years but he hoped there would be “more sticks and more carrots” to persuade wealthy moorland owners to choose alternative moorland income streams, such as carbon storage, rewilding and natural flood management.
He added: “There’s no reason why just because for 150 years people have been shooting red grouse with driven shooting in the UK and nowhere else in the world we should let it go on when it has damaged people’s homes and businesses through flooding, involves illegal killing of native wildlife, damages allegedly protected habitats and it’s not great for the climate.”
Grouse moor managers deny that its controlled burning of heather damages peat habitats and argue that good managers want to “re-wet” moors for grouse. The illegal persecution of hen harriers has been widely linked to driven grouse shoots, although grouse moor managers argue the problem has reduced in recent years.
Since Wild Justice’s formation, two of its most significant victories have been to radically change the list of “pest” birds which were allowed to shot, with species such as jackdaws and jays – which play a crucial role planting acorns in the countryside – now widely protected.
Another challenge saw Natural England, the government’s wildlife body, tighten up the regulation of the annual release of up to 60 million non-native pheasants and red-legged partridges for shoots – restricting their release near protected wildlife sites. Both species were placed on list of problematic non-native species including grey squirrels. This change ensured that wild birds were better protected from pheasants and red-legged partridges during avian flu outbreaks.
“We’ve demonstrated that there is a different way – an outsider’s way – of scoring some nature conservation victories in the UK. They all add up to changing the way that statutory agencies and government work,” said Avery. “Ruth and Chris and I are sometimes seen as revolutionaries but using the law is a very middle-class way of changing the world. We’ve got a lot of laws that apply to nature conservation. They’d be quite good laws if only everybody stuck to them.”
Avery believes conservation charities including the National Trust, RSPB and Wildlife Trusts – he cites the latter as the most effective of the three – must do more to mobilise their memberships to make that point to the political parties. When Avery was at the RSPB he pointed out to a Lib Dem MP that there were more RSPB members in his constituency than his majority, and the MP suddenly took notice.
“You get the impression that everybody’s interested in football – there are thousands and thousands of people who are interested in nature, it’s just that they don’t all gather together in Saturday afternoon crowds of 40,000, so you don’t see them. We’re told about the football results all the time; we’re not told about the biodiversity results. The NGOs need to go back to mobilising all those people and making them talk to politicians, write letters to MPs, threaten to vote for alternatives.”
Avery only ever volunteered for Wild Justice but said he would be replaced by a full-time staffer, with the organisation determined to hold the government’s feet to the fire over wildlife failures. “The relationship between environmental NGOs and government and agencies is rather too cosy if anything. We’re not looking to be friends with government,” he said. “We’d like UK wildlife to be our friends. We’re acting on their behalf. We regard them as the disenfranchised that we’re working for. If you’re a rare moss in a wood that will get affected by loads of pheasants scratching everything and eating things you cannot take a legal case, whereas Wild Justice can.”
• This article was amended on 23 January 2025 because an earlier version mistakenly misquoted Mark Avery as referring to great squirrels, rather than grey squirrels.
