The Conservative chair of the environment select committee has been urged to resign as the Guardian revealed he is also chair of a group endorsing nature policies described by critics as “destructive and dangerous”.
Sir Robert Goodwill, who chairs the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Efra) select committee (Efra), is tasked with holding the environment secretary to account on nature and environmental targets. He became chair of the committee after his predecessor, Neil Parish, resigned after a pornography scandal.
However, Goodwill has recently become the chairman of a new rightwing pressure group called Conservative Friends of the Countryside. The group is calling for a range of policies including halting the release of beavers; continuing the burning of peatland; continuing the use of bee-killing neonicotinoid pesticides; and stopping a ban on imports of hunting trophies from endangered animals.
Since Boris Johnson stepped down as prime minister, the government has pulled back on a number of nature commitments, including beaver releases and an end to the badger cull, after pressure from backbench MPs. A new ban on the burning of vegetation on deep peat, one of the UK’s most vital carbon sinks, has been criticised by campaigners for including too many loopholes after landowners and backbenchers lobbied for it to be watered down.
Members of the Conservative Friends of the Countryside group include Sir Bill Wiggin, MP for North Herefordshire, who has spoken against bans on foxhunting, referring to it as “class war”; and Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown, MP for the Cotswolds and an outspoken shooting campaigner who chairs the all-party parliamentary group on shooting and conservation.
Also on the committee are rural PR guru Amanda Anderson, who has long campaigned against a ban on peatland burning; and George Bowyer, who used to run the Fitzwilliam Hunt and chair of a group called Vote-OK, which campaigned for an end to the ban on foxhunting.
Caroline Lucas, Green MP for Brighton Pavilion, called for Goodwill to resign from either the group or the committee.
She told the Guardian: “This group is less like friends of the countryside and more like friends of the hunting, shooting and landowning elites. Its destructive and dangerous list of policies will poison agriculture, threaten animal protection and pollute our planet.
“I’m appalled that the chair of the Efra select committee, who has an essential role in scrutinising ministers’ and government progress on improving our environment, should be associated with such nature-wrecking policies. If he won’t dissociate himself from this group, he shouldn’t be associated with the select committee.”
Some nature-friendly Conservatives are opposing the aims of the new group. Lorraine Platt, who runs the Conservative Animal Welfare Foundation, said: “Conservative Animal Welfare Foundation does not support objectives such as stopping beaver releases, keeping peat burning, and keeping trophy hunting imports, which we believe all have the potential to damage rather than protect our environment and animals.
“We support the Conservative government’s 2019 manifesto, which includes several world-leading measures on animal welfare and which includes an end to trophy hunting imports.”
Nature charities have also criticised the group. Beccy Speight, the chief executive of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, said: “Decision makers in Westminster cannot afford to ignore the tens of millions of nature lovers in the UK who are calling for urgent action to address this loss, or the scientific evidence of its own advisers making the case for stronger environmental protections. Both will be required to hit the targets set in law by the government to halt declines and set about the vital restoration of our natural world.”
Goodwill said there was no issue with chairing the select committee and the campaign group, explaining: “My committee is a cross-party committee. People take different views on things – it’s different to being in the cabinet, where you have collective responsibility.”
He added that the group sought to improve the environment “based on decades of practical experience managing the countryside. The issues we are looking at is about being a friend of the countryside, not an enemy of the countryside, and we don’t want to inadvertently damage the countryside with ill-advised government policies. Sometimes the Greens, whether deliberately or not, fail to understand the means of managing the countryside that is beneficial for threatened species.”
Goodwill added that burning the vegetation on peat creates an important heather moorland habitat for endangered birds, and prevents wildfires that can spread and burn down into the deep peat, which should be protected as a carbon store. He also said he did not have a problem with beaver releases but there needed to be a management plan in place, offering the means to remove beavers causing flooding, and compensation schemes for farmers.
“Our worry is that people may introduce beavers that may escape and there is no management plan if they start to cause problems,” he said.
