Tag: Leadhills Estate

You may remember last year that NatureScot (formerly known as Scottish Natural Heritage), the statutory conservation agency, granted an out-of-season muirburn licence to the notorious Leadhills Estate in South Lanarkshire (see here, here, here, here).

This was a controversial decision for a number of reasons, not least because at the time muirburn had been banned across the whole of Scotland after emergency Coronavirus legislation was passed in April 2020, but also because Leadhills Estate is notorious as being at the centre of wildlife crime investigations (approx 70) over the last 18 years and is currently serving a three-year General Licence restriction, imposed on the estate by SNH because Police Scotland provided ‘clear evidence’ of wildlife crimes having being committed by persons unknown in recent years. The estate is reportedly under further police investigation since more wildlife crime allegations were made last year, so questions were asked about why it was receiving ‘special treatment’ from the licensing authority.

[An example of muirburn on a grouse moor in the Angus Glens, April 2021]

The environmentally damaging consequences of muirburn (setting fire to upland heather moorlands as part of the routine ‘management’ for grouse shooting) are well documented, with some of these fires leading to increased carbon emissions, increased flood risk, increased air pollution and threats to other ecosystem services.

With the intensification of grouse moor management in some areas of Scotland comes an increase in the extent and intensity of rotational heather burning. These fires have even been lit on areas of deep peat (forbidden by the voluntary Muirburn Code, which many land managers seem to simply ignore) causing damage to protected blanket bog habitat – in fact 40% of the area of land burned for grouse moor management in Scotland is on deep peat (see here).

Why on earth, in a climate emergency, is NatureScot permitting out-of-season burning, and especially on this particular estate that is supposedly the subject of sanctions due to ongoing wildlife crime?

As it turns out, the management of Leadhills Estate (which appears to be a company run by our old friend Mr Osborne) decided against using its out-of-season muirburn licence last year, because, according to its licence return, of the Coronavirus restrictions, although NatureScot has told me that the restrictions did not apply at the time the estate wanted to set fire to the moor.

Fast forward a year and guess what? In June 2021 Leadhills Estate applied yet again for another out-of-season muirburn licence and according to a series of FoI responses I’ve received, NatureScot is actively considering the application.

Here’s a copy of the licence application:

And here is the map showing the proposed area of burning on the grouse moor:

The licence application was submitted in June 2021 and it requested permission to set fire to the grouse moor from 1st – 30th September (the official muirburn season in Scotland runs from 1st October to 15th April, although this can be extended to 30th April at the landowner’s discretion, right at the time when ground-nesting birds have commenced their breeding season – its totally bonkers).

Here’s a summary of the FoI responses I’ve received from NatureScot about this year’s licence application:

17 June 2021 – I asked NatureScot whether a licence application had been made for Leadhills Estate.

15 July 2021 – NatureScot confirmed an application had been received (on 9 June) but said it hadn’t yet been assessed and that they were advising customers that there was a six week waiting time for applications relating to anything other than health and safety purposes.

16 July 2021 – I asked again about the status of the application.

12 August 2021 – NatureScot told me ‘the licensing team intend to assess this application in the next few days’.

1st September 2021 – I asked again about the status of the application (as this was the start date for the out-of-season licence to begin).

2nd September 2021 – NatureScot replied, ‘The licensing team is awaiting for some further information from one of our advisors before taking this further’.

15th September 2021 – I asked again about the status of the application.

16th September 2021 – NatureScot replied, ‘I have chased up licensing team but haven’t heard anything back from them yet’.

So apparently, NatureScot still hasn’t made a decision on this licence application, and with only nine days remaining until the muirburn season officially opens anyway, perhaps this is a clever stalling tactic to avoid having to issue the licence. Although I would argue, for all the reasons stated above, that the licence application should have been dismissed at first sight back in June.

The issue of setting fires to grouse moors in a climate emergency is quite high on the political agendas of both the Westminster and Scottish Governments. In November 2020, in response to the long-awaited Werritty Review on grouse moor management, then Environment Minister Mairi Gougeon announced there would be a statutory ban on burning peatland except under licence for strictly limited purposes such as habitat restoration. She also said that the Government would revisit the definition of ‘peatland’ and consider whether a tighter and stricter definition was required.

We’re still waiting to see progress on that commitment.

I’ve done some further digging about out-of-season muirburn on Leadhills Estate and have found the following information:

2017 – Licence issued (although apparently the estate failed to provide a licence return, which is a breach of the licence conditions).

2018 – The estate did not apply for an out-of-season muirburn licence.

2019 – Licence application made but was refused. The NatureScot assessor wrote: ‘Removing dead Molinia does not constitute a licensable purpose as burning within the muirburn season will achieve this aim and is a common management practice’. And, ‘Evidence of high Molinia not presented [in photographs]’.

2020 – Licence application made. NatureScot refuses it but estate appeals and NatureScot caves in and approves the licence.

The explanation given by NatureScot for its refusal of the 2019 licence is very interesting, because the removal of Molinia is again the stated purpose on Leadhills Estate’s current licence application for permission to conduct out-of-season muirburn.

What’s the decision going to be this year?

What’s more important – grouse shooting or the climate emergency?

Last week the BBC Alba’s current affairs programme Eòrpa had a 14-minute feature on the debate around driven grouse shooting in Scotland.

The programme is available to watch on BBC iPlayer for the next 28 days (see here, starts at 00.53 mins to 14.45).

It was good to see yet more exposure of this environmental train wreck and this was a pretty good feature because it included a variety of talking heads and gave some of them enough time to hang themselves.

The line-up included Tim (Kim) Baynes (Director Scottish Moorland Group, Scottish Land & Estates, Gift of Grouse), Jenny McCallum (Spokesperson for Loch Ness Rural Communities, one of the regional gamekeeper moorland groups), Professor Allan Werritty (Chair, Grouse Moor Management Review Group), Alison Johnstone MSP (Scottish Greens), Duncan Orr-Ewing (RSPB Scotland), Angus MacLeod (Barvas & Garynahine Estate, Isle of Lewis), Malcolm Combe (University Strathclyde Law School) and Fabien Chaudre (French Agency for Biodiversity).

A highlight was Alison Johnstone’s sarcasm about the concept of driven grouse shooting (see at 5.19 mins) but even she couldn’t top the comedic contribution of Tim (Kim) Baynes, whose straight-faced denial of ongoing raptor persecution on grouse moors, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, was as entertaining as watching Donald Trump declare himself the election victor.

[Cartoon by Mr Carbo]

Here’s what Tim (Kim) had to say:

“A generation ago, or two generations ago, the control of birds of prey was fairly routine whether it was for game management, or sheep management, or livestock, but there’s been a huge change in that over the last generation and particularly over the last five to ten years where people have realised that this is not the way to go, they’ve learnt more about the relationships between birds of prey and other species. There will always be these tensions between management activities and birds of prey but I think that people have really realised now that this is, you can’t, you simply can’t go out and kill them and it really very rarely happens now“.

Of course, for those of us who take an interest in this subject, this bare-faced denial is what we’ve come to expect from Tim (Kim) and his ridiculous grouse lobby pals, e.g. see here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here for a dazzling array of previous denials and spin.

Tim’s (Kim’s) performance on Eòrpa and all these previous years of denial provide a perfect illustration of how the grouse shooting industry has fundamentally failed to self-regulate. ‘Deny everything and carry on’, appears to have been the mantra.

It’s also a perfect illustration of why the Scottish Government, having given the industry chance after chance after chance after chance to clean up its act, is now under unprecedented public pressure to finally act.

And the funniest thing of all of it? All these denials from the Scottish Moorland Group, whose Chair, for years, has been Lord Hopetoun of Leadhills Estate.

You couldn’t make it up.

Over the last few weeks a series of Freedom of Information requests has revealed that Scottish Natural Heritage (now rebranded as NatureScot) issued an out-of-season muirburn licence to Leadhills Estate, allowing gamekeepers to set fire to parts of the grouse moor in September 2020.

Four blogs have been written about it: here, here, here and here.

[Grouse moors at Leadhills Estate, photo by Ruth Tingay]

This licensing decision was astonishing for a number of reasons, not least because at the time muirburn had been banned across the whole of Scotland after emergency Coronavirus legislation was passed in April 2020, but also because Leadhills Estate is notorious as being at the centre of alleged wildlife crime investigations (approx 70) over the last 17 years and is currently serving a three-year General Licence restriction, imposed on the estate by SNH because Police Scotland provided ‘clear evidence’ of wildlife crimes having being committed by persons unknown in recent years. The estate is reportedly under further police investigation since more allegations have been made this year, so how come it’s receiving ‘special treatment’ from the licensing authority?

Well this is a question being asked by Claudia Beamish MSP, according to her Twitter feed today:

Claudia is very familiar with the recent history of Leadhills Estate as it’s in her south Scotland constituency. Claudia is also the spokesperson on Environment, Climate Change and Land Reform for Scottish Labour so she’s well-versed in these issues and has regularly supported and hosted events for the Revive coalition for grouse moor reform.

Thanks, Claudia, it’ll be interesting to hear what SNH (NatureScot) has to say about this particular licence.

There’ll be another blog, shortly, on another out-of-season muirburn licence that SNH issued to Leadhills Estate…..

Earlier this month two blogs were published here about an application from Mark Osborne (representing the Leadhills Estate) to Scottish Natural Heritage (SNH, now re-branded as Nature Scot) for a licence to undertake out-of-season muirburn on the grouse moors of Leadhills (see here and here).

A bit of scene setting – regular blog readers will know all about Leadhills Estate and the catalogue of raptor persecution incidents that have been recorded there since the early 2000s, and the fact that this estate is currently the subject of a three-year General Licence restriction, imposed by SNH after even more alleged offences were uncovered there in recent years, including the discovery of this male hen harrier that was found in 2019 with an almost severed leg caught in an illegally-set trap next to its nest site (see here). Nobody was prosecuted for this barbaric killing.

[Chris Packham holds the corpse of the illegally-trapped hen harrier. Photo by Ruth Tingay]

Since the General Licence restriction was imposed in late 2019, further alleged offences have been reported at Leadhills and are the subject of ongoing police investigations (see here) including the alleged shooting of a(nother) short-eared owl by a masked gunman on a quad bike as witnessed by a local resident and his eight year old son (see here).

And then there was the individual licence that SNH issued to Leadhills Estate to shoot crows between April and June this year (see here). One of the conditions of that licence was that a return had to be made to SNH within one month of the licence expiring. An FoI request revealed that the estate had breached this condition (see here).

And then there’s the additional context of ALL muirburn being temporarily banned in Scotland until 30 September 2020 under emergency Coronavirus legislation.

The first of the two blogs written earlier this month about the licence application for out-of-season muirburn at Leadhills this summer can be read here.

The second blog detailed SNH’s initial refusal to issue a licence to Osborne/Leadhills Estate, and Osborne’s subsequent appeal of that decision (see here).

This latest blog details SNH’s consideration of Osborne’s appeal, which took place in late August 2020.

So, Osborne had been notified by SNH, in mid-August, that a licence to undertake out-of-season muirburn was not going to be issued. Osborne immediately sent a letter of appeal to challenge that decision and here’s what happened next:

There was some internal dialogue at SNH on 20th August 2020, between unidentified staff members, as follows:

On 24th August 2020 SNH wrote back to Osborne and asked him to provide more detail about his licence application:

Two days later, Osborne responded with the additional information SNH had requested:

The following day, 27th August 2020, SNH wrote back to Osborne saying that if the requested photos could be supplied then a site visit from SNH at Leadhills wouldn’t be necessary:

Later the same day Osborne sent over three photographs and a further explanatory email:

The next blog will examine SNH’s response to Osborne’s licence application appeal…..coming shortly.

Further to yesterday’s blog where it was revealed that earlier this summer, Mark Osborne, the agent/manager at Leadhills Estate had applied to SNH for an out-of-season muirburn licence to allow him to set fire to parts of the grouse moor after being sprayed with toxic glyphosate (see here), here’s what happened next.

[Setting fire to the grouse moors at Leadhills in previous years. Photo by Ruth Tingay]

SNH’s licensing department sent Osborne’s 2020 licence application to other members of staff for their comments. It’s interesting to note that Leadhills Estate applied for a similar licence in 2019 but this was refused, for reasons not yet known. Those documents have been requested from SNH via a Freedom of Information request but haven’t yet arrived.

It’s not known how many members of staff were invited to comment on Osborne’s 2020 licence application, or from which departments, because SNH has chosen to hide some internal correspondence on this issue (for example, there is no indication in the material released under a Freedom of Information request that Leadhills Estate’s status of being subject to a General Licence restriction for ongoing wildlife crime was even considered at this stage) but the following response was given by SNH’s Uplands and Peatlands Officer, who, alarmingly, doesn’t seem to think there’s any issue in principle with spraying the grouse moor with glyphosate and then setting fire to it, but does argue that this could be undertaken during the muirburn season (starts 1st Oct) and doesn’t require a special out-of-season licence:

Subsequently, SNH decided to refuse this latest licence application and notified Osborne on 14 August 2020 as follows:

On 18th August 2020 Osborne appealed the decision, stating that the glyphosate spraying had already been undertaken:

On 21st August 2020 SNH wrote back to Osborne to say they were treating his appeal as a formal complaint. Osborne wrote back the same day and said he wasn’t making a formal complaint, he was appealing SNH’s decision to refuse the out-of-season muirburn licence:

More to come on this saga…..

UPDATE 19th October 2020: SNH considers appeal from Leadhills Estate to undertake out-of-season muirburn (see here)

Do you remember back in April, during lockdown, Scottish Greens MSP Andy Wightman secured an amendment to the Coronavirus (Scotland) Bill (Emergency Bill) that meant that ALL muirburn was banned (temporarily, until the emergency regs were revaluated on 30 Sept 2020) (see here). This temporary ban was intended to relieve pressure on emergency services, who frankly had better things to do than attend wildfires that had resulted from poorly-managed muirburning on grouse moors.

And do you remember the Leadhills (Hopetoun) Estate in South Lanarkshire? You know, Lord Hopetoun’s gaffe with it’s very very very long history of people finding illegally poisoned, shot and trapped birds of prey, illegally-set traps and poisoned baits on the estate? A history that continues and has resulted in the estate currently being the subject of a three-year General Licence restriction after Police Scotland told licensing authority SNH there was ‘clear evidence’ of ongoing wildlife crime, although insufficient evidence to identify an individual suspect (see here).

Well, that information provides the backdrop for the next few blogs about Leadhills Estate.

Jaw-dropping audacity on every level.

First of all, take a look at this. It’s an application from well-known grouse moor manager/agent Mark Osborne to SNH, made on 15th July 2020, asking for an out-of-season licence to set fire to parts of the grouse moor on Leadhills Estate.

Have a read of the licence application details, consider the necessity of the proposed work, consider the estate’s current status of being sanctioned, and consider whether it would be appropriate for SNH to approve this application.

More to come…..

UPDATE 6 October 2020: What happened next with licence application for out-of-season muirburn on Leadhills Estate (here)

UPDATE 19 October 2020: SNH considers appeal from Leadhills Estate to undertake out-of-season muirburn (here)

UPDATE 11 November 2020: SNH grants licence to Leadhills Estate for out-of-season muirburn (here)

UPDATE 13 November 2020: Political questions being asked about out-of-season muirburn licence issued to Leadhills Estate (here)