Good morning! Today a few 'thank yous' and a few pieces of news.
A meeting with our lawyers: Just before Christmas we spent a day thinking about what we'll be doing in 2024. The morning was us talking amongst ourselves and the afternoon was discussion with our legal team. It was a great day, but quite tiring - we started at 10am, had a break for lunch, continued with our lawyers until nearly 6pm and then had a meal and some of us went to the pub afterwards! Great fun, very useful but a 12-hour day plus travel! We can't tell you much about what we discussed because it's either hush-hush, needs more work or is important but not very interesting! But, it was probably the best strategic planning day we've had, and you can rest assured that we'll be busy right through 2024.
A big thank you to our lawyers and all those we worked with in 2023!
Changes to the general licences in Wales: Natural Resources Wales has amended the details of its general licences GL001, GL002 and GL004 for 2024 - and in a good way (click here for the details). Magpies have been removed from GL001 and GL002, following their earlier omission from GL004. This is very sensible as Magpies are declining in Wales (so how can unmonitored and unregulated culling authorised by a general licence be justified?) and the evidence that Magpies cause much harm in the categories covered by these licences is somewhere between slim and non-existent. We welcome these changes, and repeat (see our blog of 22 March 2022 - click here) that Wales now has the best general licences of any UK nation (but they still aren't perfect).
Wild Justice's first legal challenge (successful) was of the English general licences in spring 2019 - since then all four UK nations have reformed and amended these licences and made them better. They are still not good enough because they are poorly enforced, do not set a cap on numbers of birds that can be killed and rely far too much on those who use them to be honest and knowledgable. We still regard general licences of this sort as the casual licensing of the casual killing of birds.
But, we've made much progress in a short period of time, despite strong and bitter opposition from some sectors, and although others have played important later parts in advocacy, none of this would have happened without Wild Justice's initial intervention and legal challenges in England, Wales and Northern Ireland.
Cheques: thank you for sending us cheques! If you have sent us a cheque since 21 November you may not yet have seen it cashed - this is for a variety of reasons mostly to do with how the post works and availability of person power to process the cheques. But it's all in hand. Please keep sending them! And please remember that the year will soon be 2024.
An intervention on Wirral: this is an example of a relatively small piece of (ongoing) work. Maybe it will turn into a big case in time, maybe our early initial intervention has already secured a good outcome. At the moment, we can't tell. We were approached by some local campaigning conservationists in the northwest of England about threats to protected plants. The location is West Kirby Beach, the local authority aiming to carry out management that (we believe) would damage the site is Wirral Borough Council, an example of a plant which would be affected is the Shore Dock and the licensing authority is Natural England. The locals include the marvellous Joshua Styles who is an outstanding young botanist.
We pointed out to the council months ago that their licence to carry out work has expired and asked them to undertake not to contemplate any such management unless a further licence is issued, failing which we would seek an order for an interim injunction, but the council provided the assurance. We also wrote to Natural England making legal points about their licence and setting out some thoughts on any further licences.
We're on the case, we'll be prepared to take it further, we've spent a small amount of money on it and although we say this is a small piece of work there are over 120 emails about it in our system and a lot of legal verbiage!
Heroes and villains: the voting for the Birdwatch Conservation Heroes award and other awards closes on Sunday - click here. Thank you to many of you for telling us you voted for us - that's nice!
Lead ammunition consultation: over 600 of you told us that you responded to the public consultation on lead ammunition. The actual figure will be much higher. That is fantastic - thank you. Many of you said that you would have struggled to have the confidence without the help that we gave - that's great too. One of our aims is to empower you to be more active in nature conservation and this is a good example of us working together.
This is the last 'newsy' newsletter you'll get from us in 2023, but not the last newsletter. By the way, how many newsletters do you think we have sent you in 2023? Answer in the next newsletter. We'll send you a short review of 2023 before the year ends and another newsletter with something for you to think about.
That's it for now!
Thank you,
Wild Justice (Directors: Mark Avery, Chris Packham and Ruth Tingay).
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