Shooting UK

Rural organisations from shooting, farming, hunting, racing and angling gathered in Westminster on Monday 14 September for the launch of the Campaign for the Countryside, the Countryside Alliance’s push to make Prime Minister Andy Burnham change course on rural policy. Former National Farmers’ Union (NFU) president Baroness Minette Batters was among the headline spea...

The Home Office has told MPs it “will undertake a consultation in due course on strengthening the controls on shotguns to bring them more into line with the controls on other firearms”, in a written answer published on Tuesday 8 September. The answer gives no date, and it lands 11 days after the police inspectorate, His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire...

His Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Constabulary, Michelle Skeer, has used her annual assessment of policing, published on 8 September, to tell the Home Secretary that the firearms licensing system in England and Wales “isn’t fit for purpose” and that “change is overdue”. The 56-page State of Policing report is her statutory report under section 54(4) of the Police Act ...

Spring pair counts at Ponsonby Farms in Gloucestershire have reached 26.5 pairs per square kilometre, up from around 2.8 in 2017, on ground that the British Association of Shooting and Conservation’s (BASC) case study, published on 2 September, says was never classic partridge country. The wild grey partridge recovery at the farm, from 17 pairs to 159 in nine years, ...

Six young Montagu’s harriers fledged from two nests at a secret site in southern England this summer, all fathered by a single male, and the Game & Wildlife Conservation Trust (GWCT) has questioned the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds’ (RSPB) description of the bird as a “species on the brink”. Writing on the trust’s news blog, senior adviser Mike Swan s...