As we wait to hear the full consequences of last year's Comprehensive Spending Review, I welcome my colleague Bob Elliot (Head of RSPB Investigations) to outline the latest risks to the National Wildlife Crime Unit.
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News that the future of the National Wildlife Crime Unit (NWCU) is, yet again, being jeopardised by a lack of commitment to its future from Government is a huge concern for some of our most threatened wildlife in the UK and beyond.
The RSPB has worked in partnership with the statutory agencies for decades to tackle wildlife crime. We have long emphasised the need to ensure that the NWCU is secured, enhanced and adequately resourced to enable the long-term operational planning which is needed to throughout the UK. The main role of the NWCU is to assist in the prevention and detection of wildlife crime. They do this by obtaining and disseminating information from a wide range of organisations and by actively assisting police forces in wildlife crime investigation. They also undertake analyses which highlight local or national threats to wildlife. We understand that the NWCU only costs £427,000 a year to run. That is amazing value for money.
The RSPB recognises the clear improvements to the policing of wildlife crime which have resulted from the work of the NWCU since it was founded in 2006. In particular, it has been instrumental in tackling some of the most serious wildlife trade offences in endangered species. This has included supporting police forces throughout the UK in 38 investigations since March 2015 as part of international operations to prevent the illegal movement of endangered species across borders.
In line with the UK wildlife crime priorities the NWCU is also heavily involved in other areas of criminality including, of particular concern to the RSPB, the continuing problem with the illegal persecution of birds of prey. The NWCU is working to identify organised crime groups and the intelligence gathered by the unit indicates a strong association between raptor persecution and grouse moor management. Our recent reports, including Birdcrime 2014 and The Illegal Killing of Birds of Prey in Scotland are just two examples from an overwhelming body of evidence which supports the need for specialised law enforcement to tackle wildlife crime and the serious threats it presents to biodiversity, both in the UK and globally.
Providing a real deterrent to wildlife crime needs both effective penalties and effective enforcement. In December we welcomed an announcement from UK Environment Minister Rory Stewart that better implementation is needed for the Nature Directives. Making a commitment to the enforcement needed to crack down on wildlife crime and end the persecution of protected species is one of the RSPB’s eight recommended actions needed to make this happen. The Nature Directives have driven recovery of species like the white-tailed eagle and red kite, which now represent a valuable tourism resource to many communities. It is vital that these laws are effectively enforced to protect our most spectacular wildlife.
There is no way that NWCU can plan for the future with this uncertainty every other year or so. The NWCU has grown out of the initiative of many years ago from the RSPB / Wildlife Trusts that resulted in the Police Wildlife Crime network, PAW and on to NWCU.
It cant just be shooters that are holding this up as NWCU is much more about intelligence and assistance on wildlife crime in general. Without NWCU individual forces will regard this as a low priority and the cross border network could fail.
The Home Secretary in one speech to the Police Service said that she wanted the Police to be about crime and nothing else (I suppose that means forget about missing children etc). I think politicians and some senior officers tend to see this as some form of 'tree hugging' phenomena and forget that the main word in 'Wildlife Crime' is not wildlife but CRIME.
This looks like yet another Lynton Crosby style piece of politicking - keeping the conservation lobby on the back foot. I'd suggest that reducing the effort going into preventing wildlife crime could well lay the UK Government open to a complaint to the EU under the Birds Directive. The level of crime against raptors is a national disgrace and completely undermines any moral right this country has to, for example, criticise the Maltese.
You have to wonder how many of those people who make the decision to fund the NWCU are game shooters.