Labour takes aim at pheasant shooting

A yellowhammer, a bird that has disappeared from much of the English countryside, flies down the hedgeline on a cold easterly. Out to the right, a sparrowhawk drifts high above the winter stubble. On Brewery Farm, a 200-acre plot in Suffolk on the old road to Norwich, a team of Guns is waiting for the first drive of a shoot day to begin. As they wait, they admire the wildlife. Brewery Farm is celebrated for its conservation work – there are rare turtle-doves and almost-extinct nightingales.

As well as hosting seven shoot days each season, the land is visited regularly by ornithologists. The first game bird to break from the cover is a hen pheasant. It rises and then curls round on the cold wind towards Peter Wooley, who is as keen on butterfly-spotting on his own land as he is on shooting. He mounts his side-by-side 12-bore and kills the bird with his first barrel. It tumbles behind him into the blackthorn. It’s a classic rural scene.

Pheasants were originally from Asia, but have been in England for around 1,000 years. Driven shooting has been practised since the mid-19th century, following the invention of the breech-loading shotgun. But there are fears that this traditional sport could now be under threat. On Nov 1, the Government closed its call for evidence on game shooting . This followed a commitment from the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) earlier this year to explore licensing the activity.

Tim Bonner, the chief executive of the Countryside Alliance, says people are concerned. “The practical legislative route to licensing the shooting of game birds requires them to ban it first,” he says. It has to be “prohibited” before the Government decides whether it will continue and in what form. Nothing is set in stone. But earlier this year, in its Land Use Framework, the Government said there were “trade-offs” when it came to game shooting.

The report argues that where shooting takes place, the land’s capacity to deliver multiple benefits, such as wildlife recovery and climate resilience, is often compromised. Announcing the consultation in September, Baroness Hayman of Ullock, a Labour peer, said shooting “can contribute to rural economies and land management,” but its “environmental, animal health, animal welfare and wider impacts are not yet fully understood”. She added that the findings would help to “inform any future policy development”.

A spokesman for Defra said: “The Government has no plans to ban game-bird shooting. High environmental and animal welfare standards must be in place for sustainable shooting to succeed, protecting our ecosystems and biosecurity.” Labour has come under pressure from the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB ) to crack down on game-bird shooting. One of the most prominent groups agitating for a ban is the hardline activist group Protect the Wild.

The outfit campaigned for the traditional guga hunt to be banned in Scotland. Its website lists companies that are involved in field sports, including pubs popular with pheasant shooters. It has hired full-time staff this year to “end bird shooting”. According to the Government, where land is used for shooting, there can be trade-offs with agricultural and economic productivity, as well as its value for wildlife. Yet research by the British Trust for Ornithology shows that where shoots plant cover-crops for pheasants and partridges, there are 12 times more wild birds, such as buntings and sparrows, per acre than fields of crops such as wheat or barley.

Furthermore, according to the Game and Wildlife Conservation Trust, there are more hedges on farms that host shoots – and where there are more hedges there tends to be more wildlife. Graham Denny, whose family has been on Brewery Farm for three generations, is proud of the rich biodiversity on his land. And it’s there largely because the income he makes from shooting covers the cost of habitat-creation and nature-friendly management. “The habitat we put in, the winter cover-crops I plant and the woodland, I can afford to maintain that because of selling shooting,” he says.

“We have owls and all the small birds. We also have adders and toads. Everything is here.” He adds: “We have 73 species of bee on the farm, and that’s been registered by ecologists.” Jake Fiennes, the director of conservation on the 25,000-acre Holkham Estate in Norfolk, says that shooting is often a vital part of wildlife management in the modern farmed landscape. “When it’s done properly and you walk the fields and hedges on a shoot that’s run well, you see so much more birdlife than you do elsewhere,” he says.

“You’ve got finches flying over before the pheasants.” That said, Fiennes concedes that at the more commercial end, some people are tarnishing the reputation of the whole sector. “The frustration is that those shoots releasing too many birds detract from smaller shoots providing environmental benefits.” Last year, The Telegraph reported that American billionaire Steve Schwarzman had established a 500-bird-per-day shoot on his 2,500-acre Conholt Park estate in Wiltshire, where planning applications noted that shooting would sit alongside conservation.

For Fiennes, the danger is that Whitehall fails to distinguish between the two: “These shoots get put in the same box as those that are doing great things for nature.” If government policy changes and Denny is no longer able to sell shooting – at roughly £6,000 for a team of Guns each time – the landscape would start to look very different. “Maybe we could have a data centre instead, or a load of solar,” Denny says half-jokingly. “I could make loads of money out of solar but you couldn’t have a solar farm and have shooting.”

The reality for Denny, who also farms wheat and barley, is that the size of his holding means that if shooting went, he would have to farm more intensively to make ends meet or rent out his land to the highest bidder. That could mean solar panel providers or housing developers. Without the shoots, his land would probably end up no longer “multi-functional”, which is what the Government claimed to want. Farmers are still reeling from the family farm tax ; those involved in trail hunting have been told their days are numbered; and now the shooting community is worried too.

How widespread would the impact be? A study by Cognisense in 2024, commissioned by the British Association for Shooting and Conservation, found that 620,000 people were involved in shooting. From new dog-leads to pheasant-plucking machines, they spend £4.4bn every year. There are 67,000 full-time roles created by the sport. This figure includes some 11,000 gamekeepers and more than 12,000 shoot managers. As well as the Guns themselves and the gamekeepers, there are also tens of thousands of beaters and those who pick up shot pheasants with their gundogs.

On Denny’s shoot, beaters and pickers-up are each paid £40 per day. Clearly, it’s not a full-time gig for any of them, most of whom are retired, but Denny says it goes some way to covering their petrol money. Steve Thurlow, who is in his 70s, has been beating for as long as he can remember. “I’m retired, obviously,” he says, “and I like to get out of the house as much as I can. I go beating two or three days a week if I can. I would miss it very much [if it were banned].”

Thurlow says it’s not all “big estates and rich people, and lots of money. It’s normal, like-minded people who just do the same thing together”. Thurlow spent his working life at the Dulux factory in Stowmarket, Suffolk. Denny says that if any government official visited Brewery Farm, they’d leave feeling positive about shooting. “You could bring anyone here,” he says, “and there’s no way they could say it’s a bad thing. My fields are covered in lapwings and gulls.

And I got all the small birds.” At just after 5pm, at the Sorrel Horse Inn, six miles south of Brewery Farm, the Guns are gathered round the wood burner, and through in the back, the landlord has some of the day’s bag bubbling away in the deep-fat fryer. When the pheasant goujons are brought through and placed on the bar, a cheer goes up. Ian Pearce, a retired farmer who bought the day’s shooting from Denny, orders another round of beers.

“My God,” he says. “The countryside would be a sad place without shooting.”