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added more and more conditions. The rules
for keeping decoy birds became ever-more
complicated; caught birds had to be killed out
of sight of decoys; traps were not to be used in
extreme heat or cold; when not in use they had
to be secured open; there were definitions as
to what constituted an appropriate ‘inspection’
and so it went on.
The General Licences, which had been
just two pages long when NE took them
over, soon extended to five. (They were
11 pages in length by the time NE revoked
them in April.) This wasn’t administering
a simple licensing scheme on behalf of
Government, it was gold-plating the law
on a grand scale. The rural bodies fought
each step of the way but there were no
democratic checks or balances to invoke,
meaning that short of judicial review, NE
could effectively do what it liked. It made
two serious mistakes, however.Above: the jay, a woodland member of the corvid family, will eat the eggs and nestlings of other birds but also
seeds oak trees through its practice of caching acornsWithout the legislative expertise that
resides in government departments, NE
first forgot to carry out the regular on-paper
justifications for the continuation of the
General Licensing system. Then, from 2010
on, and for no apparent reason, it dropped
the crucial wording in the licences that said
they were being issued because the Minister
was satisfied there was no other satisfactory
solution. Those failures ultimately led to the
legal challenge by Wild Justice, which argued
that NE’s licences were unlawful because
they no longer met the requirements of the
Wildlife Act. Whether they were right or
wrong we do not know because NE imme-
diately capitulated, agreeing to revoke the
licences at just 36 hours notice in settlement
of the action, long before it got anywhere
near a court.
NE bleated that it had taken legal advice
that showed it had no choice but the organi-
sation has since resisted all calls to publish
what it was told. NE’s then Acting Chairman,
Lord Blencathra, did later describe it, saying,
“In all my time I have never seen legal advice
that was so positive and definite as this.” His
opinion, maybe, but of course much of the
legal advice lawyers give to their clients isNatural
England’s long-
term ineptitude
was the underlying
cause of the crisis
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