11:08 Ruth Jones (Labour)

Trophy hunting can have a negative impact on wildlife. Trophy hunters tend to target the world’s most iconic animals, including endangered wild animal species such as lions, polar bears, giraffes and rhinos. Hunters selfishly kill these vulnerable animals so that they can display their body parts as some sort of perverse prize. World Animal Protection notes that British hunters have brought home approximately 25,000 hunting trophies since the 1980s, and approximately 5,000 of these came from species at risk of extinction. The public are right to find this absolutely abhorrent, and to want to increase the protection afforded to these species, which are already under pressure from habitat loss, climate change, poaching and the illegal wildlife trade, by passing this important legislation. My hon. Friend the Member for Canterbury (Rosie Duffield) eloquently outlined those issues earlier.

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11:20 The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Rebecca Pow)

I want to stress something critical: we face the triple planetary crisis of biodiversity loss, climate change and pollution. Those are the greatest threats we face globally and, as the nature Minister, they are in my inbox every day. I am only too aware of all those threats and of how we need to tackle them. About 1 million animal and plant species face extinction. Much of that has occurred very recently—in our lifetime. The abundance, diversity and connectivity of species is declining faster than at any time in human history, and that includes the species targeted for trophy hunting. We all know and love them: elephants, rhinos, lions, leopards and polar bears, to name just a handful.

There are those who argue that banning the import of trophies from those animals will do nothing to improve their conservation status, and I am certainly listening to my hon. Friends on that, but we have to ask ourselves whether importing into Great Britain trophies from endangered animals helps to tackle biodiversity loss. Does this trade really help to secure a sustainable future for species on the brink of extinction? Many animals are under terrible threat anyway because their habitats are shrinking. That is happening for a range of social and economic reasons, but climate change is certainly part of it. Ultimately, the aim of the Bill is to ensure that imports of hunting trophies to Great Britain do not put additional pressure on already threatened species. That is what should concentrate our minds, and that is why I am pleased to confirm that the Government will support the Bill. In doing so, we signal our continued determination to fulfil our manifesto commitment in this regard.

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