Examination of Witnesses (Questions 309
- 319)
TUESDAY 13 JULY 2004
MR CRAWFORD
ALLAN, MS
STEPHANIE PENDRY,
MS CAROL
HATTON AND
MR STUART
CHAPMAN
Q309 Chairman: Welcome. Thank you
very much for coming along. I do not know how you are going to
allocate these questions between yourselves but we will take you
as you want to be taken. One of the things we have been trying
to do in the course of this inquiry is to establish the scale
of wildlife crime. We have established that one of the problems
is there is no central recording system for this type of crime
and, also, there is no clear definition in law of what a wildlife
crime is. Do you think that a centralised database is as important
as some of the other witnesses we have had seem to believe?
Ms Hatton: We do. We do feel it
is very important—that is why we put it in our evidence—partly
because it is very difficult: if you have no idea of the scale
of what is going on you cannot then prioritise your resources,
so if you do not know where the main problems are you cannot follow
that up. Also, in terms of how effective prosecutions are, you
cannot tell whether prosecutions are actually making a difference
if you are not monitoring the number of crimes there are and whether
the trend is actually going up or down. So in order to get an
overall picture as to what is going on we feel it is actually
very important to have a national, central database of all the
different crimes. I think Stephanie will talk more about wildlife
trade but from WWF's point of view we feel that should be a comprehensive
database of other offences, not just wildlife.
Q310 Chairman: Who should run that
database?
Ms Hatton: That is a good question.
One possibility would be the National Wildlife Crime Intelligence
Unit which already gathers data about those sorts of offences,
but they would need to be funded, I would have thought, to establish
and maintain a database of that extent.
Ms Pendry: Following on from what
Carol said, I think it is a big job to try and do this on a centralised
and national level. I think the best way to do that would be to
try and do it through some sort of recordable criteria that had
been set up by the Home Office, in the way that both COTES and
CEMA are currently recording crimes. Things are recorded through
the Home Office, such as whether prosecutions take place, and
if those types of recording categories can be applied to other
types of wildlife crime and wildlife trade crimes we would like
to see it, and I think that would give us a better indication
for what the level of crime is—not only in terms of prosecutions,
we are very keen to see the number of incidents to be recorded
as well, because very rarely do these go to prosecution in comparison
to the amount of investigations that take place. So the amount
of incidents could be recorded and, also, in terms of the number
of cautions when it comes to COTES offences; there is no record
of how many cautions have been given, so how can you have an estimate
of the differences between the level of cautions and the level
of prosecutions and so on?
Q311 Chairman: The absence of data
on this reflects the relative lack of resources, which in turn
reflects the fact that most people in this country, I suspect,
do not care very much about this issue. What have you got to say
about that? Why should extra taxpayers' money be made available
to tackling this when, clearly, it is not on the radar screen
of most of our citizens?
Ms Pendry: I would disagree, actually;
I think it is on the radar screen of a lot of citizens and I can
base that, mainly, on the information that is received both at
WWF—which I think Stuart can mention something about in
a moment—and which gets channelled through to TRAFFIC in
terms of the concerns that the public have about issues about
both wildlife trade and, also, other issues that come to our attention,
because the public does not segregate it out in their own minds
as to what is a welfare concern and what is an importation concern,
and so on. We get to hear about a whole range of concerns from
the public, and I think they feel very strongly—strongly
enough to take the effort of finding out how do they report such
a crime and who do they report it to, giving witness statements
to the police and so on. I think they are concerned. I think it
is the public who have a strong feeling about this, and obviously
that is not definitely reflected among government departments,
who have their own challenges as to where funding must go.
Mr Chapman: In the last year WWF
and TRAFFIC ran a wildlife trade campaign, and during the course
of that campaign we collected over 120,000 signatures calling
for the amendment that was eventually brought to the Criminal
Justice Bill. We also had the backing of the majority of MPs from
the House of Commons, again based on constituency concerns over,
in this case, wildlife trade crime. Again, being the largest conservation
organisation in the world, where we have over five million members,
this is very much seen as a major source of public concern in
terms of wildlife trade crime but, more broadly, environmental
crime as well.
Q312 Chairman: So, there is a need
for a central database. How likely is it that the need for an
agreed definition on wildlife crime is going to be achieved?
Ms Hatton: In terms of how it
is defined as an offence, do you mean?
Q313 Chairman: We need all the key
players to sign up to what a wildlife crime constitutes in law.
How far away are we from achieving that?
Ms Pendry: I think there was a
submission that you received from the North Wales Police which
touched on this slightly, in terms of trying to come up with a
list of the legislation under which we could qualify what a wildlife
crime would be. I think that is a very good starting point because,
as I mentioned before, it is very easy to get distracted, perhaps,
into welfare issues when we are talking about animals, in particular.
Whether that constitutes a wildlife crime or not, I think, is
what we need to decide, and one of the ways we can do that is
to be able to look at the different pieces of legislation we have
and say, "Well, the crime is committed under COTES".
If a crime is committed under the Animal Welfare Bill, as it is
at the moment, then does that constitute a wildlife crime or not?
That is our starting point. I do not have the answer because being
a wildlife trade organisation we concentrate very much on COTES
and similar issues where knowledge of the other areas of wildlife
crime legislation is not that strong, but that is where I think
we should start.
Q314 Chairman: You do agree there
is a need to obtain a definition soon? Without a definition there
is no basis to go forward at all.
Ms Hatton: Yes, absolutely. I
think Stephanie is right. One of the ways that we attempted to
define environmental crime when we looked at the EJP report[39]
was in exactly that way. Environmental Crimes more difficult to
define than wildlife crime, obviously, because the environment
is that much more all around us. We found that listing out the
various offences was the best—at least the clearest—way
for us to do it, and it was a starting point at least. I think
it is very important.
Q315 Sue Doughty: I would like to
turn to plant crime because this does not seem to have the profile
that we see with animal crime. Do you have any ideas on why you
think it does not achieve its profile?
Mr Allan: I think with plant crime
it is a much more difficult issue to get to terms with. I think
it is a far less emotive issue and, therefore, there is far less
enthusiasm about the level of crime. To be honest, if you think
about somebody removing a plant from the wild it is quite different
to somebody thinking about the mother of a baby orang-utan being
shot so that somebody can actually take that almost human-like
primate. It is a very different issue; it is very emotive, and
plant crime is not thought of in the same way. It does go very
much undetected and the scale and nature is not really known because
it is so difficult to detect. When it comes down to enforcement
it is very, very difficult to determine what is legal and what
is illegal. There are huge problems with identification, very
often. You have got 28,000 species of plants, over 20,000 of which
are orchids and very often those are traded and transported just
as a bundle of green leaves, and even top experts will not know
what species they are until they have flowered. So to the enforcer
and the layperson it is almost impossible to determine what is
the species they are looking at, and so on. So it is difficult
because it is not emotive and therefore there is less enthusiasm,
but also there is this lack of resources, knowledge and expertise
within enforcement agencies. There is one key problem here and
that is the issue of propagation of plants, in that by nature
their biology is so different to animals that you can take seeds
from plants and you can propagate them in their thousands, so
from one plant you can make many. Therefore, in relation to some
of the most endangered plant species in the world, where there
may only be a handful of plants left in the wild, you can actually
find them in very large numbers commercially. So how do you sift
between the multitude of many thousands of plants you might see,
even, on the supermarket shelf and the really rare ones that have
actually been taken from the wild? It is a great dilemma for law
enforcement. So this issue of propagation, whether or not it is
artificially propagated or whether or not it is from the wild,
is very, very difficult. Also, when you talk about plants, you
have got a huge diversity in terms of people involved in the illegal
trade in plants; the range and profile is immense from those involved
in the large-scale commercial importation of timber worth hundreds
of thousands of pounds in one shipment, through to the individual
person who sees themselves as an academic at the frontline of
science who is actually out there in the forests of Peru collecting
plants and taking them back home in a suitcase, who will then
just keep them at home for their own pleasure, but they have actually,
probably, just collected the last specimen left in the wild. There
are those who also collect from the wild but for commercial purposes,
so they will be bringing back and propagating them and trading
them. It is a very complicated problem to tackle for those reasons.
I think there is very little understanding of this. I can give
you a few examples of some cases that show why this is serious
and why we need to think of it seriously. There was a species
of orchid from Vietnam which was not even described in science;
it had never been known before in science. The first time this
species actually appeared was when it was being sold in Germany,
before even being described. This species was described—from
illegal specimens in some cases they are described—and they
ended up actually not far from where we are sitting today; very
shortly after a period in Germany they were sold in London. So
a species that is so rare that it has never been seen before,
before it is even known to science, it has ended up being sold
in London.
Q316 Chairman: When was that?
Mr Allan: That was last year,
and they were detected by wildlife inspectors at an orchid fair.
Q317 Chairman: This is a testing
question: can you name the plant?
Mr Allan: Paphiopedilum vietnamense,
from Vietnam. Also, just another example closer to home, there
are collection trips for interested botanists to go to nice places
like the deserts of Mexico; groups of UK citizens go on trips
organised by particular companies who set about showing them the
best sites for species like rare cacti, species found only in
small sites in deserts in Mexico. I think two years ago there
was a group of UK botanists who were caught in Mexico collecting
rare and endemic cacti species from protected areas on an organised
collection trip in the name of botany, and so on, which they will
then be taking back to the UK, either to keep for their personal
use or for propagation for commercial benefit. Those are some
sorts of highlights of the impact of plant crime.
Q318 Paul Flynn: What happened to
them?
Mr Allan: This was something we
heard about and looked into it further. They were caught by the
authorities in Mexico and they were held in jail for a while.
The organiser of the trip was known to the Mexico authorities
as doing this before—he was actually a Greek guide—and
in the end they were simply fined and let go and the plants were
retained.
Ms Hatton: Are you interested
in native (?) wildlife crime as well, or just the wildlife trade
angle that Crawford was mentioning?
Q319 Sue Doughty: At the moment we
are doing gardening—certainly on that area. Have you got
some—
Ms Hatton: In terms of one of
the points that was made to us when we did the research for the
Environmental Justice Report, by North Wales' Police, they had
a difficulty with Section 14 of the Wildlife and Countryside Act
which basically tries to control the spread of non-native species
in the country. It does provide that if any person plants or otherwise
causes to grow in the wild any plant which is included within
Schedule 9 they shall be guilty of an offence. If you look in
Schedule 9 that covers things like Japanese Knotweed, which you
may have seen growing prolifically along lots of wetlands in the
UK, and the problem is then our own native flora cannot compete
with those species, so they get knocked out of the way. One of
the problems the police have is that the wording of Section 14
makes it difficult for them to undertake prosecutions, in that
nobody really knows what "in the wild" means. Does that
include people's gardens? Would it cover a huge private estate
in Scotland? There seems to be very little land in the UK that
is termed to be "wild". Also, the definition of "causes
to grow"—does that require somebody to go out and plant
and tend something, or does it mean that they can just, by an
act of omission, allow something to grow unchecked on their land
and spread to other areas where it causes problems? North Wales'
Police are saying that with regard to the latter it does seem
that some sort of act is required in terms of propagating these
plants outside of the area. So they have particular problems in
not being able to bring any prosecutions under that Section of
the Act and they are not aware of any other police forces that
have managed to do so either.
39 A report by the Environmental Justice Project (comprising
WWF, The Environmental Law Foundation and Leigh, Day and Co Solicitors)
which was published in March 2004. Back
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