BIRDS: PEST CONTROL
Sir Nicholas Soames: To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, how many licences his Department has issued to kill (a) cormorants and (b) goosanders in each of the last five years.
Thérèse Coffey, Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for the Environment: The numbers of cormorant and goosander licences issued between 2014 and 2019 (to date) by Natural England on behalf of the Secretary of State are given in the table below. Individual licences are licences issued to an individual or angling club/fishery. An area based licence is one licence issued to a primary contact which covers multiple individuals amongst a group of fisheries within a defined catchment or area.
|
Species |
2014 |
2015 |
2016 |
2017 |
2018 |
2019 (to date) |
|
Cormorant (Individual) |
409 |
456 |
450 |
435 |
429 |
106 |
|
Goosander (Individual) |
31 |
35 |
29 |
29 |
29 |
9 |
|
Cormorant only (Area Based Licence) |
6 |
13 |
12 |
13 |
15 |
1 |
|
Goosander only (Area Based Licence) |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
|
Cormorant / Goosander (Area Based Licence) |
1 |
4 |
4 |
4 |
4 |
0 |
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