The LINK Deer Group comprises all of the main eNGO landowning organisations in Scotland.
What are the Scottish government’s proposed Deer Management Nature Restoration Orders? Why does the LINK Deer Group agree that this measure is now necessary?
Recently the Scottish government announced its Programme for Government for 2024-5 and we can now expect a Natural Environment Bill (NE Bill) in this Parliamentary term. We expect this Bill to include welcome proposals to reform and modernise deer management in Scotland to help address the climate and nature emergency. The deer sections of the NE Bill should implement many of the legislative recommendations of the independent Deer Working Group Report (DWGR) published in December 2019, which were accepted and committed to by the Scottish Government in March 2021. The Deer Working Group Report was a response to the growing deer populations in Scotland, now estimated at 1 million animals and increasing. In the absence of natural predators, deer must be managed by people using humane techniques and to prevent damage to various public interests. The venison then provides a healthy meat product.
In its recent public stakeholder consultation of January 2024 the Scottish government additionally introduced the concept of Deer Management Nature Restoration Orders (DMNROs) described as follows:
“In developing our proposals to implement the recommendations made by the DWG, however, we also give consideration to what enhancement and restoration is required to improve biodiversity and about how we manage deer to help achieve this. Scotland is one of the most nature depleted countries in the world, and our country’s biodiversity has been altered by centuries of habitat loss and fragmentation, management changes, development and persecution. It has been that way for so long that simply maintaining the equilibrium is in effect maintaining already damaged land. The Deer Working Group report, while comprehensive, was commissioned in 2017 and presented to Ministers in 2019, and since then the Scottish Government has set out ambitious targets for tree planting and peatland restoration alongside our commitment to the global 30 by 30 targets. It is in the context of this work that we are proposing a set of new powers for NatureScot, set out in Theme 1 of this consultation. The proposals set out in this section are in addition to the recommendations made by the Deer Working Group but we believe they are essential to our deer management capabilities”.
“The proposed purpose of a DMNRO would be to enable all necessary deer management actions to secure restoration of nature across a specified area of land, covering one or more landholdings, to be prescribed by NatureScot under a single legally enforceable direction”.
Importantly, DMNROs focus on enhancement of habitats in contrast to existing NatureScot powers to intervene to reduce deer numbers which work from an existing ecological baseline and assessment of deer damage – which has already been shown over many years to be hard to prove in practice and costly to implement. In practice, a DMNRO could result in enforced reductions in deer numbers or densities; a requirement for deer fencing to be installed; or additional work to support deer management such as habitat assessments and cull plans and reporting.
Of course, any DMNRO would be subject to consultation with relevant affected parties, and public incentives are likely to be available to support land managers and encourage compliance. It is also likely that any measures would be signed off by the Minister so public checks and balances would be in place.
In September 2024 the Scottish government published the stakeholder feedback to its “Managing Deer for Climate and Nature” consultation. Those in favour of DMNROs comprised nearly all conservation and animal welfare organisations, three quarters of organisations in the “other organisations” category, and around two thirds of individual responses.
The analysis found that: “These respondents often said that deer overpopulation was the main obstacle to ecosystem recovery in certain areas of Scotland. They highlighted the benefits of improved deer management, including the regeneration of natural woodlands, reduced flooding, and greater carbon sequestration. In addition, this group pointed to the problems of deer causing damage to small farms and gardens in some parts of Scotland, the growing incidence of Lyme Disease, and the large numbers of road accidents involving collisions with deer. Some also suggested that better management of wild deer populations would have benefits in terms of animal welfare – particularly in areas where deer mortality is high due to insufficient food in the winter months. A recurring view among this group was that deer numbers need to be controlled as a matter of urgency.
Some respondents who supported DMNROs acknowledged that deer management groups have had success in reducing deer populations in parts of Scotland, but thought that, overall, deer numbers were still far too high. These respondents emphasised the need for ‘radical and new’ approaches. They supported a ‘landscape scale’ approach to sustainable deer management that was capable of achieving a long-term reduction in deer numbers without having to cull repeatedly. They also thought it was important that such efforts are not impeded by deer moving across land ownership boundaries, and there was a suggestion that the whole of Scotland should be the subject of a DMNRO, with locations being excluded only if there was a good justification for doing so. These respondents wanted the use of DMNROs to be linked to natural regeneration and improvements in ecological connectively, and to aim for full recovery and restoration of natural processes”.
So why are these new powers needed?
Since the introduction of the current Deer (Scotland) Act in 1996, Scottish Natural Heritage (now NatureScot) have had powers to intervene to reduce deer numbers either through voluntary control agreements under section 7, or compulsory control orders under section 8. We have seen a series of voluntary control orders over the past 20 years, mainly within the Highland red deer range. Most of these deer control sites are linked to designated upland and woodland wildlife sites, amongst our most important nature conservation sites in Scotland. Over a long period of time now they have demonstrably failed to meet their objectives when it comes to sustainable deer management. The first section 8 compulsory control order power has only been used this year, some twenty-eight years after the Deer Act was passed, and even that was subject to a lengthy legal challenge. The power has been largely considered unworkable due to concerns about establishing the facts around deer damage in the terms described by the Act to withstand legal challenge. If the years since 1996 have taught us anything, it is that we need unambiguous means of securing positive deer management to deliver nature restoration at scale.
The independent Deer Working Group Report highlighted that of eleven section 7 agreements administered by NatureScot, only one has achieved its objectives, namely Glenfeshie Estate (now part of the landscape scale ecosystem restoration project Cairngorms Connect), and where benign private landownership supported the measure. The most notorious section 7 agreement has been at Caenlochan in the Cairngorms National Park which has been in place since 2003 and has recently had to be re-instigated by NatureScot due to very high recorded deer densities and ongoing damage to one of the most important sites for arctic alpine plant communities in the UK. The Deer Working Group report estimated that section 7s had cost NatureScot – that is the Scottish taxpayer – £3 million between 2006-18, often with only continued declines in nature to show for it.
The LINK Deer Group wholeheartedly supports Scottish government’s leadership in trying to deliver sustainable deer management to address the climate and nature emergency, as well as to protect public investment in new native woodlands, peatlands and wildlife conservation programmes. DMNROs have been developed by the Strategic Deer Board comprising of Scotland’s main public bodies with an interest in deer management and these proposals have therefore been carefully considered. The clear failure of previous largely voluntary approaches to protect public interests over a long timeframe indicate that a new approach is now urgently required. We consider that DMNROs, if properly targeted, incentivised, and enforced by NatureScot, could offer a significant step forward and help improve Scotland’s largely degraded upland and native woodland ecosystems.
Duncan Orr-Ewing, Convener, LINK Deer Group
Hazel Forrest, Deputy Convener, LINK Deer Group
Supported by
RSPB Scotland, Trees for Life, Scottish Wildlife Trust, National Trust for Scotland, Woodland Trust Scotland, John Muir Trust, Nature Foundation