GWCT urges Defra to weigh real-world evidence of game management

The Game & Wildlife Conservation Trust (GWCT) is urging Defra to weigh evidence from working landscapes as its call for evidence on gamebird rearing, release and shooting in England runs towards its 1 November deadline. In a new Allerton Project blog, head of sustainable farming Joe Stanley argues that good game management is “fundamentally about land management” and supports far more than gamebirds.

What is the three-legged stool of game management?

Mr Stanley describes successful game management as a three-legged stool: habitat management, legal predator management and supplementary feeding. Remove any one leg, he writes, and the whole thing becomes unstable. Together the three form the basic tenets of keepering, and crucially they create the conditions in which a wide range of farmland wildlife can thrive.

At the GWCT’s Allerton Project at Loddington, habitat created for game since a shooting interest was introduced in the early 1990s now forms a mosaic of woodland edges, conservation headlands, grass margins, pollen and nectar plots, wild bird seed mixes, hedgerows and cover crops. The project’s long-term monitoring shows songbirds, pollinators and small mammals all using habitat established with game in mind, and its songbird counts fell away during 2002 to 2010, the period when predation control and supplementary feeding were removed.

Why does the shoot’s contribution matter to Defra’s review?

Game management contributes some £500m a year and 14m days of conservation work funded from private sources across the UK, the trust’s recent Game for Nature report found. “Given the increasingly parlous state of ‘public money for public goods’ in England, that is tangible conservation activity which would likely not be funded from any other source,” Mr Stanley writes.

He is clear that game management is not beyond scrutiny, calling Defra’s review welcome if it results in “an objective examination of the full range of environmental outcomes associated with game management and shooting”. But he warns policymakers to recognise what would be lost were game management to disappear: the habitats, investment and effort that support gamebirds frequently underpin much broader biodiversity benefits, funded by the economic incentive shooting provides.

What happens next?

Defra’s call for evidence closes on 1 November 2026, and shoot managers, keepers and land managers in England have until then to submit real-world evidence of what their management delivers. The GWCT has published guidance for supporters on responding, and the trust encourages decision-makers to “look closely at those landscapes where wildlife is genuinely flourishing”. The full blog can be read on the GWCT’s Allerton Project research blog.