My Lords, I am most grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Cromwell, for adding his name to our Amendment and especially for spotting the rather attractive typo in an earlier Marshalled List whereby “animal rustling” had become “animal hustling”. The only animal hustling I am aware of is when my small dog hustles me out of bed in the morning.

I have tabled this amendment to probe the Government’s thinking about rural crime prevention. I appreciate that a recent rural crime strategy from the National Police Chiefs’ Council covered the years 2025 to 2028. It is very helpful to have that document and to see the priorities there. However, I do not believe it replaces a government-wide prevention strategy. Many issues would benefit from the Government having a complementary strategy, for example from the Department for Education and Defra, both of which have a huge role to play in educating the public with regard to the countryside and its wildlife on questions such as when lighting a fire in the countryside becomes a crime—something that is increasingly serious with climate change. What is criminal behaviour when you are in your boat and you spot a dolphin? I will not weary the Committee with too many examples.

Society as a whole and the Government need to take a role in ensuring that our rural areas do not become crime hotspots. Organised crime, sadly, sees rural areas as a soft touch. A big example of this was recently highlighted by your Lordships’ House’s Environment and Climate Change Committee: fly-tipping on an industrial scale. It has become almost a full-time job for my noble friend Lady Sheehan to go around the country looking at these huge fly-tips. She has done a terrific job, raising awareness of the scale of the problem and eliciting some response for the Environment Agency and the Government. It is a question of public awareness, because it is important to report very early on where something is going to become a fly-tip. It illustrates how rural crime has become big criminal business, as has wildlife crime.

In hare coursing, for example, there is big money to be made through the bets placed. That is disastrous for farmers, driving straight through their fences and hedges. It is hard to stand in the way when you are alone and facing a gang. It is also hard to police in remote rural areas. I hope the Government are paying attention to that sort of crime. They should be praised for pledging to introduce a closed season for hares, which is an excellent thing to do, but it will be a shame if hares continue to suffer from hare coursing. Peregrine falcon chicks—not something you would normally associate with commanding high prices and being the subject of organised crime—have become such a luxury item in the Middle East that there is now a need to police peregrine falcons’ nests. Eel poaching—not one or two eels for supper but glass eels, which are the babies, all illegally fished—is a trade worth £53 million at the last annual count and is wiping out the eel.

These are very serious crimes, backed by criminals with serious money who are making serious money out of it. They threaten very precious parts of our wildlife. So my question to the Minister is: what part will the wildlife units play and how will the police reorganisation that has been recently announced affect those sorts of issues?

Then there are the wanton or one-off crimes, perhaps best exemplified by the felling of the Sycamore Gap tree. If there was one benefit that that piece of wanton vandalism elicited, it was that it highlighted to the public how vulnerable our trees are, that ancient and iconic trees need protection and that, if they are damaged or destroyed, that is a criminal issue.

There are a lot of issues around farming, including livestock rustling, which I mentioned at the start, and the theft of machinery, tractors and quad bikes. I understand that those crimes, on the whole, are falling because of much-increased prevention measures. That is all to the good, but not something to lessen effort on.

The list in my amendment is not definitive and I am very grateful to Julian Fry, the rural affairs officer for the Devon and Cornwall constabulary. He pointed out some issues that were additional to those I had listed, in particular heritage and maritime crime. Heritage crime affects both the DCMS and the Home Office. It covers everything from stealing lead off church roofs and artefacts from buildings, often churches, which are easy targets because they are isolated. Those centuries-old carved lecterns and stone figures command high prices and the tragedy of those thefts is, as Mr Fry put it, “Once they’re gone, that heritage is lost”. The effect for communities, for tourism and for our actual history is tragic. It is not like a TV stolen from a home, which can be replaced if it is insured. These items are irreplaceable.

With maritime crime, it is pretty jaw-dropping to realise that Devon and Cornwall police have to cover all that extensive coastline, including the Scilly Isles, with all their wrecks, which is another heritage issue. Maritime crime includes wildlife crime. Last week, I went to a meeting hosted by the Wildlife and Countryside Link about seals and sea mammals. At the meeting, it was explained that much of the harassment of protected mammals, though constituting a crime, is because people want an Instagram photograph with said mammal. So the creatures are harassed, the police are called—the police are very stretched as they have to police out to the 12-mile limit—and they then have an enforcement job. This is an education issue, really. We should be explaining better to the public what happens to our wildlife when you just want your Instagram photo. Maybe you are frightening the seal, so it leaves its pups, the pups die and that is another tragedy.

My second question to the Minister is: why on earth are wildlife crime figures not recorded by the Home Office? That is extraordinary. There can be no logical reason why such figures are not recorded. As I said, these are serious crimes and, if the Government are serious about improving nature outcomes, wildlife crime figures need to be recorded. So, in responding to this amendment generally, I hope the Minister can, in particular, comment on how the Home Office, the DCMS and Defra can come together to tackle these crimes that so badly affect our rural areas. I beg to move.