A COURT ruling which overturned a Natural England (NE) decision has significant implications for the game-keeping industry.

Mr Justice Ouseley, sitting in the Administrative Court at the Royal Courts of Justice, quashed the refusal of NE to grant a licence for the control of common buzzards.

The judgment followed a three-day judicial review hearing in June and was brought by Ricky McMorn, a self-employed gamekeeper from Northumberland, with the support of the National Gamekeepers Organisation.

He said, since 2010, buzzards had increasingly killed young pheasants before they could be released for shoots.

He made the first of five applications to NE for a licence in 2011, but all were rejected. He wanted it to cover the six shoots he operated, some of which he had run for more than 20 years.

However, the delay in granting the licence meant the shoots became unviable and had the court ruling gone against him, he could not have continued as a game-keeper.

Matthew Howarth, a judicial review expert and head of the commercial litigation team at Leeds and Bradford based law firm Gordons, represented the NGO and Mr McMorn.

He said: "The 1981 Wildlife and Countryside Act makes it illegal to kill wild birds without a licence. But licences can be granted in the interests of public or air safety, for research and, as in this case, to prevent serious damage to crops or livestock, including, specifically, game birds kept for shooting. Where certain tests are met, these licences can’t be unreasonably withheld."

Mr Howarth said NE had already accepted that buzzards were the main cause of the pheasant deaths and that Mr McMorn had done all he reasonably could to scare them off.

NE had also acknowledged that removing a small number of buzzards from the site would not compromise the species’ conservation status, yet still repeatedly refused a licence.

He said: "In the judicial review, we specifically challenged NE’s latest 2014 rejection on a series of grounds, all of which Mr Justice Ouseley upheld. He agreed that NE unlawfully took public opinion into account and acted unreasonably in declining the licence application.

"He also ruled that NE unfairly failed to consider its own technical assessor’s recommendation that eight buzzards should be captured alive through cage trapping and moved to captivity.

"In addition, the judge considered that NE unlawfully operated an undisclosed policy about how buzzard applications were to be treated," Mr Howarth said.

"This required more and better evidence than was demanded for other breeds, for individual birds to be identified and for proof to be provided that removing them would end the damage to the pheasants."

Mr Howarth said NE allowed thousands of cormorants to be shot each year, despite there being fewer of them than the UK's 300,000 buzzards.