Tim Bonner: National Trust faces trail hunting choice

At the National Trust's AGM last Saturday, a motion put forward by a member to ban trail hunting on Trust land was passed. The vote is not binding on the National Trust board, and the Trust has said that "the votes cast by members will help it make decisions in the months to come", and that "later this year, our Board of Trustees will meet and reflect on the outcomes of the resolutions". When they do so I am sure the Trustees will also note that less than 2% of the Trust's six million members actually voted on the motion which, as ever, suggests that the vast majority of people consider the issue an irrelevant distraction. A full report of the AGM is available here.

It is perfectly reasonable that the National Trust, like other landowners, should want to have confidence that the activities it permits on its land are being carried out safely and legitimately. To that end the Trust introduced new conditions for trail hunting in 2017 which include active monitoring of hunts operating on its land. It is also entirely understandable that the Trust would want to have confidence in the governance of hunting and it is the job of the various hunting associations to provide that.

What would be unreasonable, however, would be to prohibit a legal and historic activity, which donors often specifically asked should continue when they gave land to the Trust, simply because a proportion of its membership does not like it. In essence National Trust trustees need to separate the principle of allowing hunts access to Trust land from the practicalities of ensuring those hunts are operating properly. Not least because if the Trust were to take an ideological position against one legal activity being carried out on its land it will be opening the door to endless similar campaigns. A members' motion to prohibit game shooting will undoubtedly follow, and then campaigns to stop deer and pest management on Trust land and eventually to end livestock farming entirely.

The Alliance will continue its dialogue with the Trust on trail hunting and other activities our members are concerned about. We will stress that prohibiting trail hunting per se would simply invite an ideological attack on the next issue on the activists' agenda. Far from resolving a problem, such a decision would create many more and drag the Trust into a range of debates which, I am sure, it would far rather keep out of.

In recent years the National Trust has faced financial difficulties as a result of the Covid pandemic and range of criticism (justified or otherwise) for some of its policies. The last thing it needs is to be diverted into an endless battle about which activities it is ideologically acceptable to allow on its land.

A simple statement that all applications to carry out safe, relevant and legal activities on National Trust land will be considered - and that it is for applicants to show that they meet those criteria - would stop that battle before it starts.