A pro-shooting environment minister allowed gamebirds to be released into protected wildlife sites for hunting despite his own experts warning it could spread bird flu to at-risk species.

Lord Richard Benyon, who himself owns a shooting estate, overruled Natural England’s recommendations and approved licence applications from other estates to release pheasants and partridges in, or near to, Special Protection Areas (SPAs). These decisions were made at meetings attended by a pro-shooting charity, openDemocracy has learnt.

Wild Justice, the campaign group co-founded by wildlife presenter Chris Packham, has now accused the government of acting unlawfully by granting the licences and said it is considering legal action.

Shooting estates have been required to obtain a licence from the Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) before releasing gamebirds in or close to SPAs since 2020, following a successful legal challenge by Wild Justice.

Natural England this year called for even stricter limits to remove the risk of gamebirds spreading bird flu to threatened populations of wild birds. The UK’s worst outbreak of bird flu on record caused the death of 3.8million birds last year and infections remain widespread.

But documents obtained by openDemocracy from Defra – Benyon’s department – reveal he and Thérèse Coffey, who this month quit as environment secretary, repeatedly overruled Natural England’s recommendations. The two ministers made decisions on 36 licence applications during seven meetings this summer, with Benyon chairing five and Coffey two.

Natural England recommended 30 of the applications should be refused. The two ministers overruled the regulator by approving 15 of them.

Benyon owns the 14,000-acre Englefield estate in Berkshire and is worth £130m, making him one of the richest parliamentarians, according to The Sunday Times Rich List. He listed shooting as an interest, alongside conservation, in his Who’s Who entry.

Documents we obtained reveal all the decisions to overrule Natural England’s recommendation to refuse were made at meetings attended by the Game & Wildlife Conservation Trust (GWCT), which is partly funded by shooting estates and previously listed Benyon as a trustee.

The GWCT had a representative at four of the meetings and appears to have been the only external group permitted to attend any of them. On the three occasions the GWCT was absent from the meetings, ministers accepted Natural England’s advice to refuse a licence.

When asked if Benyon or the department wanted to comment, a Defra spokesperson said: “We cannot comment at this time due to ongoing legal proceedings.”

One of the cases in which a minister rejected Natural England’s advice involved an application by James Foskett Farms in Coffey’s constituency, Suffolk Coastal, to release 2,500 pheasants and partridges in or near the Deben Estuary SPA.

Foskett told openDemocracy that Natural England’s suggestion that his gamebirds might give bird flu to protected avocets was “the biggest load of bunkum I’ve ever heard”. He added: “It’s coming from people who don’t know what they are doing.”

He said there had never been bird flu in his area and he ran an “environmentally friendly” shoot.

The GWCT had been “very supportive” during his licence application process, he added. “They help protect our sport with science.”

His release licence required him to pay a vet to check his gamebirds for bird flu before releasing them.

A spokesperson for Coffey said: “As this is in the middle of legal action, Thérèse cannot comment, but to clarify she did not make the decision regarding the application in her constituency.”

Mark Avery, another co-founder of Wild Justice, said: “It seems that a minister who is a keen shooter and GWCT supporter took the advice of the pro-shooting GWCT over whether to give licences to other shooters, no doubt many of them GWCT supporters.

“Natural England, Defra’s statutory nature conservation adviser, was sidelined. That is a terrible model for regulation. We think it stinks and we have started a legal challenge of the process.”

Wild Justice has sent Defra a letter before action accusing ministers of “unlawful failure to give significant weight to advice of Natural England in issuing licences”.

Richard Benwell, chief executive of Wildlife and Countryside Link (WCL), a coalition of nature charities, said: “With almost half of UK wild bird populations in decline, the last thing vulnerable species need is a sustained bird flu pandemic. Yet this is precisely what they are facing, with wild birds still dying every week from the worst ever outbreak of bird flu in the UK.

“In the face of these grave threats, the government needs to stick closely to safety-first, precautionary approach, informed by expert, independent advice.’’

Hundreds of country estates earn large sums from pheasant shooting, with customers willing to pay thousands of pounds to kill up to 800 birds a day.

Animal rights groups say that shot pheasants are often dumped because there is too little demand for their meat.

Only about a third of the 47 million pheasants and ten million red-legged partridges released are shot and retrieved. The remainder become food for scavengers such as foxes, crows and rats, boosting their numbers. They in turn prey on threatened species such as curlews and lapwings.

Reptile experts have also blamed the rise in pheasants for the decline in adders as the birds kill adult snakes and swallow young ones whole.

GWCT is a charity which describes itself as being at the “cutting edge of conservation research” and aims to create “a thriving countryside rich in wildlife and game”.

It republishes on its website a more succinct description by the Shooting Times: “The GWCT provides the bullets for others to fire in the defence of shooting.”

A GWCT spokesperson said it had “provided independent expert advice to Defra during the summer of 2023 on matters relating to gamebird releasing and management.

They added: “The GWCT has undertaken and published more independently peer-reviewed science, in world-leading ecological journals on matters relating to the ecology of gamebird releasing (including investigating negative impacts as well as positive ones) than any other organisation."