Vanishing Acts: Has the New Hunting Ban quietly scrapped its ‘Parliamentary Committee’?

In May, the shiny new anti-hunt lobbying group the New Hunting Ban proudly announced the formation of its ‘Parliamentary Committee’, complete with five Labour MPs (four of whom were only elected in 2024) and promises of political credibility and potential legislative reform. The group held its first meeting inside Parliament on 3 June, lending the illusion of parliamentary legitimacy.

However, that illusion didn’t last. The committee has now vanished from the group’s website without explanation, quietly replaced by a generic ‘Members of Parliament’ section that simply lists the same five MPs: Neil Duncan-Jordan (Poole), Rachael Maskell (York Central), Perran Moon (Camborne and Redruth), Will Stone (Swindon), and Sean Woodcock (Banbury) - but with no mention of any formal committee.

As we revealed last month, NHB’s so-called Parliamentary Committee wasn’t a Select Committee, Bill Committee, or even a registered All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG). It had no standing, no transparency requirements, and, most crucially, no right to call itself ‘parliamentary’ at all.

According to the Committee on Standards, unregistered cross-party groups “are not permitted to use the crowned portcullis in any form, or to use the terms ‘All-Party’ or ‘parliamentary’ in their name.”

After our exposé, and no doubt a few raised eyebrows in Westminster, it appears someone’s quietly told NHB to lose the branding. Whether it was an internal legal scramble or an external telling-off from the Commissioner for Standards, Daniel Greenberg CB, the result is the same: the ‘Parliamentary Committee’ has vanished.

A meeting of New Hunting Ban's 'Parliamentary Committee'

So far, there’s been no public comment from the MPs involved. Neil Duncan-Jordan, Perran Moon, Sean Woodcock, Will Stone, and Rachael Maskell have stayed silent. Perhaps they’re busy, or perhaps they’d rather not talk about their brief stint as part of an unofficial, rule-breaking and now-defunct committee.

In any case, the disappearance of the ‘Parliamentary Committee’ is just the latest twist in NHB’s increasingly dodgy story. If they’re willing to misrepresent something as basic as a committee’s status, how trustworthy is anything else they say?