One chief constable says that he will not spend precious resources snooping on people hunting on private land, and that he will put action against illegal hunts behind dealing with road accidents and robberies on his list of priorities.

Writing in The Times on the day the Hunting Bill goes to a Commons committee after Monday’s overwhelming vote for an outright ban, Alastair McWhirter says the new law fills police officers with dread.

Mr McWhirter, who is Chief Constable of Suffolk and rural spokesman for the Association of Chief Police Officers, expects widespread flouting of the law. He thinks people will wear ordinary clothes instead of hunting jackets and claim that they are simply out riding with their dogs.

He also highlights practical problems, such as how to arrest hunters when they are on horseback and what to do with the horses and hounds that must be seized if they are used for hunting. “If people are arrested they will have to be taken to a station and that will take several hours. Where do we put all the animals and how do we take control of them? Very few police officers are qualified to deal with horses and dogs and we haven’t got large areas for stables. Should police be using their budgets to build stables?”

After years of being piggy in the middle between hunters and protesters, Mr McWhirter thinks things will get worse for the police. And he fears that, having secured a hunting ban, saboteurs will turn their attention to shooting and that people could get killed if demonstrators defied the guns.

With some 350 hunts in the country and about 250,000 people who take their dogs on individual hunts, the police surveillance task would be enormous — especially as most hunting takes place in isolated areas with minimal police presence. Mr McWhirter, who has never hunted or had any connection with field sports, also points out that policing a hunting ban did not figure on David Blunkett’s priorities for police, nor had it been raised by any local authority.

For his own part, he would always send officers to deal with a motorway accident or robbery before investigating an illegal hunt. And he would not use the force’s helicopter to look out for people hunting on private land. “Policing will be very difficult, depending on how many people decide to flout the law,” he says. “We certainly will not turn a blind eye to any illegal hunting, but we will have to prioritise.”

Mr McWhirter said that one way of enforcing the ban would be to film illegal hunting and then try to identify offenders in the same way as football hooligans are traced. But that would require a team of officers to identify people and then prove they were part of the hunt. He said: “We usually put up pictures of people wanted in connection with a riot or other illegal activity. But will we get the support of the public on this?”

Mr McWhirter speaks out with the approval of Chris Fox, the former Northamptonshire Chief Constable who is now the Acpo chief executive. He also has the backing of most other rural police chiefs, who prefer not to comment yet.

At the moment, a third of the forces in England and Wales spend an average £543,000 a year policing hunts. Denis O’Connor, Chief Constable of Surrey, said: “If the rules change, the risk is that our resources will be devoured keeping the peace. “

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