The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (George Eustice)
I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Beverley and Holderness (Mr Stuart) for bringing this motion to the House. He has consistently championed the cause of the environment, and he made a number of incredibly important points in his speech. Like many others, I acknowledge the work done by my right hon. Friend the Member for Meriden (Mrs Spelman). It is important to recognise that a lot of the work we are doing now stemmed from the natural environment White Paper. After having been elected, one of the first things I did early in this Parliament was to attend the launch of that document at Kew. I remember it well. It was a very important piece of work, and she is to be commended for it.
To prove that there can be some cross-party consensus on this issue, I acknowledge the work that the hon. Member for Brent North (Barry Gardiner) has done through his chairmanship of the all-party group on biodiversity and his consistent interest in its potential. However, I must take a little issue with his strong criticism of the Secretary of State. I can vouch for the fact that my right hon. Friend believes passionately in these issues, of which he is a real champion. He regularly speaks to Dieter Helm, the chairman of the natural capital committee. I therefore do not agree with the hon. Gentleman’s criticism on that front, but perhaps we can come back to that later.
As every Member who has spoken has said, the state of natural capital is a crucial issue and the scale of the problem is great. Recent studies, such as the national ecosystem assessment and the “State of Nature” report prepared by the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds and others, drew on the excellent work of experts and volunteers across the country. They have reinforced the Government’s view about the worrying trends in the state of our natural assets.
We are constantly learning more about the complex mutual dependencies that underpin our vital ecosystems, but we are also finding evidence that shows that these intricate systems are, indeed, under threat. As many Members have said, 30% of the UK’s ecosystems are in decline. The numbers of specialist farmland birds, for example, have plummeted.
Although the overall condition of the natural environment is a cause for concern, we should also acknowledge that there have been some significant success stories that demonstrate what can be achieved when there is a will to do so. For example, environmental legislation has helped to transform many of our watercourses, and rivers that were once notoriously polluted now sustain a variety of wildlife. Of course, although these successes are heartening, important aspects of our natural environment are still in decline. The status quo is therefore not acceptable and a concerted effort on the part of Government and society is necessary to turn things around.
As part of their efforts to halt and reverse degradation of our natural environment, this Government have pledged to improve their understanding and measurement of England’s natural capital. It is, therefore, extremely encouraging to hear that the Government’s commitment to advancing the natural capital agenda is shared by Members from across the political spectrum.
A number of Members, including the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent North (Joan Walley), have said that a Treasury Minister should be present instead of me. All I can say is that I am passionate about this issue and I am here to represent the Government. It is usually only one Minister who responds to this type of debate. Members have said that they would have preferred a Treasury Minister to be present and I will not take that personally, but I am afraid that tonight you’ve got me. It is important to note that the Treasury is heavily involved in this issue. The response to the NCC’s first report was co-signed by the Secretary of State and the then Economic Secretary, my hon. Friend the Member for Bromsgrove (Sajid Javid).
A number of Members have asked what we are doing to get the principles into the green book. I have three points to make in response to that important question. First, following the publication of the natural environment White Paper in June 2011, the Treasury and the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs published in 2012 supplementary green book guidance on accounting, so consideration has already been given to including environmental impacts in cost-benefit analyses by Government Departments.
Secondly, I reassure Members that the NCC is currently in discussions with the Treasury and DEFRA about developing the green book so that we can take further steps. Thirdly, DEFRA has commissioned a baseline evaluation study to review how well recent impact assessments across government take into account environmental impacts. We are, therefore, taking a number of steps.
Mr Graham Stuart
I wonder whether the Minister took note of my point about the Government response—the letter. He has just laid out how the Government are responding in a serious way, but will he undertake that when the next state of natural capital report is published in nearly a year, it will receive as full a response as that which we would expect for a Select Committee report?
George Eustice
I hope my hon. Friend will find that the remainder of my speech will pick up on a lot of the themes of the 13 recommendations made by the NCC report.
Mr Stuart
I recognise that my hon. Friend is new to his post and that he is in a difficult position, but it really would be helpful if he could commit on the record to provide a full response to next year’s report. This debate was called not by the Government, but by the Backbench Business Committee, and we cannot rely on a debate such as this to ensure that the Government are held to account on something so important.
George Eustice
I take on board my hon. Friend’s point. Lord de Mauley leads on this element of the Department’s portfolio and I speak on it in the House of Commons. I will discuss the point that my hon. Friend has made with him.
It is not surprising that there is a consensus that natural capital matters. It underpins fundamental aspects of all our lives. We rely on natural capital for the air that we breathe, the food that we eat and the water that we drink. It is also a crucial source of energy and well-being. It will play a central role in mitigating the potential impacts of climate change. It may even provide the key to scientific and technological innovations. It is the foundation on which our economy is built. My hon. Friend the Member for Richmond Park (Zac Goldsmith) gave a fabulous quotation from John Aspinall:
“Nature is the bank upon which all cheques are drawn.”
That is very true.
Despite its importance, we have taken natural capital for granted. For too long, the value of our natural capital has been disregarded and, as a consequence, degraded. In the past 50 years, in spite of growing environmental awareness, many of the pressures on the natural environment have accelerated. Short-term, short-sighted economic gains have been prioritised. Too often, that has come at the expense of the natural environment. It is clear that if the habit of eroding our natural capital assets is allowed to continue, it will ultimately, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Meriden said, be at the expense of future generations and their economic well-being. If economic growth is not sustainable, frankly, it will not be sustained. If we do not actively attempt to understand the true value of natural capital, we will continue to set its value, wrongly, at zero.
Many people in the UK already place a value on nature. Members may well have heard enough about the BBC for one day, but the growth in popularity of programmes such as the BBC’s “Countryfile” demonstrates that we are a nation that cares passionately about the natural environment. The widespread appreciation of nature’s intrinsic value, the importance of which many Members have highlighted, is demonstrated by the large memberships of groups such as the RSPB and the wildlife trusts. To those who say that unless we put a monetary value on something, it is not valued, I say that that is not the way that the public see it. They see a great intrinsic value in our natural environment.
Valuing our natural assets in terms of their worth to the economy in pounds and pence is a challenging exercise. We will have to involve the dedicated efforts of world experts to come up with the right calculations. However, it is important that we do not see valuing nature as just a dry, academic exercise that is performed by accountants. The natural capital agenda must, and will, have a practical application that will lead to real outcomes in our natural environment. If we want to protect nature, we need to make better decisions about how we use it. Those decisions will be better informed when we have properly measured and valued our natural capital.
That is why the Government set up the natural capital committee in 2012. In doing so, we were acting as a global leader. We now lead the way by having an independent group of experts that reports on where our natural assets are being used unsustainably. Ultimately, the committee will advise the Government on how we can prioritise action to address the most pressing risks to our natural capital. That advice will better enable the Government to fulfil their vision, first set out in the natural environment White Paper of 2011, of being
“the first generation to leave the natural environment in a better state than it inherited.”
With that vision in mind, I read with interest the committee’s first state of natural capital report, which was published in April this year. It set out a framework for how the committee would deliver its ambitious work programme. The report highlighted just how high the stakes are for the environment and the economy in work that the committee is doing. The committee argued powerfully that the environment and the economy are not rival priorities that have to be traded off against each other, but that environmental and economic interests can and must be aligned. The report set out how that beneficial alignment can be realised.
Although we have enough data to be confident that our natural assets, for the main part, are being degraded, we do not measure directly changes in their extent or quality on a widespread basis and we do not account for them in national or business accounts. It is therefore not currently possible to identify systematically which natural capital assets are being used unsustainably, but the work of the committee aims to get a better handle on that.
The committee’s first report not only set out the need for a framework to measure and value our natural assets, but contained a number of recommendations to help get that framework in place. When the report was published, the committee promised to follow up in its second and third reports—due in early 2014 and 2015 respectively—with more specific advice about where assets are at risk of not being used sustainably, and what needs to be done about it.
The Government support the analysis set out in the NCC’s first state of natural capital report, as detailed in the joint letter that my hon. Friend the Member for Beverley and Holderness referred to from the Environment Secretary and the Economic Secretary to the Treasury. The letter stated:
“We welcome the report’s conclusions and we look forward to working with the Committee as they and others advance this agenda.”
I can report that good progress has been made on the recommendations contained in the report, by both the Government and the NCC. For example, in order to determine whether we are on a sustainable path, the NCC has commenced two pieces of work to help understand which assets are in decline—and to what extent—as well as which are most at risk. The NCC will report on its initial findings in its next report. We are interested to see how that might inform other Government policies, such as biodiversity offsetting, which a number of hon. Members—including my right hon. Friend the Member for Meriden—have mentioned.
On national and corporate accounting, which was mentioned by the hon. Member for Brent North, good progress is being made. On national natural capital accounting, the NCC is working closely with the ONS and DEFRA to implement the road map to 2020 that the ONS published in December 2012, setting out its timetable for producing natural capital accounts. On the corporate side, the NCC is engaging with a series of major businesses and landowners. It is about to undertake a series of pilot projects with a selection of those businesses in order to trial natural capital accounting in a real-world context and see whether it is an effective tool for encouraging businesses to operate on a more sustainable basis.
Let me touch on some of the points that my hon. Friend the Member for Beverley and Holderness raised at the end of his contribution. He asked for a response to each of the 13 recommendations, and as I have said, I will take his comments back to my noble Friend Lord de Mauley. A lot of those recommendations are being taken forward by the NCC, and many others are addressed in the good “Accounting for the value of nature in the UK” report by the ONS.
A number of Members asked whether we believe that the framework should be developed, and the Government agree that it should be. That is a task for the NCC, which is working further on that. Importantly, the committee is not doing just a single one-off report that is then placed in the Government’s hands; it is continuing to work on many of these elements. Many hon. Members raised the importance of developing a risk register, and I confirm that the second report from the committee will look further at a risk register and at highlighting those areas where we use our natural environment in an unsustainable way. The next report will contain the first steps in that direction.
In conclusion, we are very much looking forward to the NCC’s second report, due to be published in spring 2014, and to the more specific recommendations we expect it to contain. We are particularly interested in what it might have to say about a proposal for a long-term strategic plan to ensure the preservation and recovery of natural capital in this country.
