House of Lords
Impact of Environmental Regulations on Development (Built Environment Committee Report)
(4 weeks, 1 day ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Watch Debate Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Lord Moylan
That this House takes note of the Report from the Built Environment Committee The impact of environmental regulations on development (2nd Report, Session 2022-23, HL Paper 254).
Lord Moylan (Con)
My Lords, I begin by offering a few words of thanks to the committee and its current and former members. I am delighted to see so many of them here today contributing to the debate. I also thank the clerk of the committee, Kate Wallis, the researchers, Anna Gillingham and latterly Andrea Ninomiya, our administrator Hadia Garwell and, in particular, our specialist adviser Kelvin MacDonald both for his academic insights and his experience as a planner and former planning inspector. I will also take this opportunity to congratulate my noble friend Lord Banner on what I am sure will be a very welcome maiden speech that will follow shortly in the course of the debate.
The time available for this debate is cruelly short, given the significance of the topic, so I have broken my thoughts down into three broad areas. The first is the general problem, the second is to illustrate it with some particular problems and the final point, if I get to it in time, is to ask whether there needs to be a problem at all, because perhaps there does not.
The general problem is that the Government have ambitions for building a certain number of houses—there are well-publicised housing targets—and to leave the environment in a better state than previous generations had it. The starting evidence for the committee is that neither ambition is likely to be met. In fact, we found very few people who thought the Government would hit their housing targets, and we heard authoritatively from various senior figures at some government agencies that they will not meet their environmental targets either. Even worse than not meeting them is the fact that they appear to be operating in antagonism with each other, so that, rather than cross-departmental working to achieve both, we appear to have two sets of targets working against each other the whole time.
In that context, it is worth saying that the environmental targets tend on the whole to win. Part of the reason for that is the legal background to the environmental targets, which is European Union law that we have inherited, particularly the habitats regulations. They are fundamentally coercive. They require things to happen or prohibit things from happening. On the other hand, housing is driven fundamentally by the Town and Country Planning Act regime, which is essentially a permissive regime—having planning permission does not oblige you to build anything—and is of course based on domestic law. There is no European Union background to it in particular. As a result, we have constant, unnecessary battles going on that arise in part from conflicting legal systems.
Of the particular problems that the report addresses, the most prominent and the one most deserving of time is summarised in the expression “nutrient neutrality”. This dates back to a judgment of the European Court of Justice delivered in 2018, I believe. It related to Dutch farmers. The Netherlands is very intensely farmed. For a small country, it produces an awful lot of food and a lot of pollution from that runs off into rivers. Various parties went to the European Court of Justice and said that this must stop. The European Court of Justice agreed and the Dutch Government completely kiboshed themselves by putting in place a draconian plan for buying up farms and closing them down, which has resulted in a sort of revolution in domestic Dutch politics.
That is not the key matter of interest to us. The key matter of interest is that Natural England, an unaccountable agency that exists under statute in the UK, decided that that judgment applied to England as well—we are speaking predominantly of England in this debate, incidentally, as noble Lords will be aware. It was backed up in this, I understand—although, of course, I have not seen it—by legal advice from Defra. As a result, it started to issue advice in relation to applications for residential planning permission which effectively banned them because they would add pollutants to nearby watercourses without any mitigation.
It is not possible for Natural England to actually ban or nullify a planning permission. It does so by way of advice. None the less, it is very potent advice because, first, local planning authorities live in constant terror of having judicial review proceedings brought against them and, secondly, it must be said that many local authorities are delighted to be told that they cannot build anything in their area, which is a further problem we have with our housing market.
In fact, of course, we all know that the pollution in our watercourses comes predominantly from sewage overspills and agricultural practices. These agricultural practices are licensed by the Environment Agency, another player in this complex ecology of quangos running round causing confusion in every direction. Natural England has no purchase on that, but it does have purchase on applications for planning permission—so the whole burden is being put on the housing market when in fact it belongs elsewhere. As a result, 14% of England’s land area is now effectively under a ban for residential development at a time when we need more housing.
Biodiversity net gain offers a contrasting story. What was notable about nutrient neutrality was that it arrived out of the blue, as court judgments tend to do, so those in the development world had no chance to repair or plan for it. In the case of biodiversity net gain, there was discussion and consultation, and the larger housebuilders have incorporated it effectively into what they are doing; but the smaller housebuilders, for whom the committee has great concern, have not managed to do that.
I remind noble Lords that, 20 years ago, 40% of homes were delivered by small and medium-sized housebuilders. That is now down to 10%. We have moved towards a highly oligopolistic market for the provision of homes and we have driven the small builders out, mainly through the costs of planning permission and regulation of this character. If you are building a small site, as smaller builders tend to do, incorporating biodiversity net gain is extremely difficult.
The larger housebuilders often get permission to deliver it off-site, and here we come to another conflict with government policy, because they do that by buying up agricultural land and turning it fallow, yet Defra tells us that it has an objective that we must continue to produce food for this country. At the moment, we produce 60% of our own food. The Defra target is that that figure should not fall, yet it is encouraging people to buy up agricultural land and turn it into a nature reserves, or whatever.
Finally on biodiversity net gain, there are perverse outcomes in relation to derelict sites. Everyone agrees that building on a brownfield site is better than building on a greenfield site. Yet a brownfield site, if left derelict, becomes biodiverse quite quickly. The weeds come, the birds, the bees and the rodents arrive, and so on. So, if you are going to take a brownfield site that has been left derelict for some time and build on it, the first thing you do is contribute negative biodiversity net gain, as you will flatten it and destroy all of that. What you have to supply to make up the difference and the additional 10% starts from a lower base and is a bigger challenge. We are perversely encouraging greenfield site development when we say we want to encourage development of brownfield sites.
Finally under particular problems, I come to the question of what is referred to as “water neutrality”. This is a slightly misleading expression as it suggests some parallel with nutrient neutrality. It is almost better described as “water sufficiency”. We do not have enough water for many of the developments. It was announced in the Sunday Times while we were doing our report that the Secretary of State had said there were going to be 250,000 homes built in Cambridge. It was pointed out that a planning application for 5,000 homes in Cambridge was being held up because the Environment Agency claimed there was insufficient water to supply them.
Happily, when we quizzed the Housing Minister on this, she was able to assure us that the Secretary of State had said no such thing and it had appeared on the front page of the Sunday Times entirely as a matter of speculation. So it was a great consolation to us to know that that article had no basis in the thinking of the Secretary of State, given that there is no water to service these 250,000 houses. But it does raise the question: why have we not built any reservoirs for 40 years, or whatever it is, that might help and contribute to our housing target?
I will be very brief now. Is there a problem? I think there is a problem at the moment. Does there need to be a problem? Of course not. We are a reasonably well-off country. A reasonably well-off country can both build houses and improve the environment. It should not be that difficult. There should not be a conflict. But it requires a vision and a plan—and, in the case of pollution in rivers, a plan that will take at least 30 or 40 years to deliver. It requires buy-in to that plan; it requires leadership and selling that vision, and then delivery with cross-party support.
I think that can be done. The current way is to go around insisting that you are entitled to have what you want now. Well, nobody is going to get what they want now. The only answer will be a long-term plan. Somebody has to take the lead. I look to my noble friend on the Front Bench to do that as she steps forward and explains how the Government are going to resolve these problems for future generations. Sadly, it is unlikely that she is going to resolve them for this generation. If we can cast light on that and point at a path, we can feel that we have done something very valuable.
Lord Berkeley (Lab)
My Lords, it gives me great pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, the chairman of the committee, of which I was a member for the full length of this inquiry. I echo his thanks to the clerk and the specialist adviser.
As the noble Lord has outlined, we had an enormous task in looking at all the things that had gone wrong or could have gone wrong over 10 or more years of this Government, and what could be done about it. We heard some amazing pieces of evidence that, frankly, conflicted with each other. I was surprised when we ended up interviewing two Ministers, one from the environment department and the other from the planning and levelling up department, sitting next to each other, and I was tempted to ask them, “Do you ever talk to each other?” That is a critical matter in all the issues that the noble Lord has outlined and many more that I will try to cover, but it did not appear that they had. They had different objectives.
The noble Lord has mentioned the housing targets but the Government are probably 20% to 25% light on those targets for this year. Who are they blaming? There are lots of people to blame but not much action.
We had a very detailed response from the Government on our report, and I will highlight one or two aspects of it. Before that, though, maybe it is worth illustrating the problems. I live in Cornwall, as noble Lords may know, and a couple of weeks ago we had an interesting debate in the media on solar panels because some people on the council do not like solar panels on agricultural land because they restrict food production. However, then you start thinking about it: you need agricultural land for food production; you need solar panels for energy to keep your house or flat warm and lit; and we do not like windmills in many parts of the country because we like the nice view of scrub-land or whatever because it is environmentally perfect land to look at as we drive through Cornwall. There is a conflict between all those, and each one has its own recommendations and legislation but there is no solution.
The best example is the latest plan—which I hope has been cancelled now—from South West Water, because there is a water shortage in Cornwall. Some of us might doubt that after last winter, but that is what they say. It had a plan to carry water in seagoing tankers from the port of Fowey in south Wales, discharge it into a tank and pump it up-river in the new pipe to some kind of reservoir further up the hill. Importing water from Wales to Cornwall does not seem to be the most useful means of using our resources. The company now intends to have solar panels instead, which do not take fresh water but take a great deal of electricity. Again, do we need solar panels in the south-west of England, especially after this last winter?
In addition to what the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, has mentioned, something else that came to mind in the course of our inquiry, which goes back a long time, was the lack of planners. Local authorities do not have enough planning officers, and that is causing delays to planning applications. The Government are blaming that on the local authorities, but most of us would say that planners do not grow on trees—you have to train them and so on—and the local authority has to have money to pay for them. A big issue that we are facing at the moment is the lack of finance for local authorities, and that is just one example.
There is a surprising lack of off-site prefabricated construction, which I think is a really good idea. The noble Lord, Lord Moylan, mentioned that the large builders have a high proportion of orders now, but we also interviewed a lot of people who said it is very difficult doing it off-site because people do not like them.
I recommend that noble Lords read the response from the Government to our report, because it shows a complete lack of joined-up government. Although it could go better, and the Minister has said it will, a great deal of work needs to be done.
Earl Russell (LD)
My Lords, it is a pleasure to speak on this report today. I was a member of the Built Environment Committee for a short period. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, for his chairmanship, and I thank the other members of the committee.
This inquiry is important and timely. As the introduction of the report says:
“At the heart of this inquiry is the interaction between two government policies: a drive for development—particularly of housing—and … a commitment to protect habitats … Both policies should be achievable in a mutually reinforcing way. In practice, our inquiry has found that this has been hampered … by lack of co-ordination in policy-making and haphazard and unbalanced implementation”.
Today I shall speak primarily to the environmental side of this debate. The Government have strong environmental ambitions, such as being the first Government ever to leave nature in a better position than they found it, and in some areas progress has been achieved. I thank the Government for halving our CO2 emissions, which are now at their lowest level since 1837, but there is much to do and very little time to do it in.
As the tasks ahead have become more challenging, the political will appears to be declining. We have already seen the Government rowing back from several key environmental commitments or delaying them. Ambition is great, but it means nothing without a relentless drive to implement and clear and consistent policy-making. The transition to net zero by 2050 is challenging. It impacts all sections of society, and it will be a key part of government policy going forward. The transition must be a just one.
While there are strong ambitions, the Government are largely off-track to meet many of their environmental commitments. The Office for Environmental Protection’s annual report says the Government are meeting only four of their 40 key targets. To paraphrase that report, the Government remain largely off-track; many policies are at the early stages or are long-awaited; government plans must stack up; and the Government must set out transparently how they will change the nation’s trajectory in good time. The Government are also failing to meet their housebuilding targets. While they remain committed to building 1 million homes over this Parliament, they are not on target to meet that.
In my humble opinion, the general government response to the inquiry to date has been poor. The Government have not adequately engaged with or addressed many of the key areas, while in others they have provided the stock answer of blaming nutrient neutrality for the problems. The report went out of its way to search for potential solutions and point out clearly where the systems and processes in place were not working. Ideas put forward included giving housebuilding a statutory footing.
Underlying the key report is a continued trend of poorly thought-out processes, a lack of coherent policies, a lack of support for developers and a hodge-podge of systems and processes that work for no one. We have planning authorities that lack funding, a lack of planners and general systemic problems across many sectors that are inhibiting the need and the demand for housing.
When we need policy implementation across all areas of government to be a co-ordinated dance, we have something that in reality is much more akin to Laurel and Hardy than to Torvill and Dean. The idea that we can have either new housing or nutrient neutrality but not both is a false dichotomy; to accept that would be to reward past failure and to agree to continue to fail in future as well. We can and must have both, and the Government need to work to achieve that at speed and at scale. The idea that environmental targets are somehow of secondary importance is alarming. Environmental commitments must not be a convenient scapegoat for inaction, a lack of coherent policy or an inability to meet the Government’s own obligations.
We are one of the most nature-deprived countries in the world, while England has the lowest numbers of houses available in the developed world and the highest rate of inadequate housing in Europe. The Government must act at scale and at speed to change that.
Lord Best (CB)
My Lords, I was honoured to serve on the Built Environment Committee for this inquiry, under the distinguished chairmanship of the noble Lord, Lord Moylan. I congratulate him on a brilliant opening speech. I also pay tribute to our brilliant clerk, Kate Wallis, and her team, and to Kelvin MacDonald, our special adviser. My remarks in this debate will concentrate specifically on the impact of environmental regulations on the provision of new homes, with a particular emphasis on requirements for water and nutrient neutrality.
Environmental regulation is of course essential, but a heavy-handed imposition of rigid edicts can have devastating consequences. Most prominently, the water and nutrient neutrality requirements have led to a ban on new homebuilding in many areas at just the time when we most need a significant increase in housing production. When environmental regulation trumps the planning system, even contradicting the content of local plans, the consequences can be felt by innocent parties, not least by those who need a home: young households desperate to leave the parental home, older people needing to right-size, and all the rest. The committee argued that government should have as powerful an obligation to achieve its target of extra housing—the national figure of 300,000 homes a year is a reasonable immediate ambition—as it has to protect the natural environment.
Reconciliation between the parallel systems of environmental permits and planning consents is not impossible. Biodiversity net gain—BNG—is being introduced after proper consultation with the relevant parties, with a transition period for implementation and with government support for mitigation measures. BNG rules may need modifications, some of which are in the pipeline, but should lead to a 10% gain in biodiversity for every development, so new housebuilding can actually achieve more biodiversity.
In contrast, the water and nutrient neutrality decision came as a bolt from the blue. It stopped housing development in many areas, even though this adds only a tiny fraction to the pollution going into our rivers. It failed to address the vastly more significant pollution from intensive farming practices and, as we all know, so much of the underlying reason for river pollution lies in the failure of the ineffectually regulated water companies to fulfil their obligations and invest in water treatment.
Moreover, the SME housebuilders, and we need more, not fewer, of these, are taking the biggest hit. They are often ill-equipped to deal with the plethora of planning and permit requirements. Unlike the major housebuilders, they cannot afford specialist consultants to assist in completing all the necessary—and sometimes quite unnecessary— assessments and form-filling. They cannot switch production to a different area because they operate only locally.
What our Select Committee’s report advocates is a balanced approach which considers the underlying causes of environmental problems and seeks to address these fairly, openly and consistently. The Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities and Defra, with its agencies, must act jointly and not in opposition. Perhaps the forthcoming national land use framework will help bring things together. At the local level, local planning authorities must have the central role, despite cuts in planning department budgets. Increased planning fees coupled with more efficient models, as in Warwickshire, for sharing expertise and the necessity of having up-to-date local plans can all help. But responsibility comes back to central government and its agencies to engage with all the relevant stakeholders, to provide clear guidance, to introduce new measures only with proper transition periods and to ensure mitigation schemes are in place so that, at the end of the day, environmental improvements work hand in hand with securing much-needed new homebuilding.
Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)
My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Best, with whom I usually agree, but on this occasion I am afraid that I will come to a point of disagreement. Yes, of course people need homes but they also need healthy homes, which requires those homes to be in a healthy environment. The level of pollution in our rivers means that that is just not available at the moment; you cannot have a healthy home without a healthy environment.
I thank the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, and his committee for this excellent report. I also thank him for this introduction to this crucial debate. I stress that what is clear from the whole report is that this is a failure over decades. I often hold the Government responsible for many things that they have done in the last 14 years; I do in this area as well, but the current mess we are in is not just this Government’s fault.
We are, as the noble Earl, Lord Russell, said, one of the most nature-depleted corners of this planet. We also have an enormous housing crisis, with both a lack of housing and its incredible cost. The Green Party says that we need the right homes in the right place at the right price. The part of that most relevant to this report is the right place, which means essentially a healthy place. To get to all those requirements, we need a total turnaround in policy.
I learned about extraordinarily bad planning in Australia, where there is no green belt. I grew up in Sydney, a city that just sprawls and sprawls, destroying everything in its path, so I really want to stress the value of the green belt. It is there to protect land but also to keep urban centres compact, close to public transport and shops, et cetera. The noble Lord, Lord Moylan, referred to the potential biodiversity value of brownfield sites and we really have to take account of that. Those who are inventing a new term of “grey belt” might want to reflect on some of those issues.
I also want to refer to biodiversity offsetting, which I have debated with many other Ministers, so I will not go in depth on it now. But with the local elections approaching, I have been travelling around the country a lot by train recently. Looking out the window at new estates, with biodiversity net gains often being off-site, we are all too often looking at biological deserts—homes set on tiny pocket-handkerchief lawns, while for street after street there is not a tree or even a shrub to be seen. Increasingly, we know that that has massive negative impacts on human health.
For the next part, I should probably declare my position as vice-president of the Local Government Association to pick up the points made by the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, about the resources available to local councils. I have to note the Government’s response to paragraph 59 of the committee’s report:
“A well-resourced local planning authority is crucial to the delivery of all planning functions”.
I can hear the hollow laughs in councils up and down the land at this moment. We know that local authorities have been starved of resources and of the power to make decisions.
I note also that paragraph 120 of the committee’s report states:
“Public bodies are facing challenges recruiting and retaining ecological expertise. It is necessary to bring expertise into the system through recruitment or training”.
Unfortunately, the Government’s response to that paragraph says absolutely nothing about education or training, yet there is an issue with green skills. When I talk to local councillors—noble Lords might be interested to know that 10% of councils in England have Greens as part of their administrations—they basically say that ecologists are like hens’ teeth. It is not that they are not trying to recruit them. These ecologists do not exist, and those green skills do not suddenly pop up out of nowhere. People need to be trained; I do not know whether the Minister is able to comment on that, but it would be very useful.
Finally, I have to come back to the Office for Environmental Protection’s report in January. I am sure that many noble Lords will say, and have already said, that we need housing, but we need a healthy environment for our people to live in. The Office for Environmental Protection said that the Government are well off track to meet their long-term water targets, that there are issues of water scarcity—to pick up what the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, said—and that there is not sustainable resource use. None of this is working and the answer is not just build, build, build; it is to build the right house in the right place at the right price. I look forward to the noble Lord’s maiden speech.
Lord Banner (Con) (Maiden Speech)
My Lords, I am humbled to speak for the first time in the House today. I thank all the wonderful staff and noble friends who have, in time-honoured fashion, facilitated the process of settling me in. I want to mention in particular the doorkeepers for all the assistance they have given me so far, as well as my noble friends Lord Blencathra and Lord Wolfson of Tredegar for supporting me at my introduction.
This is not my first job in this House. In 2005, before embarking on private practice at the Bar, I spent 12 months here seconded as a judicial assistant to the Law Lords, as they then were, before the creation of the UK Supreme Court. I had the immense privilege of working for Lord Rodger of Earlsferry and Lord Brown of Eaton-under-Heywood. Both remained close friends and mentors of mine until their passing—in the case of Lord Brown, only last year. I am sure this House misses them greatly, as do I. An independent and respected judiciary, applying the rule of law, is fundamental to the operation of our democracy. That is the lesson I took from my first stint in this building, and one which I shall apply in my second.
Like my noble friend Lord Moylan, whose Motion this debate concerns, I am a Brummie, who ended up in west London. I grew up near Barnt Green, a charming village on the outskirts of Birmingham, where my mother still lives. I am proud to have Barnt Green as the territorial designation on my Letters Patent, although I must confess it was not a difficult choice between that and the other nearby village, Lickey End.
There is one other introductory matter that it would be remiss of me not to mention, and that is Ukraine. I am lucky enough to have a Ukrainian wife, Tetyana, who is here today and to whom I owe so much, and we are the proud parents of our two British-Ukrainian children. Our close family and friends include Ukrainian women and children, who are routinely bombarded in their homes and in their daily lives, and heroes risking their lives to defend their country. To them and all Ukrainians, I say this: I hope with all my heart that the UK, Europe and the United States will continue to support you tooth and nail against Russia’s repugnant war of aggression. Slava Ukraini.
I now turn to the subject matter of today’s debate. I have had some difficult briefs in my time at the Bar, but few have been as challenging as maintaining the convention that maiden speeches must be uncontroversial while also offering a meaningful contribution to a debate about the impact of environmental regulations on development.
I start with the easy bit: declaring an interest. As a King’s Counsel specialising in planning and environmental law, it will not surprise your Lordships to hear that I have acted and continue to act for many clients in relation to the impact of environmental regulations on development, including in relation to nutrient neutrality, which will be the focus of my observations today.
Most of those clients are developers and land promoters who have felt that the current level of environmental regulation of development is disproportionate and ineffective. That is not, however, my only perspective. Until last month, I was for six years a board member, and latterly interim chair, of the Joint Nature Conservation Committee, or JNCC, the UK-wide statutory nature conservation advisory body. Although work on nutrient neutrality is currently led by the statutory nature conservation bodies of the four component countries of the UK rather than by JNCC at a UK-wide level, my engagement in that role with Natural England’s leadership and that of the other statutory conservation bodies has helped me see things from their standpoints too.
It is with that rounded perspective that I seek to cut the Gordian knot of meaningfully contributing to a controversial subject in a speech that cannot itself be controversial. I propose to highlight five areas of apparent common ground which, if considered carefully by all stakeholders, might help provide some focus on how to solve the current stalemate.
First, everyone seems to agree that the status quo in relation to nutrient neutrality cannot continue. In the middle of a housing crisis, the building of new homes is subject to an effective moratorium in many parts of the country because of currently unachievable requirements for them to be nutrient neutral. In the middle of a nature crisis, the main causes of the nutrient pollution of river habitats—farming practices and water companies’ underinvestment in their infrastructure—continue to damage the environment.
Secondly, requiring developers to pay farmers to take land out of beneficial agricultural production, thus offsetting the nutrient generation of new development, is not the solution. It is unsustainable in every sense of the word to take productive agricultural land out of use. Moreover, a fundamental tenet of environmental law is “the polluter pays”, yet in this situation the polluter gets paid.
Thirdly, the long-term solutions plainly lie in improving agricultural practices and upgrading water infrastructure, but that will take time. The key question then is what can be done in the meantime to allow the much-needed housing to go ahead before the farming and water industries get their acts together. What quick wins can be achieved in the meantime to reduce phosphate levels in rivers and provide headroom for new development? An answer to this question must urgently be found.
Fourthly, as the committee’s excellent report makes clear, a joined-up approach across government is essential in finding a way to reconcile these considerations, which straddle the departmental responsibilities of DLUHC and Defra, as well as others. I suggest that there may be lessons that can be learned from previous Governments in which responsibility for both planning and environmental matters fell under the same departmental roof.
Finally, one of the most important things for the development industry is predictability. Land use regulation is called “planning” for a reason—the clue is in the name. Unplanned and sudden changes to rules and requirements undermine market and investor confidence. There appears to be broad consensus that the impact of nutrient neutrality requirements on the development sector has been significantly exacerbated by the lack of advance warning or consultation. Lessons can surely be learned about the need for fair notice of future environmental regulation of development.
There is not much more I can say within the limitations of this maiden speech, but I hope to make further contributions to the House’s consideration of these important issues in future.
Lord Jackson of Peterborough (Con)
My Lords, I welcome the opportunity to participate in this debate and I congratulate my noble friend Lord Moylan and his committee on this excellent report. I also, of course, congratulate my noble friend Lord Banner, of Barnt Green, on his superb speech. He brings deep knowledge and expertise on this subject. For a lawyer, paid by the word, his brevity was both welcome and unexpected. I feel sure that his professional background, experience, intellect and eloquence will be a much valued addition to your Lordships’ House. I look forward to what I hope will be many contributions from him over the next few years, not least on a subject dear to his heart, that of Ukraine.
I wish to make a number of general observations, because this report is too long and too complex to do justice to in five minutes. It highlights a failure: a policy, regulatory, legislative and judicial quagmire which I think any Government would have struggled with.
There are some fundamentals that we need to concede, as the noble Lord, Lord Best, said. We have a housing crisis; we have an issue of intergenerational fairness; we have increasing housing costs. We have to look at a proper strategy for dealing with that. We have also lost our way on proper strategy and planning for infrastructure. My part of the world is leading the way. In the east, Anglian Water is developing two new reservoirs, one near Grantham and one in the Fens, near Chatteris, but these things take sometimes 20 or 30 years to come to fruition. We do not appear to have coherence on that issue.
The decision last September to throw the baby out with the bathwater, to make the perfect the enemy of the good, by rejecting the Government’s very credible proposals to ameliorate the impact of nutrient neutrality in sensitive river catchments was a big mistake and an avoidable error, not least because the nutrient mitigation scheme, worth £280 million, was sorely needed.
We have also seen over a number of years regulatory and quango overreach, judicial activism and policy capture, which is a very regrettable situation. The proposal in 2023 to roll out a national credit-based scheme to address the imperative for nutrient neutrality would have entailed more than 30,000 acres of productive agricultural land being taken out of use for that purpose. I was interested to see that that is 61,000 tonnes of wheat, which is 35 million boxes of Weetabix.
It also has not produced, as at 2023, 142,000 homes which could have been built across 70 discrete local planning authorities. As other noble Lords have made clear, that has had a particular impact on small and medium-sized enterprise builders, who have suffered significantly since the downturn over 15 years ago. In fact, the Government’s own research shows that agricultural runoff and inaction by the privatised water companies in maintaining water infrastructure are the main reasons for the discharging of raw sewage into rivers and issues around nutrient neutrality. Indeed, new development accounts for less than 5% of phosphate and nitrate loads in our rivers. Of course, we also have the rather pernicious decision of the European Court of Justice in the so-called Dutch nitrogen case in 2018, which has resulted in what I would call the judicial activism in respect of the habitats regulations.
We are left with just one weapon in the armoury. That intervention is the sledgehammer used by Natural England to block much-needed new residential development. So, to quote Lenin, I ask the question: “What is to be done?” We need new primary legislation. We absolutely must have new watertight legislation and, I am sorry, but I believe that we must scrap the existing nutrient neutrality rules—needs must.
I cannot analyse all the recommendations in the report and the Government’s comprehensive reply, but there are a few things that I think are important. Ministers need to be able to exercise powers to grant planning permission and bypass local planning authorities that wilfully refuse to prepare timely and comprehensive plans. We need to refocus on the funding, capacity and expertise of local planning authorities. As an imperative, we obviously must have a review by the Environment Agency of environmental permits and plots that discharge effluent into rivers and areas impacted by nutrient pollution, especially agricultural activity. We also need a long-term look at historic housing stock and existing agricultural practices, as outlined in paragraph 89 of the report. We of course also have to look again at a greater emphasis at development on brownfield sites and remediation of brownfield land.
In conclusion, I commend this report. It is detailed and comprehensive and, more importantly, as my noble friend rightly said, it has signposted this and future Governments to find a way to reconcile two extremely important objectives: protecting biodiversity, species and quality of life; and building homes for people who desperately need them.
Lord Mawson (CB)
My Lords, I will not rehearse in this speech the points made in the committee’s report. They are now in the public domain and are clear and have been set out in this debate. I would, however, like to share a few reflections on the process that we have been through and the lessons learned. I thank the committee clerks and Kelvin, our special adviser, for the support they gave us and the production of what I thought was an excellent and timely report. I also thank the chairman of the committee for setting out the issues so clearly in the press briefing and media interviews that he took part in.
I begin by sharing my disappointment at the way the Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities and Intergovernmental Relations, Michael Gove, dealt with the challenging questions that we sent him. They were set out clearly in writing by the clerks when we met with him on 6 February. They were questions that our committee had researched in detail. We are living at a time when there is decreased trust in politicians of all parties and in the machinery of the state and its ability to deliver anything effectively. Members of the public, let alone Peers of the Realm, are sceptical and deserve a grown-up conversation with our politicians on challenging issues and the functions of the state. We all know, and have experienced at first hand, that this machinery is not working for us in so many ways. There is a desperate need for a frank and honest conversation, in which we grapple together with the issues, admit failings and challenges and attempt together to find ways forward.
The Secretary of State arrived at our meeting with 13 civil servants in train, at great cost to the public purse—only two of whom spoke briefly. The two-hour session, I am afraid, was a great example of a clever politician who has been meddling in the systems of state for some time now but who actually told us very little. This was a real opportunity missed, and an example of what is happening on all sides of the political spectrum in our public discourse about serious issues such as the ones we are discussing today. It is a discourse that sheds very little light and, more importantly, produces very little learning.
I raised with the Secretary of State the impression that we had clearly been given in our evidence sessions of the lack of joined-up working in the siloed systems of the state for which his department was responsible. We were told time and again about the fragmentation in many of the processes of those bodies that his department was responsible for, about people not communicating effectively with each other and about the machinery’s lack of fitness for purpose, with questions over whether any real learning was going on between these various bodies dealing with these important issues.
Instead of serious engagement and grown-up discussion about the challenges—which certainly predate Michael Gove—in the systems and processes that sit below him, we were told that all was fine and dandy in the kingdom. I do not believe it for a minute, and our evidence clearly suggests otherwise. If everything is fine with the machinery below the Secretary of State’s office, why were we told, in the recent Public Accounts Committee report on levelling up, that only just over 10% of the promised funds had actually been spent and were making a difference on the ground? That report asks why the Government are unable to provide any compelling examples of what levelling-up funding has delivered so far in one of the Government’s flagship policies.
As a person with direct experience of these issues on the ground, I declare my interest. This all speaks volumes as to the challenges of this department’s machinery—top, middle and on the front line—and accords with the evidence that we heard. Our encounter with the Secretary of State was disappointing, and an opportunity for real, informed dialogue and learning was missed. These machinery issues are not a party-political matter, of course. They will equally apply to, and have to be faced by, any new and incoming Government—they are not going away any time soon.
To move on, I agree with the conclusions of our report and think that their implications are very serious. All parties are promising to solve the housing crisis, but I am afraid that this will not be possible until we are all willing to have hard, honest and grown-up conversations about the challenges that we all face with the top, middle and front line of the machinery of the state, its fitness for purpose and its ability to deliver. Trust in our democracy depends on it. There is a desperate need for innovation, new ways of working and what I call a learning-by-doing culture at all levels of the state apparatus. But what does this look like in practice?
One very interesting piece of innovation that we heard about during our evidence sessions was from the Honourable Justice Brian Preston, Chief Judge of the Land and Environment Court of New South Wales. Having done several speaking tours in Australia, I know that Australians can sometimes—given our shared history—unfairly feel a little dependent on the UK and often want to learn about our latest thinking and practice on this small island. In this case, I suspect we may have important lessons to learn from them, and rightly so. Justice Brian told us about the Land and Environment Court in New South Wales, of which he was the Chief Judge. It was established in 1979 by legislation. At that time, we were told that planning and environmental law was quite primitive and even incoherent—sound familiar? The resolution of planning and environmental disputes was dispersed between multiple institutions, not only courts and tribunals but boards and government bodies. If you had one dispute, you could go to six different courts, tribunals or boards. This led to delay, transaction costs, inconsistent decision-making and incoherence in the administration of the legislation. In New South Wales, there was a desire to rationalise this fragmentation process and bring everything into one place to create, in effect, a one-stop shop. The consequence, we were told, has been the much speedier resolution of conflicts.
There is so much more to say about the lessons that we can learn from the Australian approach but, frustratingly, we have not been given the time to have a proper discussion about it. The Secretary of State could learn a lot. This learning-by-doing environment—the 360-degree approach—may not be perfect but I suspect that it has much to teach us all. My question to the Minister is: what are we actually learning about how to resolve the tensions between environmental issues and housing, and how are we applying these lessons to practice?
Baroness Eaton (Con)
My Lords, I declare my interest as a vice-president of the Local Government Association. I welcome the noble Lord, Lord Banner, and thank him very much for his contribution. I know that we all look forward to hearing much more from him. I also thank my noble friend Lord Moylan for the clarity of his introduction to this debate, and the team of experts and staff who helped us create the report that we are looking at today.
The title of the report, The Impact of Environmental Regulations on Development, seems straightforward enough. However, the more evidence the committee received, the more it heard of the disconnection between government departments, organisations, local planning authorities and developers—all of which play a major part in implementing government policy. The delivery of 1 million homes over this Parliament and 300,000 a year by the mid-2020s was a key government manifesto pledge. As we have heard, the Government also promised to become
“the first generation to leave the environment in a better state than it found it”.
The commitment to the housing numbers and the environment is to be commended. No Government would make such statements without the intention to deliver them. However, the work of the Built Environment Committee, in interrogating this intention, has found that the desire is far greater than the outcome.
One of the most obvious requirements for having a full understanding of the reasons for problems in enabling increased housing numbers is to have a clear understanding of the costs of delivering a full range of environmental regulations for housing or infrastructure delivery. The committee was unable to obtain such information. It suggested that the Government should have a review of costs so that their policies better balanced development and environmental objectives. Is this work under way?
As we heard from the noble Earl, Lord Russell, the Office for Environmental Protection’s January 2024 report on progress on the Government’s targets, including those in the Environment Act 2021, indicated that, of the 40 targets, the Government are on track to achieve just four. Due to a lack of information, 15 of the targets cannot be assessed. Nitrogen pollution contributes to limiting housing delivery in large areas where there continue to be damaging levels of nitrogen.
A problem for local authorities is how to balance the delivery of more housing against environmental ambitions when the two areas do not have equal statutory weight. Other areas of conflict can be the steps taken to off-set nutrient pollution or to deliver biodiversity net gain. One result of this is that active farmland is being taken out of production, including through Natural England’s own mitigation schemes. It is important that the Government recognise the critical importance of domestic food production and the role it plays in food security. In the 2022 National Food Strategy, the Government committed to publishing a land use framework in 2023 to manage the increasing demands on the UK’s land for food production, nature recovery and renewable energy. This land use framework is still eagerly awaited.
It is alarming to read advertisements such as the one I saw recently for 20 hectares of arable land and pasture near Darlington, where the site is being transformed into an
“expanse of wildflower grassland with a network of natural ponds”.
However attractive sites such as this might become, they do not produce food. What assessment has been made of the loss of arable land for mitigation schemes and its impact on food security? Could progress be made in cross-departmental working and, when policies are being created, could cross-organisation working be prioritised? Where there is existing expertise in organisations such as Homes England and the Planning Inspectorate, it certainly should be used.
The Earl of Lytton (CB)
My Lords, I very much welcome the opportunity to debate this hugely important subject. I declare an interest as a resident in the part of Sussex affected by water neutrality. I am also a supporter of the local group Save Rural Southwater—SRS—which focuses on excessive residential development in contravention of a made neighbourhood plan. Noble Lords will know that I am a chartered surveyor by profession and a former member of the Built Environment Committee. I pay tribute to its work in this area, in which I was not involved. I also pay tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Banner, on a most thought-provoking speech. He is no stranger to my profession or the hallowed portals of 12 Great George Street.
My first wider point is to reinforce the report’s implicit query as to how it has come about that damage to ecology, derived in my area from excessive water abstraction by a privatised utility under the noses of the Government’s Environment Agency and nature conservation adviser, has somehow alighted on the development control system rather than dealing with the supply-side mechanics and consumer demand management. That seems quite extraordinary. The report refers to a siloed approach, but it is more serious than that: it is bad public administrative architecture and a basic failure to co-ordinate environmental, economic and social factors.
I will start with a bit of data. A comment has just been made about housing. The report rightly describes the number of out-of-date local plans, but it does not query, at least in that context, the Government’s own data for household formation and thus housing need, which dates from 2013. My case rests on that point, but I question what we are doing about the inventory versus the flows in what we might call the creation of wealth.
In focusing on water neutrality, I acknowledge that this is not the only area of critical provision at issue. Communications, energy supply and distribution, waste and critical social infrastructure sit alongside air, water, light and sound pollution, many of which are difficult to price, but almost none is being planned for on a predictable basis or even consistently and objectively measured, let alone managed effectively. I am all for saving water. We are profligate in our use of it, which must be dealt with, but it is a wider societal issue.
The exemplar used in the report, which is the water off-setting scheme of Crawley Borough Council—14 miles from where I live—is apparently now being accepted by neighbouring local authorities as the model for dealing with this. However, it is a classic example of greenwash and is not fit for purpose. It devises an off-setting arrangement based on an aspirational water consumption metric of 85 litres per person per day. That is slightly more than is allowed in the desert Kingdom of Jordan. Although theoretically achievable, it is ludicrous in terms of current domestic practice. Data from Southern Water, our local utility, shows an average domestic daily per capita consumption of 136 litres per person per day, and the long-term objective of Part C of the building regulations is 110 litres. To see how absurd this is, I recommend that noble Lords visit the SRS website. Crawley’s own pilot scheme showed a consumption of 166 litres per person per day. You could scarcely make this up.
If this is to be the general way in which environmental regulation is to be circumvented or worked around, I am extremely fearful for where we may end up, with no objective metric for evaluating offset equivalence. In the limited circumstances of Crawley borough’s social housing, verifying ongoing compliance is absent, with no enforcement provision, no sanction for failure to perform and no authority possessing the intrusive powers necessary to achieve these. This is a recipe for profligate overconsumption, which will end up in tears.
This is an irresponsible approach and a dereliction of public duty. It will result in critical attrition of essential resources: not only water but nature and other things that are of extraordinary value to us. A holistic process is needed. When the report suggests shifting the balance between ecology and development, I reject that on the basis of the current situation, because it needs to look at the problem in a different way. The noble Lord, Lord Best, referred to balance and engagement. He is absolutely right, although I take that point from a different standpoint from his.
Ultimately, this is an issue for central government, utility companies and their regulators, for pricing into consumption the true costs of environmental compliance. We need a demand-side approach and the sort of thing that has encouraged consumers to save electricity and gas, recycle waste and gain a better understanding of the role that we all have to play as citizens.
Baroness Thornhill (LD)
I too welcome the noble Lord, Lord Banner, to our Chamber; I appreciated his extremely pertinent contribution. Likewise, I echo my thanks to my committee members and to Kate and Kelvin, who kept the herd of cats focused. I am no longer a member of the committee, but I really enjoyed my time with them.
This has been a stimulating debate with some excellent contributions, kicked off most incisively by our indomitable and knowledgeable chair, the noble Lord, Lord Moylan. What is clear from the contributions of all noble Lords is that this report has laid bare the failure of government to meet either its environmental objectives or its housing targets.
As has already been said by the noble Baroness, Lady Eaton, the Office for Environmental Protection—whose representatives were of excellent calibre—gave evidence in the annual report saying that the Government remain largely off track to meet their environmental ambitions, including those set out in the 2021 Act. Sadly, we were not surprised by the Secretary of State’s admission to the committee that the 300,000 housing target will not be met in this Parliament. This is a failure on both objectives.
As the noble Lord, Lord Mawson, strongly stated, we found the Government’s response disappointing, to put it mildly. In fact, I go so far as to say that it felt like there was a collective giving up on trying to engage with the issues, and many answers were just assertions that they rejected the committee’s findings. Despite very strong evidence that both sets of targets would not be met, they did not engage with the evidence that we put forward.
It was a challenging inquiry in different ways, but it was soon established that this was a battleground, and entrenched positions were taken up. Regrettably, because their respective roles are so important, Natural England versus Defra and the Environment Agency and/or the greedy developers featured as the villains of the piece, depending on which side of the battle you were on, with poor council officers stuck in the middle of the fray trying to referee.
Some of our witnesses were clear that with the right policy levers and leadership from government, the objectives were not mutually incompatible. But lack of policy co-ordination and implementation were exacerbating the problem and hampering delivery, as several noble Lords have mentioned.
As we have heard today, the report identified very clear policy conflicts between the Government’s food security ambitions, in particular, and steps to offset nutrient pollution or to deliver biodiversity net gain. Both are resulting in active farmland being taken out of use, including through Natural England’s own mitigation schemes.
There is no doubt that the impact of water pollution measures and nutrient neutrality rules has resulted in fewer homes being built. The former has been the reason for some councils in effect calling a moratorium on housebuilding in their area. This has been to great fanfare and whoops of delight from nimby residents and their councillors in some areas.
A quick study of the councils is revealing. I am not aware of any parties’ political leaflets going out saying, “Boo, hiss, the nasty Government are stopping us building lots of much-needed new homes—shame on them”, but rather the opposite. I would be grateful for the Minister’s update on the Government’s position with those councils. Is there actively any engagement with councillors who sit on the planning committees that make the decisions?
It was clear to us that finding solutions to allow housing to go ahead is technically challenging. For example, I learned about the science of working out how many nutrients can be offset by creating a wetland. There is undoubtedly a shortage of people in individual councils with the right skills and knowledge, as was mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley. For councils it has been a steep learning curve, as it has for the private sector and public bodies.
Developers looking for a way to meet their obligations find a complex, complicated and inconsistent system. This particularly impacts on SME builders, as has also been said. The market in schemes providing mitigation and selling credits to housebuilders has not materialised or grown quickly enough to meet demand. Some of the designated catchments are still without schemes, such as the River Eden and Bassenthwaite catchments in the north-west. Even in areas with relatively mature credit markets, availability is not always good.
Part of the problem is the lack of central standards and accreditation. It seems that it is up to each individual local Natural England team as to whether the proposed solution is acceptable. Will the Government consider an independent set of standards and accreditation to circumvent the need for Natural England to have to approve every single solution, which inevitably leads to delays and inconsistency?
As ever, funding is clearly an issue. The Government have set aside a £110 million nutrient mitigation fund, but as always it is a competitive bidding process, which those of us in local government know is a barrier and does not always result in those with the greatest need getting the appropriate amount of money to make a difference. As yet, there is no timetable for when these local authority schemes will be operational.
Do the Government have an assessment of the availability of both local authority and commercial credit schemes in each of the nutrient-sensitive areas, including when they expect the local authority-funded schemes to become operational and how many homes are expected to be supported? Unfortunately, there is real uncertainty and inconsistency with local authority schemes, not least regarding the cost of credits, which I was surprised to find varies considerably. This is exacerbated by the paucity of credits and the lack of competition in this area.
It came over strongly in the report that collaborative working was the key to success—there is no surprise there. Councils need clarity over the roles of the regulators, as this is critical to stopping nutrients entering the water systems in the first place, coming mainly from agriculture and water treatment. To make this effective, there have to be more formal data-sharing agreements between councils and water companies, as the lack thereof is hampering progress.
Are the Government acting now on changing agricultural practices that would help in the short term? Perhaps the Minister can update us. It must be said that housebuilding contributes a very small amount to nutrient emission. The biggest source of pollution is farming at 70%, as we know, with 30% coming from the activities of the rest of the built environment, including existing residents.
This is a significant and bold report. Much more could be said, and I have just scrapped a couple of paragraphs. In truth, noble Lords have given it a good critique today. It seems we agree that the two objectives are currently incompatible, and it will probably take another Government—and perhaps a few decades—to pull everything together, to get a grip and to reconcile the very valid goals of reducing pollution and building more homes. If we do not, we face the lose-lose situation of pollution continuing to accumulate unchecked, with our rivers facing total ecological collapse while our housing crisis gets worse.
Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)
My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Banner, on his excellent maiden speech. I was very interested to hear his comments on Ukraine; from our side of the House, I reassure him again of our support for government actions on Ukraine to support the brave heroes there. I was delighted to hear that he is an active supporter of Brian May’s animal welfare campaign. We look forward to hearing more in the House about his expertise.
I thank the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, and all members of the Built Environment Committee for the extremely thorough and balanced way in which they have approached what I consider to be one of the most important issues facing our country. We know that we need to balance the development that we urgently need and the environmental protections that we would all want to see. For the future of our country, we must ensure that the developments and communities that are formed do no detriment to our rich biodiversity and, at best, will contribute significantly to its protection and enhancement.
It was a pleasure to listen to all noble Lords who have contributed to the debate, and I hope that the Government will work with all the public bodies involved to use this report as a catalyst for genuine and long-term change to the planning system and to the delivery mechanisms for housing, economic growth and regeneration. It is impossible to do justice to the 74 recommendations in the report in the time constraints of the debate, but so many of them are welcome, thoughtful and so important that I hope they can be implemented with as little delay as possible.
I will restrict my comments to some of the key areas that have emerged during the debate: co-ordination in government, the planning process, some brief comments on nutrient neutrality, the availability of good environmental data and mapping, and the use of brownfield land.
First, I will comment on one of the report’s key findings: the lack of co-ordination between government departments and the public bodies associated with them. That issue was raised by my noble friend Lord Berkeley, the noble Lord, Lord Best, and the noble Baroness, Lady Eaton. If we are to plan and deliver a better future for the country, we simply cannot carry on with the current silo thinking in government departments. As the report rightly puts it:
“We see no path to delivering the Government’s ambitions by the intended deadlines unless there is a strong display of political leadership to deliver and implement a comprehensive strategy for both development and the environment”.
What work is currently going on to ensure that we have a long-term housing plan, a comprehensive and long-awaited land use strategy, and a plan that will ensure future food security? These strands clearly need drawing together, so can the Minister indicate how the Government intend to respond to the need to ensure better cross-departmental working?
At local level, it is vital that local authorities can respond to the dual challenge of delivering housing and protecting the environment—an issue raised very powerfully by the noble Lord, Lord Best—and that their local plans are effective in helping them to do so. The Government’s decision to remove the need for local housing targets last year made this worse, not better, and has further delayed the production of local plans. As we have heard, a quarter of local planning authorities do not have an adopted local plan, and almost 30% of those with an adopted local plan have one that is more than five years old. There is an urgent need to ensure that local authorities, as well as the statutory bodies that need to contribute to local plans, are properly resourced to do that—an issue raised by my noble friend Lord Berkeley and the noble Baroness, Lady Eaton.
While the limited increase in planning fees is welcome, it is a matter of regret that the opportunity to introduce full-cost recovery for major planning applications was not taken in the passage of the then Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill. The recommendation in the report—that for any new regulations or requirements on the planning system or on development there should be a mandatory consultation with Homes England and the Planning Inspectorate—is welcome, but I suggest that, as local government is responsible for the delivery of planning, the LGA be added to that list. This too would prevent the issue flagged in the report: that the introduction of regulations without detail and practical solutions would inhibit or delay development.
There is a need to urgently consider the issue of nutrient neutrality, to ensure that the development of much-needed housing is not impeded, but that, at the same time, it is not adding to the enormous and toxic pressures on our natural water resources, which have, sadly, become all too familiar to us in recent years—what the noble Earl, Lord Russell, described as a false dichotomy. There has been significant success in the mitigation networks undertaken by Natural England, such as those in the Solent. Urgent consideration of how they can be built on is needed, including lessons learned and any necessary adaptations for wider rollout to be undertaken. We understand the recommendation that this should initially be publicly funded, but there must be urgent work with the private sector to ensure that a long-term funding approach is developed.
As a council leader who has faced many planning challenges over the years, I was delighted to see the great crested newt get a special mention in the report. However, if we are to deliver the significant goal of biodiversity net gain, we will need to have much better environmental data and mapping, with a proper, data-driven land use strategy at the top of the pyramid. Access to local, environmental, species and natural resource data is vital to ensure that planning departments and developers can take relevant data into account. New technologies, particularly satellite mapping, can and should be employed to facilitate this process and to ensure that it is comprehensive.
In addition to all those significant challenges is the overriding need to find more suitable land for housing without impinging on the truly precious green spaces that are our natural heritage. Unfortunately, the government approach to date means that nobody is winning. The housing crisis is
“engulfing a generation of hard-working aspirational people”,
while the UK is one of the most nature-depleted countries in the world. New analysis from the Labour Party today reveals the scale of this housing failure, with planning applications received and granted dropping to the lowest level on record. Applications made and granted have dropped by a fifth. What we have seen is an inconsistent and haphazard approach, leading to significant amounts of speculative development, including on high-quality, nature-rich, green-belt land, often via an appeal over the heads of councils and out of the reach of local people.
A Labour Government would take a brownfield-first approach to development across England, stressing that areas with enough brownfield land should not release green-belt land. However, we will release some land currently classed as green belt to build the homes that Britain needs. We intend to create a new class of grey-belt land to prioritise ugly, disused grey-belt land, and set tough new conditions for releasing that land. We will ensure that any development benefits local communities. This follows cases such as affordable homes in Tottenham being blocked because a disused petrol station had been designated as green-belt land.
We are setting out today five golden rules for grey-belt housebuilding, to deliver affordable homes, to boost infrastructure and public services such as schools and GPs, and to improve genuine green spaces. We will also look to ensure high environmental standards that go above the legal minimum on biodiversity net gain. The chair of Natural England has rightly said that new housing and better protection for green spaces, wildlife and nature should not be opposites, and that a new approach to the green belt should be part of the answer to the UK’s housing crisis.
I look forward to hearing from the Minister on the Government’s response to the challenges set by this extremely welcome report. I again thank all noble Lords who worked on it.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Levelling Up, Housing & Communities (Baroness Swinburne) (Con)
As ever, I am grateful to noble Lords for their considered views on this important topic. Given the number of recommendations in the report and the number of topics raised today, I will try to do justice in responding to them.
I begin by reiterating this Government’s commitment to delivering the homes that we need, while ensuring that we continue to protect and enhance the environment. Through the Environment Act 2021 and the environmental improvement plan, the Government have been clear in their ambition to be the first generation to leave the environment in a better state than we found it. This ambition has been carried through the Levelling-up and Regeneration Act 2023 and our recent updates to the National Planning Policy Framework, to ensure that development continues to support environmental recovery. However, like the committee, the Government recognise the need to ensure that environmental regulation is proportionate and effective in supporting the delivery of much-needed developments.
As noble Lords said—particularly my noble friend Lord Moylan in his opening remarks—a key focus for the Government is to increase housing supply. I reassure my noble friend, as well as the noble Earl, Lord Russell, and the noble Baroness, Lady Thornhill, that we are on target to meet our manifesto commitment to deliver 1 million homes in this Parliament. Indeed, since 2010, we have delivered 2.5 million additional homes—but we can and must do more, and in a balanced way.
To maintain this balanced approach to increasing housing supply, and to drive growth and development, national planning policy needs to create certainty, as numerous noble Lords said. That is why we used the Levelling-up and Regeneration Act to introduce powers for national development management policies to be produced. These policies will have statutory force and will guide decision-making on planning applications across England, helping local authorities produce swifter, slimmer and more locally relevant plans, and ensuring that important protections have the recognition that they deserve. We are working to prepare these policies now and will consult on them in due course.
The Government echo the sentiments of the committee: local planning authorities need up-to-date local plans, as the noble Lord, Lord Jackson, stated. That is why in December we reaffirmed our commitment to a plan-led system, creating strong incentives for local authorities to get their local plans in place, and encouraging authorities to make balanced decisions that support their diverse communities.
For local authorities to be able to have a plan in place, deliver it and do this efficiently, they will need our continued support. I reassure the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, and the noble Baronesses, Lady Bennett and Lady Thornhill, that we will continue to provide additional financial support. This includes the planning skills delivery fund, which has been boosted to £29 million, allowing the planning application fees to be increased, and indeed a further £13.5 million to support a new “planning super-squad”. This will be made up of leading planners and specialists, who will be deployed across local planning authorities to accelerate the delivery of homes and development and to support those local planners.
As highlighted by the committee and reiterated here today by numerous if not all noble Lords, nutrient neutrality and its interaction with the habitats regulations has created a situation where some local authorities are not able to approve development. To remedy this, we continue to provide funding for local authorities to support strategic management and mitigation plans in their areas. In December 2023, we confirmed the first tranche of the local nutrient migration fund, which totals some £110 million, as referred to by the noble Baroness, Lady Thornhill. It aims to promote innovative approaches to delivering mitigation and to enable more effective mitigation solutions, with a second round of nutrient support funding to lead authorities in substantive catchments.
Indeed, the funding is already delivering an impact, enabling sustainable development in affected catchments. As many noble Lords will know, Natural England’s scheme is providing credits for some 4,500 homes in the Tees catchment so far, and through the local nutrient migration fund the Government have awarded £57 million to eight local authorities in December. That included funds of some £10 million to Wiltshire Council, which has enabled the construction of integrated wetlands, a nature-based solution to reduce nutrient pollution. A further £9.6 million to Somerset Council supports an innovative reverse-osmosis technology building on research from the University of Birmingham. This is rapidly boosting the supply of nutrient mitigation in these areas, which translates directly into more housing.
I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Banner, on his excellent maiden speech and take this opportunity to welcome him to the House. I think we can all look forward to his further contributions in this Chamber, drawing on his wealth of experience in planning and environmental law.
Although the Government recognise the serious issues that noble Lords have described with regard to nutrient neutrality, I believe it is attainable. There is a lot that we can do and are doing to allow housing delivery to progress, even in areas affected by nutrient neutrality. Where there is a sufficient supply of mitigation, housing delivery is unlocked. I agree with noble Lords that assuring the delivery of long-term, major water supply infrastructure is an important element of this joined-up strategy, and we are seeing examples in Cambridge and elsewhere. We are working on addressing the water scarcity issues, as proposed by various schemes.
I am cutting out an awful lot of my paragraphs to make sure that I do not overrun while trying to answer your Lordships’ questions and understand my own scribbled handwriting, so I apologise if this does not sound as eloquent as it might have done when it was originally drafted.
We will of course continue to support local authorities, having opened a second expression of interest process, open to all nutrient-neutrality catchments. We are continually looking at ways to work more strategically on the delivery of mitigation on top of our close partnership with Natural England, which manages the £30 million nutrient mitigation scheme.
In response to the comments of the noble Lord, Lord Best, and the noble Earl, Lord Russell, one of the clearest examples of the Government’s commitment to ensuring a proportionate approach to environmental regulation is the new system of environmental outcomes reports that will be brought forward using the powers secured through the Levelling-up and Regeneration Act. Processes for environmental assessment have matured since they were first introduced, yet, despite lengthy assessment reports, they often prove ineffective at securing better environmental outcomes or encouraging development to support the country’s most important environmental priorities. A tailored approach to assessment that properly reflects the nation’s environmental priorities via environmental outcomes reports will ensure that assessment moves away from being a costly, passive process to one which focuses on supporting the delivery of the environmental outcomes we all desire. The Government will shortly publish their response to our initial consultation and will be working at pace with the sector on the detailed design of this important new system.
We agree with numerous noble Lords, including the noble Lords, Lord Moylan, Lord Banner, Lord Berkeley and Lord Jackson, and the noble Baroness, Lady Eaton, that taking agricultural land out of production is not the optimal way of addressing nutrient pollution. However, food security and housing delivery can be seen as compatible rather than as conflicting aims. More efficient nutrient management is a win-win, and while improving agricultural practices is a long-term solution, we are taking many of those actions now. Our nutrient reduction plan includes funding for agriculture, encouraging further nutrient management actions for farmers, and includes plans to modernise fertiliser standards, developing innovative solutions locally, as we are seeing with the River Wye.
We are also seeing immediate benefits through action we have taken to improve water infrastructure; the duty to upgrade wastewater treatment in affected catchments by 2030 is an important additional step in unblocking housing delivery. I agree with the noble Lords, Lord Berkeley and Lord Best, the noble Baronesses, Lady Eaton and Lady Taylor, and the noble Earl, Lord Russell, that joined-up working to address this important issue is crucial, and officials from across Defra, DLUHC, Natural England and the Environment Agency are working closely on a daily basis on trying to deliver these competing targets.
The Government recognise just how important it is for these public bodies to be appropriately resourced, just as it is for local planning authorities. That is why, over the 2023-24 financial year, the Government have provided an additional £5.6 million to increase the number of staff at Defra’s arms-length bodies.
Biodiversity net gain became mandatory on 12 February for new major developments and on 2 April for non-major development except where exemptions apply. We have been assisting local authorities with its implementation, providing funding which they can use to recruit ecologists or additional planners, as well as training through the Planning Advisory Service. Also available is a package of guidance designed to help with the implementation of biodiversity net gain, showing authorities how they can monitor and enforce it, as well as how the 10% net gain should be applied. Smaller developers need support, so we have provided a simplified small-sites metric to streamline the process for calculating net gains for small sites where there is no priority habitat present.
As many noble Lords mentioned, we are prioritising brownfield development. It is key to delivering the homes our communities need, but it also provides important opportunities to improve our environment and regenerate places, hence our strong encouragement of the reuse of suitable brownfield land in policy. We have consulted on changes to the National Planning Policy Framework that would place an even stronger emphasis on the value of using suitable brownfield land for homes, and we have also introduced funding incentives to support brownfield development. This includes £5.1 billion that is making its way to the existing brownfield housing fund to unlock and prepare more sites for brownfield development.
With regard to solar, which the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, mentioned, the Prime Minister said earlier this week that we want to see more solar but on brownfield sites, on rooftops and away from our best agricultural land if at all possible. National planning policy is clear: where significant development of agricultural land is demonstrated to be necessary, areas of poorer-quality land should be preferred to those of higher quality.
I note what the noble Earl, Lord Lytton, said about water neutrality and water efficiency, and that is why the Government have committed to reviewing the building regulations in order to introduce tighter water efficiency standards in new homes. In the meantime, in areas of serious water stress where water scarcity is inhibiting the adoption of local plans or the granting of planning permission for homes—including north Sussex—we will find ways and solutions to unlock what we need to unlock.
I close by thanking noble Lords for their work on this report and on this committee more widely. I am confident that, through our work to improve national planning policy and procedures, we will continue to achieve a balance between protecting our environmental assets and making sure that the right homes and infrastructure are in the right places in support of our communities.
Lord Moylan (Con)
My Lords, I thank all noble Lords who contributed to this debate. I add my particular congratulations and thanks to my noble friend Lord Banner on his maiden speech. Given the time constraints, I hope that the noble Lords who spoke will forgive me if I do not respond individually to each of them but instead confine myself to making a few remarks in response to the comments from my noble friend the Minister.
All of us in this Chamber are agreed, I think, that the objectives of building housing and of improving the environment are desirable and, if properly planned, attainable. That is also true of my noble friend the Minister; we are all as one on this. I was pleased to hear from my noble friend that the Government are doing various things they can boast of, but what I did not hear was an acknowledgement, as was well identified in this report, that the system we are operating with is broken—not necessarily fundamentally broken, but there are systemic problems—nor that the Government are going to grasp the problem. What I heard was that the Government are spending money, perhaps for the highly desirable objective of trying to work around the nutrient neutrality bans on housing, but not what they are doing to address the overwhelmingly predominant cause of the pollution in our rivers: farming practices and the discharge of sewage and other pollutants. It seems to me that the Government have not quite grasped the seriousness and systemic nature of the problems that the report identified.
I am gratified on behalf of the committee that the report itself attracted so many compliments from noble Lords who spoke. If I may say so, I am very proud of it. I am pleased that I can say I have been associated with it. It has lessons that any Government should seriously learn; that is true of not only current Ministers but Ministers who will hold office after the general election that we must expect this year. These problems are not going away; they require a long-term, well-thought-out solution. Whoever’s laps these problems land in, I hope they will find this report a useful guide to what they should do.
English Horticultural Sector (Horticultural Sector Committee Report)
(4 weeks, 1 day ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Watch Debate Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Lord Redesdale
That this House takes note of the Report from the Horticultural Sector Committee Sowing the seeds: A blooming English horticultural sector (Session 2022–23, HL Paper 268).
Lord Redesdale (LD)
My Lords, I start my speech introducing Sowing the Seeds: A Blooming English Horticultural Sector by thanking the noble Baroness, Lady Fookes, because, without her persistence in lobbying for a horticultural committee, it would never have been formed in the first place. Although by rights she should have gone on to chair the committee, I am grateful that she graciously allowed me to assume the role.
The report covers myriad issues. Although there are 93 recommendations and the report is 180 pages long, its length and number of recommendations correspond to the breadth of the sector and the complicated landscape of interconnected issues. The overarching conclusion of the report is that horticulture is a successful sector that is vital to the British economy, providing food security and environmental benefits, and is integral to the way in which we interact with green spaces and the landscape in the UK.
The report engendered an enormous amount of work. I thank our clerk, Dr Jillian Luke; Francesca Crossley, our policy analyst; and Abdullah Ahmad, the committee’s operations officer. Unusually, I would also like to pay special tribute to Dervish Mertcan from the House of Lords Press Office. The committee got a great deal of press coverage, which is not unusual for a House of Lords Select Committee, but I would argue that it shone above all others in achieving a rare accolade: being able to host “Gardeners’ Question Time” in the Robing Room.
The horticulture sector is worth more than £5 billion a year and employs more than 50,000 people, although different measures put the value far higher. However, its importance as part of the economy has had little recognition by the wider public; it also seems to be politically undervalued. That is not the case in other countries. The committee’s trip to the Netherlands showed how the Dutch place far more importance on this sector—a position that we believe should be mirrored in the UK. The horticultural sector is vital in helping the country meet its food requirements with high-quality, low-cost produce and with world-leading innovation in areas such as the development of the vertical farming sector. However, there are real challenges, not least of which is that profit margins are low and risk factors such as energy prices and climate change threaten the viability of producers.
The perception that the sector is undervalued was expressed by many in our evidence sessions. If we are to secure food security and environmental goals, horticulture should have more proactive support from the Government. Therefore, the Government’s response to the report was profoundly disappointing. Although the response showed in general an agreement with much of the sentiment of the report, there was little commitment to policy change. The Government highlighted future publications and consultations that will report at some point in the future, but there seemed to be little appetite for urgent action.
The written and oral evidence to the committee painted a picture of a sector that is struggling to meet its full potential. The sector faces multiple challenges, including post-Brexit trade problems. In the supply chain, the rising cost of labour, linked to shortages, and energy price rises have led to an increase in the cost of fertiliser. There are also water supply concerns and certainty that water shortages will increase in future as a result of climate change—as will flooding, as shown last winter. While, on the demand side, low margins are linked to extreme price competition among the supermarkets, all these issues will need to be addressed if farms are to remain competitive and viable.
The most obvious recommendation of the committee, in order to bring direct oversight of the sector, was the creation of a dedicated Horticultural Minister. The proposal did not suggest that Defra Ministers are failing, but a Horticultural Minister could focus more clearly on the many issues highlighted by the report’s recommendations. As a recommendation, it was always going to be a long shot—I am sure that the Minister will argue that the sector is covered adequately by Defra; obviously, that is not a personal jibe at the Minister—but submissions from the industry showed a belief that the fragmented nature of responsibilities between different departments is a real impediment to the sector’s ability to operate and grow.
The one consistent ask by those giving evidence at almost all the sessions was for a comprehensive horticultural strategy. The Government’s response confirmed that despite past assurances that a strategy would be produced, they will not now be publishing a horticultural strategy for England. This has caused a great deal of frustration and the belief among many in the industry that this shows a lack of commitment from the Government. One bright spot is that the committee’s report clearly highlights what should be addressed in any future strategy. I am sure there will be much lobbying of the next Government, whoever they might be—almost certainly Liberal Democrat—to make the formulation of a horticultural strategy a priority after the next election, whenever that may be.
Horticulture in the UK is a very broad topic for a report. At the first meeting of the committee, when the parameters of the report were discussed, it was agreed, after a firm intervention by the noble Baroness, Lady Fookes, that a central component of the report should be the ornamental sector. The size of that sector would surprise many people. The Horticultural Trades Association stated that:
“The UK ornamental plant and tree production sector directly contributed £880 million to the UK economy in 2019, employing around 17,800 people. By 2030 … this could grow to £1.3 billion in direct GDP contributions with the direct employment of almost 21,000”.
However, as the report points out, there are serious constraints on growth in the sector due to a lack of confidence in the procurement processes that has acted as a disincentive to investment, which has hindered growth.
The sector is not just about the sale of plants but has a role in protecting the environment. Climate change will all but banish the English country garden in the coming decades in the south of England, so the ornamental sector has a role in helping gardeners move to more resilient and less thirsty plants for gardens, at the same time making sure that the plants grown foster biodiversity. The committee was keen to look at green spaces, and it is impossible not to see how arboriculture—the propagation of trees—and tree nurseries are essential for the country’s parks and public spaces. I hope the Minister can say whether Defra is looking at funding commitments for tree nurseries beyond the grants made available by the Nature for Climate Fund, because the fund finishes in 2025 and at present there seems to be no replacement.
One of the most pressing issues faced by the ornamental and tree sector is the new border control systems necessitated by the hard Brexit that the Government adopted. At the time of the publication of the report, there had been a delay in the implementation of the new border controls through to April this year. They come into effect a week on Tuesday, when the current “place of destination” system of plant health import inspections will end. From then, checks will take place at border control posts. Using BCPs to conduct import checks on plants imported in volume from the EU is a unique and untested system. There has been a distinct lack of detail about how they will operate when handling plants and how much they will increase costs and delays for businesses forced to use them.
A few weeks ago, the Government finally announced the awaited common user charge for goods entering via the short straits, but charges do not apply to commercially run BCPs such as those at Harwich or Immingham, which will apply a different set of methods for charging when it comes to handling plants being presented to the Animal and Plant Health Agency for inspection.
A major concern is that businesses cannot forecast their costs because it is a lottery as to who gets charged and how much, and it is difficult to compare costs for using different ports of entry into Great Britain. The Horticultural Trades Association has expressed a concern that there is a lack of experience or training in handling precious plants and trees, and the way that border control posts are designed is not conducive to treating sensitive and perishable plants in the best way possible. This will almost certainly lead to losses and costs to businesses.
The current processes and plans have been developed in a vacuum of reliable and robust data. Systems have not been capturing the information needed to develop appropriate processes and infrastructure to cope. After 30 April, importers will be operating in a period known as the “pragmatic approach”, which means that if it does not work, solutions will have to be developed on the hoof, potentially harming the businesses involved and possibly costing much more, with the risk of compromising biosecurity. Checks are currently being conducted at nurseries, with plants unloaded only once by the experts and checked by the Animal and Plant Health Agency. Businesses will now lose control of their supply chain’s integrity and are anxious about accidental damages, destruction of healthy stock, delays of perishable plants and cross-contamination at border control points. There has been a call for the point-of-delivery system to continue in a dual system, with border control points operating as well as PODs so that learnings and improvements are made.
Considering the delays and concerns from industry about the lack of clarity of the system, is the Minister now confident that the scheme will run smoothly? Which Minister will be responsible for the implementation of a pragmatic approach if the system crashes? Can the Minister confirm that the Minister responsible will be from Defra, not another department? The Horticultural Trades Association has said that more than 90% of its tree and plant-growing members in the UK, the vast majority of which are SMEs, import plant products. There is a real risk to the viability of many companies if the new system fails. One element that is coming into play with the import of plant material and being exacerbated by climate change is the spread of disease and viruses. Biosecurity is essential, but funding by government for the research base was a real concern for the committee. We hope that the Government will review grant funding to put the research community on a more secure financial footing.
I would like to list all the areas covered by the report but that would take considerably more time than the 12 minutes I have been allocated, so I will leave them to other speakers. I am tempted to stop at this point, but I have a couple of points to raise. The first is water. There is little understanding of just how much climate change will affect the water supply in the UK. It has been predicted that we might have a 75% reduction in water supply by 2050. It is quite likely that demand will exceed supply in many areas in the next 10 years. Abstraction is a short-term answer that the Government are looking at, but do they believe that the £20 million set aside for water catchment at farm levels will be enough? This area will need to be funded at a far greater level if we are to carry on with water security.
Peat was a major concern for the sector. The Government’s report emphasised how healthy peat should be left in the ground. Nobody can argue with that, and the industry is on course to almost eliminate commercially available peat. However, there are still major issues for the professional sector in its use of peat for propagation. Defra has moved the timescale for removing peat from 2030 to 2026. While 2030 was always going to be difficult, 2026 will be impossible for some. What resources will the Government provide to cover this?
I must cut short at this point, leaving out issues such as the national curriculum, but I know that members of the committee will cover those areas. My final point, which I could not get away without raising, is allotments. My wife is a zealous user of allotments, which are incredibly important to the countryside. Their health benefits cannot be overestimated, and mental health is a real issue that came out of the report, although I got a double hernia from digging potatoes on my wife’s allotment so I am not absolutely convinced of this. One of the things that I hope the Government take from the report is that there should be increased protection for green spaces. I beg to move.
Baroness Fookes (Con)
My Lords, I pay tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Redesdale, for his admirable chairmanship of the committee. We were able to make far-ranging inquiries followed by some very good practical recommendations. The attitude of the Government to all these recommendations was variable; the main point is that we had a lot of Civil Service language full of good intentions and not enough action.
I turn now to that failure of action, to which the noble Lord, Lord Redesdale, has also referred—the absence of a national horticulture strategy for England. I stress this point about making long-term plans and putting their money where their mouth is, because people involved in horticulture need to know and have some degree of certainty about what the Government’s attitude will be.
I was particularly unimpressed by the reference in the government reply to this being but a snapshot in time. The inference is that everything will change and, therefore, a strategy is of very little purpose. I do not buy that, because it is perfectly possible to revise it at intervals. If that is the Government’s philosophy, I ask my noble friend the Minister if they are about to jettison the grand 25-year environment plan, which could be subject to precisely the same fault.
I turn now to another topic—two, if I can squeeze them in—that relates to research. Unfortunately, since 2003, there has been a notable decrease in the amount of research funding. At one time, Britain was noted as a world leader in ground-breaking research. Frankly, as we have been told by experts, who should know, we are in grave danger of losing this. A lot of the trouble stems from the absence of long-term funding, which again harks back to the horticultural strategy. That has been lost. There is what I call an obsessive reliance on short-term, competitive projects. This does not lend itself to the short term because everything to do with horticulture, whether edible or ornamental—I stress “ornamental”—needs long-term funding. I do not understand why we have this reliance on short-term funding. It is quite clear that it is having an impact on research institutes, some of which have disappeared altogether. The one at East Malling now has between a third and a half fewer staff than it used to, which bodes ill for what we are trying to do.
I urge the Government to think again about this research funding. It also has an impact on the chances of future generations enjoying high-level careers. For example, I believe Reading is now the only university that offers graduate and postgraduate horticulture courses of world renown. The RHS and Kew Gardens offer specialist ones of their own but, frankly, that is not enough if we want to encourage and give an opportunity to younger people to go in at a high level.
I turn now to the slightly lower level, which makes me get hot under the collar. It is quite clear that very little is done in schools to encourage knowledge of horticulture. There is certainly no encouragement whatever for young people to take it up as a career, at whatever level is suitable to them. The whole point about horticulture is that it can offer jobs from a fairly low level, although all of them need some special talent, right up to the postgraduate level.
We have the new T-levels, which are supposed to give a qualification at the end of two years equivalent to A-levels, but they are not widely known about. I am not at all sure that they have been set out in the most useful form. I hope that the Government, or whoever will be responsible for this, will look at the early stages of the various T-level qualifications clearly to make sure that they meet both the aspirations of the students and the needs of the industry where they will be employed. I fear that this has got off to a rather shaky start, as our committee indicated. I am therefore concerned that we have a really good go at making a good job of this, providing young people with really good, interesting careers.
We do not seem to have anything up to indicate the time, but I am pretty sure that I have reached my limit. Ever willing and, I hope, able to keep to the rules, I now end my contribution.
Lord Evans of Rainow (Con)
I am most grateful to my noble friend, who is quite right. We have notified the House authorities about the clock, but we still have the other monitor so, as the Whip at the moment, I will keep the time and, when it comes to five minutes, I will gesticulate appropriately. We still have a record of the time, but the debate has been excellent so far, so I suggest that we carry on.
Lord Carter of Coles (Lab)
My Lords, I start by thanking the noble Lord, Lord Redesdale, for his dedicated—the size of the report indicates that—and skilled chairing of the committee. It was a pleasure to work on this, not least because it brought to fruition the lifetime’s work of the noble Baroness, Lady Fookes, who has been a fundamental driver of change in the sector, which, as I hope we demonstrate, is of great significance.
What was interesting about the committee was that it took us into a wide range of issues and showed how difficult it is for modern government to touch every base. The first thing we hit was the elusive reality of joined-up government. It is practically impossible. If I had a pound for every committee meeting I have been to where people banged on about how one department does not talk to another, I would have a bit more money.
There were a large range of issues, some of which have been touched on—innovation, investment, cheap food versus food security, the environment and all those things. But with the time limit today, I will focus on a very narrow range of things.
The first thing that struck me is that this industry can grow substantially, and this country needs growth industries. One need only look 40 or 50 miles across the sea to the Netherlands to see a country about 17% of the size of the UK that has a horticultural sector that is five times greater. It can be done. The challenge we face is how to do it.
That leads me to the question of government. The Government’s strategy is non-existent. How can they not be enthusiastic about something that has such potential to grow? To add to that disappointment, I would be complimenting the Government if I said that their response to our report was anything other than totally anaemic. It does not help with anything that we want to achieve.
Why should we be doing this? What is the opportunity? It is best if I quote Sir James Dyson. His credentials enabling him to speak on this are that he has a large greenhouse, 760 metres long, in Lincolnshire, in which he has 1.25 million strawberry plants. He does all of that with heating from solar panels and anaerobic digestion. What he says is this:
“Sustainable food production and food security are vital to the nation’s health and the nation’s economy, whilst there is also a real opportunity for agriculture—
he says agriculture but I say horticulture—
“to drive a revolution in technology and vice versa… efficient, high-technology agriculture holds many of the keys to our future”.
That is what it is. We have the opportunity, so we need to look at technology. We cannot forever be competing with warm countries with long hours of sunshine and low labour costs. We need to get the technology right if we are to compete and deal with these key issues.
The committee was lucky enough to spend a day in Kent, on the Isle of Thanet, said to be the sunniest part of England. We saw two great exemplars. The first was an Anglo-Dutch joint venture growing tomatoes. It was brilliantly organised. It is, I think, the leading supplier of tomatoes to the UK and is world-class and competitive. Equally entrancing was a visit to a site a few miles away where a vertical farm had been built. It focused on producing leaves—that is, lettuces and things for supermarkets—in a really controlled environment which was pesticide-free, with minimal water and labour. It was absolutely fantastic. It did it on an amount of land which, to get the same output with conventional methods, would have to be 20 times greater. What is there not to like? Why are we not pushing and investing, and getting the Government to help in taking this forward?
So we know what to do and we have seen others do it. This sector has great innovative ability. People such as Sir James Dyson and the people on the Isle of Thanet are not in this because they want to be charities. We know how to do it. In response to the supermarkets’ continued pressure on margin, it will be only technology and innovation that get the right margin to supply the job.
We do need better training—the noble Baroness, Lady Fookes, touched on this—and the Government should be in that place. Frankly, I have never believed in the Government picking winners, but in this case I make an exception. The Government need to get behind this, but with a light touch: we do not want another bureaucracy, and we do not want another load of civil servants writing endless reasons why not. We just need to get on with it. So perhaps in conclusion the Minister might tell us whether he believes that some small part of the Defra underspend will be directed to this, as the Government have committed to the total amount of money going in during the lifetime of this Parliament.
Lord Colgrain (Con)
My Lords, it was a pleasure and a privilege to serve as a member of this Horticultural Sector Committee, which was so ably chaired by my noble friend Lord Redesdale. I thank my committee colleagues for making our meetings enjoyable and informative, and I wish to add my thanks to those already given to the clerks and expert witnesses, all of whom managed to enable the committee to cover considerable ground effectively in a short period of time. The visits we made, within London and without, were particularly useful.
Of the issues raised in the report, there are three I wish to revisit. The first is education, referred to in recommendations 22 to 30 in the report. We were constantly reminded by many witnesses of the value of contact for young people with nature, in the classroom and outdoors—“Green time, not screen time”, as one witness put it. Beneficial effects through the outside world for the purposes of general well-being are appreciated by educationalists and the medical profession alike, but the long shadow of Covid means that there will now be a generation that needs exposure to and education about nature more than any previous one. So it is particularly frustrating that the Government say there is no room on the national curriculum for the subject of horticulture as a stand-alone topic, as highlighted by my noble friend Lady Fookes. I wonder whether the Government might reconsider this point.
The second issue I wish to revisit is that of food security and our recommendation 13. At the time the committee was sitting, the unseasonably cold and wet weather in Spain and Morocco had curtailed the availability of salads and tomatoes, with empty shelves in shops. The evidence given highlighted the small percentage of such crops grown in the UK in a normal year, thus adding to the susceptibility of annual shortages. As a consequence of the war in Ukraine and attendant energy cost increases, and with uncertainty attached to the availability of seasonal labour, many growers were cutting back. At the time, these seemed like exceptional headwinds, but the particularly wet weather this winter has brought about further jeopardy to the domestic supply chain, with crops unharvested from last autumn and crops not yet planted this spring. Can the Government give further thought to helping domestic horticultural producers wherever possible, particularly on the vexed issue of water storage—on which I hope that the Minister might comment—so that our percentage of self-sufficiency in horticultural products is not reduced further?
The third issue relates to research, development and innovation support from the Government in our recommendations 55 and 56. My noble friend Lord Carter of Coles has already slightly stolen my thunder on this point, because I too was going to refer to the site visit that we made to the vertical farming enterprise in Kent. This addressed positively many of the factors that the committee had heard negatively about, such as seasonal labour, energy and water consumption costs, and the detrimental effects of poor weather, which of course are not relevant to vertical farming at all. The disappointing note in our visit was that the funding for this enterprise and its planned follow-up site was coming from a US pension fund. Given that it is government policy to look for more inward investment from UK pension funds and insurance companies to infrastructure and businesses that might develop a public listing in due course, can the Minister give assurances that all possible financial help is given to similar horticultural enterprises in the future, along the lines of R&D tax alliances and preferential access to domestic capital markets?
Lord Curry of Kirkharle (CB)
My Lords, it is a delight to follow the noble Lord, Lord Colgrain. Let me also pay tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Redesdale, for his very competent leadership in chairing this committee, and to fellow members for their friendship and camaraderie throughout the process, particularly the noble Baroness, Lady Fookes, who sponsored the study. I also thank the staff team, who were brilliant and worked incredibly hard.
I hope that the Minister does not take these comments personally, but the response from his department was very disappointing. There is a common theme here. In my view, it fails to acknowledge the huge amount of work involved in the research and drafting of the report and therefore the importance of the horticultural sector. I am sure the Minister will try to reassure us that this is not the case. As has been referred to earlier, the Government announced in the 2022 food strategy that it would produce a horticultural strategy, then changed their mind and so rejected our recommendation, too. This means that the sector feels undervalued and let down. This is a big mistake and Defra should urgently review this decision.
As we have heard, horticulture is one of the most exciting sectors there is, with huge potential. It is exciting in terms of innovation, with new technologies, robotics and automation, and exciting in terms of career opportunities. I was very pleased that the Government recognised the role of TIAH in their response to some of our recommendations.
The Government’s commitment to try to maintain 60% self-sufficiency in domestic food production will never be achieved or maintained without a thriving horticultural sector. There is massive scope to increase production and reduce our heavy dependence on imports, particularly from water-deficient parts of the world that are severely impacted by climate change. As we state in the report, horticulture can also contribute much more to impact on the nation’s health challenges, including obesity, than any other sector. More fruit and vegetable consumption is essential if we are to improve the nation’s health. I am sorry to say that none of that comes across in the Government’s response.
I have a few specific topics that I would like to address. The Government’s response defers numerous times to the labour market review carried out by John Shropshire. When are we likely to get a response to that review?
Secondly, the Government have already committed to and are in the process of establishing an adjudicator for the dairy sector to address fair dealings in the milk supply chain. The Minister led the process in the Chamber very recently. In view of the extremely challenging trading conditions in the horticultural sector over the past couple of years or so, and very slim margins, a similar approach to horticulture is urgently needed; it is recommendation 11 in our report. Can the Minister confirm when this might take place?
Thirdly, an area of real concern, referenced in recommendation 56, is the inability of smaller businesses—SMEs—to access grants to improve productivity and invest in robotics, for example, due to a lack of capital to provide the matched funding required. The consequence is that the larger businesses will get larger and the SMEs will fail. All large businesses started life as an SME. It is vital that the Government look again at this issue, so that innovative small businesses have a chance.
Finally, an area of deep concern during our consultation, and which has been referred to already, was the funding of science. The noble Baroness, Lady Fookes, mentioned this. The bidding process for research projects needs to be reviewed. This is covered in recommendations 78 and 79. Despite an attempt by Defra in its response to reassure us that all is well, that is not the message we received loud and clear on our travels. We no longer have sufficient scientific capacity to pitch one scientist against another in a bidding process. When asked what he did for a living, a scientist friend of mine replied, “I delete emails and I write failed bids”. Too much valuable scientific resource is being spent writing failed bids. We need a much more collaborative process, which encourages institutions to work together where there are great centres of excellence. Short-term funding is discouraging to the scientific community and is impacting our productivity. Will the department please review this?
I could say much more, but time does not allow. I hope the Minister can reassure us this afternoon that he has taken these issues seriously.
Lord Taylor of Holbeach (Con)
My Lords, what a pity it is that a subject so important, and which has had such an input from the House of Lords, has such little time to be debated. I hope there will be other occasions on which we can talk about this.
I speak as a professional horticulturalist—I am less so nowadays, because I spend too much time here, and you cannot actually work in the fields and sit on these Benches. I must declare some interests. I am president of the Institute of Agricultural Management, and in that there might lie a key as to how I approach this job. I am also president of the Anglo-Netherlands Society, and that also probably is a key to how I view this job.
We were talking earlier about how we start in these things. Taylors Bulbs, the horticultural firm of which I am the third generation, was started by a man from London—an ex-soldier in the First World War who managed to get 10 acres of land in Holbeach and rented it as a Crown colony holding. From that, he grew the business. His two sons were born in London but became naturalised Holbeachians in time; I still say “flowers” in the way that I was taught to when I was younger—I cannot help it. From that beginning, we grew to a business of 200 acres, which we owned by the time I joined. We now own 2,000 acres, and the business is in the hands of my younger son and a nephew. They are running it very well, and many of your Lordships will know the products that the company offers.
That lesson shows you something about the way in which horticulture thinks of itself. It is an entrepreneurial business. It is not a form-filling and bureaucratic business—it cannot be so. It has to work with the grain; it cannot fight against it. It works with the climate and the seasons, and has a great deal going for it because of that. It is really important that the Government, in interacting with the industry, understand that basic tenet; it means they should regulate lightly in an area where enterprise and initiative may well lead to great solutions.
That is certainly the way in which the Dutch have worked. Having left school at 17—I should have gone to university but I did not, and I do not mind that I did not because I went somewhere that was vital for me—I went to work in Holland. As a result, I learned how the Dutch dealt with their business: how they worked and prioritised horticulture, and how all sections of the Dutch Government used natural gas and various attributes which came to the Netherlands to build an industry. It was very much the enterprise and focus of the Dutch Government, and the Dutch as a nation, that led to the huge development of horticulture in that country. We can still learn from that; we have very close relations. Spalding was built by Anglo-Dutch co-operation—it is still the area supplying most of the fruit and vegetables to the whole of this country. Even strawberries growing in Kent and melons from Brazil get distributed from Spalding. This is an important feature of the potential that we have.
We have a lot going for us. We should back our horticultural institutes—the National Institute of Agricultural Botany is superb in its East Malling venture, and should be invested in and encouraged. We have Kew, and we have the Royal Horticultural Society. We have so much going for us in this country. We also supply the nation’s greatest hobby industry—gardening. Are we not lucky? Are we not gifted? This is a superb report. I am so grateful to all those who have spoken and participated, and I am really grateful to my noble friend Lady Fookes for all that she has done in proclaiming the virtues of our industry.
I hope the Minister will understand why there is disappointment with the Government’s response, not for any other reason than that they have failed to realise the potential that lies in this report and this industry. We should be optimistic, back it, and make it work for the interests of Britain.
Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)
My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow that rousing speech, and to compliment the committee on its report, as others have widely and rightly done. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Redesdale, for his clear introduction, and join the almost universal tributes to the noble Baroness, Lady Fookes, for her long-term contribution to horticulture. I declare that I have an Industry and Parliament Trust fellowship with the Horticultural Trades Association.
I start, as pretty well every noble Lord has, by reflecting on the extreme disappointment there has been in the Government’s response to the committee’s report. The HTA, the National Farmers’ Union and the Worker Interest Group are severely disappointed by the Government’s failure to properly engage with this report, in particular their failure to acknowledge the need for a horticultural strategy. The Worker Interest Group is a coalition of nine not-for-profit groups representing and engaging with seasonal horticultural workers. It has written to Defra, pointing out many of the failures relevant to it in the Government’s response to the committee’s report. They represent a failure of basic functions and responsibilities of government, and for any noble Lord who is interested, I would be happy to share a copy.
I will take just one example from that. The committee’s recommendation 59 says:
“The Government must publish its review of the seasonal worker route, as promised in response to the Independent Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration’s December 2022 report.”
I note that the chief inspector said in that report that
“the Home Office should significantly raise its game”.
One might say that in regard to a lot of things, but we are talking at the moment about the seasonal worker scheme. The Government’s response is that they will “in due course” publish a review of the scheme’s operation from 2020 to 2022. The only published full review of the scheme is of the 2019 pilot, which involved 2,500 visas. We now have 55,000 visas. It is entirely different in scale and nature.
Before I get back to that, I want first to address the overall failure of the Government’s response. It reflects a lack of understanding of the importance of the horticultural sector and the need for it to expand. We have just come out of a debate on housing and the environment. If the sterile, bleak housing estates that we are now building are to be enhanced and public health is to be improved, we need a much expanded, upskilled and valued environmental horticulture sector.
The noble Lord, Lord Curry of Kirkharle, has powerfully covered the point about food. We need about 20 times more fruit and vegetables to be grown in the UK than we have now to be self-reliant and for a healthy diet.
I want briefly to look at the overall situation. There is a failure of labour policy, which I started with, but underlying that there is also a failure of policy to control and ensure a fair market for growers against the power of the big supermarkets and food manufacturers. They have been allowed and, indeed, encouraged by government policies over decades to entirely dominate our food system.
Behind that is a system of growing what vegetables and fruit we do grow here in outdoor factories, where there is huge pressure on the imported workers who come here for six months to pick rapidly and accurately. The worker advocates tell me that workers are subjected to significant bullying and abuse in the fields. If they are not seen to be picking fast enough and accurately enough, after a few hours they are sent back to their accommodation, which is likely to be a caravan. This might be housing six people, often speaking different languages. They go back every night, crying, to a caravan that is likely to be cold and mouldy. They see doors and accommodation without locks. They are not supposed to be charged for energy supplies, but they are. When you see your punnet of strawberries in the supermarket, it is worth thinking about what is potentially behind it. About 70% of the workers who come here take out debt to do so. Only 30% of them are confident that they will be able to pay that back.
For further information on this, I have to cross-reference the FLEX report, Bearing Fruit: Making Recruitment Fairer for Migrant Workers, which is out this month. It is worth saying that it does not have to be like this. Countries such as the US and Canada have far better models. They have bilateral arrangements with sending countries—workers come from a handful of countries. There are so many things to say, but I will finish on a reference to this FLEX report. Of the workers FLEX spoke to, 30% were from Kazakhstan, 18% from Kyrgyzstan, 10% from Indonesia and 18% from Uzbekistan, with others from Tajikistan and Moldova. We are bringing people to this country from around the world. They are going back to the rest of the world with a very negative impression of the UK and we are failing to provide ourselves with the horticultural sector that we need.
The Earl of Caithness (Con)
My Lords, before sowing seeds, one must have access to them and the right land on which to grow them. Of the report’s 167 conclusions and recommendations, only two relate to the seed from which all horticultural crops are produced and there is scant mention of our grade 1 land. These are serious omissions. Ironically, the remaining conclusions depend on them.
Post Brexit, the UK plant breeding sector seed suppliers are facing increased regulatory costs, delays and uncertainty. New plant health regulations have brought more bureaucracy, costs and problems in moving seed and breeding material to and from the EU; at least one breeding partnership between the UK and the continent has been cancelled.
The Government’s Animal and Plant Health Agency is not fit for purpose. At least 200 new vegetable varieties are currently affected by its delays and are stalled in the registration process. In a sector that is so dependent on seasonality, such delays can have a devastating impact on individual businesses. Some breeders are not submitting new varieties for registration. These problems pose an existential threat to horticulture growers’ future access to improved varieties, which will be essential to help them to respond to a changing climate, changing pest and disease threats, demands for more sustainable farming practices and changing consumer preferences.
Most of our vegetables and salads are grown on grade 1 land. I understand that much of this land is let on one-year farm business tenancies and that the rotations being practised are accelerating its degradation and threatening our food security. On the question of whether to continue to farm or to rewet these agriculture peatlands, does the Minister agree that it is better to carry on cropping them, protect the remaining carbon and reduce the overall GHG footprint through dynamic water level management and limiting the extent of summer water table drawdown combined with regenerative farming? This would spread the environmental impact over a longer timeframe and more tonnes of produce. Total rewetting raises the question of reducing food production capacity here and the vexed issue of offshoring, possibly to where worse practices take place. Furthermore, soils that have been waterlogged that are drained and then rewetted behave differently in their emissions of nitrous oxide and methane from soils that have never been drained, so carbon emissions might be reduced at the expense of increased emissions of more potent greenhouse gases.
I will go further than some today: I would like to see a radical rethink of how we translate our world-leading position in agriculture-related academic science into farm-level innovation and sustainable farming activity growth. The UK’s applied research base in crop science is too fragmented and lacks focus on key policy objectives. We need to learn from and copy what other countries have done in creating national centres of excellence and attracting investment in public-private projects and international partnerships, such as Wageningen in the Netherlands, Embrapa in Brazil and New Zealand’s Plant & Food Research. In conclusion, I make a plea to this and future Governments: stop making promises to farmers such that made to the horticultural industry which was broken only one year later.
The Lord Bishop of Newcastle
My Lords, I thank the members of the Horticultural Sector Committee for their work in producing a thorough report highlighting the challenges that this undervalued sector experiences. I also thank the noble Lord, Lord Redesdale, for his excellent summary when opening this debate. It is an honour to follow the noble Earl, Lord Caithness.
My understanding of this sector has been greatly helped by conversations with horticultural business owner Matt Naylor in south Lincolnshire, whom I met at the Oxford Farming Conference a few years ago. Listening to Matt has brought home to me the immense obstacles that the horticultural sector has faced in recent years. As other noble Lords have indicated, the sector is not in isolation from the totality of the farming and agricultural sector. To ensure food security for the future, of which horticultural activity is an integral part, we need joined-up, long-term thinking. I share the disappointment of noble Lords in this debate that the Government scrapped their plans last year to publish a horticultural strategy for England.
I want to focus my remarks on two issues. The reality of the seasonal work that the sector requires is not suited to most UK residents, resulting in a reliance on migrant seasonal workers. Without them, the industry could not function. However, their working arrangements often place them in positions of vulnerability. As evidence to the committee revealed, their protection under UK employment law is frequently not upheld. Seasonal workers often face abuse and poor pay and working conditions. I agree with the remarks made by the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, on this matter.
I support the recommendation that the GLAA should ensure that welfare standards are upheld through compulsory welfare spot checks. I note the Government’s response that UKVI compliance staff already undertake some welfare checks, but the ICIBI’s inspection of the immigration system and the agriculture sector in 2022 showed the inadequacy of those visits. Issues raised at visits were not appropriately recorded, escalated or followed up, resulting in a lack of action. What use are they if no action is taken in cases where compliance issues are found? What steps will the Government take to ensure that seasonal migrant workers are not exploited and that employment laws are upheld on farms?
Secondly, I refer to the report’s final chapter highlighting the benefits that horticulture and interaction with nature have for us all, a point raised by the noble Lord, Lord Colgrain, in comments about education. Newcastle GP Services’ social prescribing team has established projects allowing patients spaces to connect with nature, offering them community feeling, social inclusion and support for their mental and physical well-being. Benfield Park surgery has set up a community allotment as a space for patients experiencing loneliness or mental or physical health difficulties. Patients can access a garden and help as much or little as they wish. They have raised beds and greenhouses, and grow fruit and veg. The work is predominantly patient led, with the benefits being demonstrated by a patient being taken off medication because of positive changes to his mental health through tending the garden. I encourage the Government to continue to support these programmes.
When considering horticulture, discussions on the economy, business and supermarket power are often prioritised. Of course those issues matter, but in debating them we must not neglect the human aspect of horticulture—the people whom the sector relies on and the benefits that horticulture can have for us all.
The Earl of Shrewsbury (Con)
My Lords, I declare an interest as a non-farming retired member of the National Farmers’ Union. I have been involved in agriculture all my working life.
I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Redesdale, and his committee on their excellent report. It is a first-class, complex piece of work that addresses the horticultural sector in great detail and provides the Government with pragmatic and sensible conclusions and recommendations. I know the report is strongly supported by the National Farmers’ Union.
There are a couple of points to which I shall draw your Lordships’ attention. I was fascinated and enthused to learn about salad production from vertical farming technologies, and the considerable benefits that are achieved by growing in this manner: less use of water and nitrogen, less waste, no pesticides and an efficient use of energy. The list of benefits is wide-ranging. In addition, vertical growing frees up significant areas of agricultural land, as we have heard today, for growing other crops. It produces constant year-round production and employment, giving added security to the grower and their workforce.
Yet, as the report states,
“vertical farms struggle to access government support”.
Why? With current global instability, we cannot and should not continue to rely on imports of foodstuffs that we are perfectly capable of producing in this country. The Government appear to be supportive of horticulture and agriculture, as stated by them at the Farm to Fork summit and in their food strategy, but platitudes and fine ideas do not put food on people’s plates.
I fear I am somewhat cynical when I say that in my opinion, no political party seems to have the enthusiasm or determination to fully back the agricultural and horticultural sectors, and it has been like that for a long while. The fact is that it is simply not a headline-making industry, whereas currently, matters of a green nature attract constant column inches and opportunities. In that vein, much as I support rewilding, I believe it should be done only on land that is uneconomical or unviable in production terms. We need every acre of good productive land to be available for cropping.
In conclusion, the report is excellent. The Government and Defra should support its findings and take immediate action to support them in full, with both actions and financial support.
Baroness Hamwee (LD)
My Lords, I cannot claim to know anything about horticulture. I do know that it is important economically and because it helps to feed us, and for the sheer pleasure it gives. I know that you cannot pluck a cucumber off a tree already shrink-wrapped, but that is about the extent of it. It is not my subject, except that it is everybody’s subject, but I am a member of our House’s committee currently reviewing the Modern Slavery Act, so I have a particular interest in the section in the report on seasonal workers.
Exploitation is a continuum; it does not have to be modern slavery or trafficking to be a problem. My noble friend Lord Redesdale told me that Members were shocked at an early stage by the conditions to which some workers are subjected; the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, referred to this. More recently we discussed recruitment practices, which my noble friend described as the biggest issue, since agencies recruiting overseas workers are outside the jurisdiction. I have not picked up whether the National Crime Agency is able to pursue organised criminality in the sector. I do not disagree with his identification of these two areas of concern, but I would like to take a step back.
Why are there problems in this part of the sector? In my view, it is in part because the Government look at so much through an immigration lens—or perhaps I should say, not immigration. The high-level policy is that we should grow our own skills and use the domestic workforce, but seasonal agriculture work is not a career path. As the report points out, local workers are not available for work that is not available year-round. Of course, the seasonal worker route is treated separately from shortage occupations by the Home Office.
The committee thoughtfully refers to more than low wages. I had not realised some of the aspects of tax and national insurance. I do not know whether to describe as defensive or unimaginative the Government’s response, for instance, to the recommendation on auto-enrolment: “Saving for retirement”, they say,
“is a crucial right … exemptions… would undermine the success of workplace pensions.”
I doubt whether that is a priority for many in this group. HMRC has responsibilities with regard to compliance with minimum wage requirements, so it should understand some of the realities. Simplified arrangements for claiming overpaid tax from overseas or, better, waiving tax deductions until the tax-free limit is reached, seem obvious and right.
There is an ad-hoc response to shortages of labour in different sectors, which has led to a clunky visa regime. Rolling out a scheme before reviewing the pilot is unhelpful. One aspect of workers needing visas is vulnerability to exploitation and poor working conditions. Workers who do not understand the system are vulnerable to exploitation by the person who holds the power in the relationship. Starkly, that is through illegal recruitment fees, loans taken to pay them from loan sharks and organised crime gangs, and resulting debt bondage. The report’s paragraph about the scams offering non-existent jobs is powerful.
The Government’s response that the GLAA has published guidance for employers recruiting overseas, coupled with the explanation that it has no relevant powers, and of course the cuts to its budget and those of the Director of Labour Market Enforcement and the Independent Anti-Slavery Commissioner, are unhelpful. Employers want certainty; the only certainty seems to be that it is known that budgets to deal with modern slavery and human trafficking and exploitation are to be cut year on year.
Can the Minister be clear, and if necessary write to me, about what powers the GLAA has to inspect workplaces at which workers are based? In other words, what can it do, systematically and by way of spot checks, to address abuses? Similarly, can he provide a list of memoranda of understanding between the GLAA and Governments of the countries of origin of workers? What binding agreements are there in respect of fair recruitment? Time defeats me, as it has defeated all of us, but I congratulate my noble friend and the committee on its report.
Baroness Hayman of Ullock (Lab)
My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Redesdale, for his introduction and all committee members, who produced such a thorough and impressive report. We have heard from a number of them today: the noble Baroness, Lady Fookes, my noble friend Lord Carter, and the noble Lords, Lord Colgrain and Lord Curry. We thank them for their work on the report.
We know that growth in productivity, innovation and sustainability is an ambition that the horticultural sector has held for some time. The Government initially amplified that in their own food strategy and talked about the need for
“a world leading horticulture strategy for England”,
aiming to boost production in the UK, create skilled jobs and future-proof the sector in the face of climate change. I thank at this point the noble Lord, Lord Taylor, for sharing his industry experience, because it is important that we look at things in the context of industry.
The noble Lord, Lord Redesdale, said that, despite those government promises in the report, we badly need a horticultural strategy; I am sure that we are all looking forward to hearing what the Minister has to say about that. We also heard about health. Any strategic plan to increase fruit and vegetable production, for example, needs to be coupled with efforts to increase fruit and vegetable consumption for the future health of our young people.
A recent report commissioned by the NFU talked about the increases in production costs over the past two years; it put the figure at 39%, with the main drivers being energy, labour and fertiliser. Although some producers have secured some increases from their customers, this often has not been at the rate required to keep pace with costs of production, clearly putting pressures on the industry.
We have also heard about how fragile our supply chain is, due partly to ongoing global instability—the noble Lord, Lord Colgrain, talked about that. Retailers and government should not rely on imports, however, to plug our self-sufficiency gap to feed the nation. The Government should match their own ambition to grow the horticultural sector, as they outlined in their Farm to Fork summit and their food strategy. The noble Earl, Lord Shrewsbury, talked about the strategy and the importance of the Government acting on what they know to be the right direction for the horticultural sector. However, the recent EFRA Select Committee report expressed disappointment in the strategy for not having food security as part of its focus. Can the Minister explain why that was and just how high up the agenda food security is?
Defra has also had its fairness in the supply chain consultation. The consultation did not include ornamentals. I wondered why that was. It closed in February, so when are we going to hear? The Government said that the consultation did not include ornamentals because they were going to be part of a different consultation in the future. Again, I wonder when we are likely to see that.
Public procurement has also been mentioned during the debate. We know that dynamic procurement practices could support smaller growers. As part of that, the Government’s response said that they would update the government buying standards for food and catering services
“to showcase the use of sustainable, high welfare, quality produce in the public sector”.
As far as I can see, that has not happened yet; neither has there been a publication of a formal response to that consultation. Perhaps the Minister could update us.
We have also heard quite a bit about trade. There are concerns about border control posts posing severe biosecurity risks for the horticultural sector, particularly for the protected salad sector, which imports young plants. The risk is that BCPs become a point of infection and not inspection. The proposed authorised operator scheme being piloted excludes many horticultural businesses due to the narrow eligibility criteria. Perhaps the noble Lord could expand on how the industry is being supported in relation to that.
Many noble Lords have talked about skills. There have been unprecedented challenges, including labour shortages, from the many changes internationally: the EU exit, the European conflict and the Covid pandemic. The report highlights that the horticultural sector faces a persistent deficiency in both workforce and skills—although it clearly highlights, as other noble Lords have mentioned, the T-level qualification in land management which has been launched recently.
However, there does not seem to be sufficient encouragement for young people to engage in horticultural careers; the noble Baroness, Lady Fookes, particularly talked about this. In terms of apprenticeships, the report notes that there are several barriers, both for apprentices and industry, preventing apprenticeship schemes reaching full potential. I noted in the Government’s response that there is not anything new on apprenticeships. Again, I wonder if the Minister could elaborate on the Government’s thinking around that.
A number of noble Lords talked about seasonal workers. The right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Newcastle talked about workers’ conditions, as did the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, in her remarks. The noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, referenced the recommendation that the Government should publish their review of the seasonal worker route but also respond to the Migration Advisory Committee’s latest report on the shortage occupation list. We heard that the first is going to come in due course in the Government’s response, and that the second is being carefully considered. Like the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, I would really welcome any chance of a clarification from the Minister.
On climate change and biodiversity, the committee had noted that the
“utilisation of green spaces in urban environments … can help to support the reduction of urban heating and surface water flooding”.
We have had a number of questions from noble Lords around water supply and storage, so I will not go into that, but I would be interested to hear the Minister’s response.
Also, I am afraid that I am going to mention the land use framework again to the Minister. I am aware that he has made it quite clear that we should see it before the summer but, about a month ago, there was a story that there were comments from Defra suggesting that it would have the status only of guidance—I just wondered if that was the noble Lord’s understanding.
On research and development, the committee emphasises that the landscape needs to improve. My noble friend Lord Carter talked about the importance of technology, as did the noble Earl, Lord Caithness. On that note, I wonder if the Minister is able to give an update on the automation review. I could not find anything on that, but perhaps I have missed it.
We have heard a lot about peat. The Minister is aware that everyone is waiting to find out what will happen regarding the proposed ban of peat use in amateur gardening. Again, it would be interesting to know whether the Government are likely to support Theresa Villiers’s 10-minute rule Bill, which has been brought forward in the other place.
Finally, I will just say a bit on horticulture and health. The report explains the significance of horticulture for better health and well-being, including alleviating mental and physical health difficulties. The noble Lord, Lord Colgrain, talked about the importance of health and getting out into nature and the importance of outdoor activities. The report also talks about the benefits of community gardening and allotment spaces, and the noble Lord, Lord Redesdale, talked about the importance of this in his introduction. The committee also acknowledges, however, that:
“Not all green spaces are equally accessible,
and there is also a correlation around ethnicity and income regarding deprivation of access. As the noble Lord, Lord Curry, mentioned, in the context of rising obesity, pressures on the NHS and a greater shift towards plant-based diets, growers and horticulture can play a really vital role in supporting the nation’s health while also boosting the sector as we go forward.
I also mention, as was mentioned in the report, the Community Eatwell scheme. There were pilots promised around this; I think that there might be a local scheme in Manchester, but I do not know if that is on the part of the Government or a separate thing. It would be interesting to know more about how that is moving forward.
On green social prescribing, the Government have done an evaluation report, which will apparently be published as soon as possible. Sheffield Hallam University seems to be doing something on it, but I cannot see anything from the Government. Again, it would be useful to know.
I should have said that I am a member of the APPG on horticulture, thanks to the strong encouragement of the noble Baroness, Lady Fookes. It is disappointing that the Government’s response did not adequately address all the concerns. As the noble Baroness, Lady Fookes, said, there has not been enough action.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Lord Douglas-Miller) (Con)
My Lords, I start by thanking the noble Baroness, Lady Fookes, for the very enjoyable dinner that we had with the HTA a month or so ago. It was a very interesting and pleasurable experience and introduced me to the subject in no short order.
I congratulate the noble Lord, Redesdale, on securing today’s debate. I start by addressing a common theme: the disappointment in the Government’s response. The noble Lord, Lord Curry, predicted that this was not the intention. It certainly was not, and if any member of your Lordships’ committee felt that was the case, I assure them that it most certainly was not. I applaud the enthusiasm of the noble Lord, Lord Redesdale, that the Liberal Democrats will be leading the charge later this year, and I wish him very good luck.
I also welcome the opportunity to speak about the Horticultural Sector Committee’s report and the Government’s response, which, as noble Lords know, was published in February. I hope that, in the comments I am about to make, I can address some of the issues that have been raised today. I also thank committee members for all that they have done, and continue to do, to champion the vibrant and vital English horticultural sector, and to those who have contributed to today’s very interesting and informative debate. I also thank those who contributed to the public evidence sessions, provided written evidence and attended visits made by the committee, which contributed greatly to its inquiry.
As many noble Lords have commented, the importance of the horticultural sector to the economy, the nation’s health and well-being, and the environment should not be underestimated. This is a country that has a unique agricultural heritage, with a fruit and vegetables sector that we can be rightly proud of. It is a hugely diverse and vital industry, and one with great potential to grow, which has been highlighted on a number of occasions today. However, it is not just the fruit and vegetables sector. As the report and the debate have shown, we also have a vibrant ornamental sector. Our reputation as a nation of gardeners is beyond dispute, as is the tremendous value of those green spaces, which we should rightly champion.
As I have just mentioned, horticulture, allotments and their associated benefits have an incredibly important role in promoting well-being—although this is now being questioned, with the noble Lord’s example of digging his allotment. They also add enormously to the nation’s mental health benefits and reduce social isolation. However, it is perhaps the sector’s economic contribution that is most significant. In the latest study from June 2022, there were 3,398 horticultural farms in England, employing over 36,000 people. In the same year, UK horticultural sector production was worth approximately £5 billion to the UK economy. By any measure, this is very significant and worthy of the Government’s full attention.
The committee’s report is split into six chapters, containing 93 recommendations covering a broad range of areas. Many of today’s questions fall into six main categories: cross-government working and a horticultural strategy for England; government support; environmental land management schemes; biosecurity and the border target operating model; the common user charge; and peat. I will start by talking about these six areas and addressing some of the questions that were raised in them.
Recommendations put forward include requests that the Government
“consider establishing a cross-departmental horticultural sector working group”,
publish a horticulture strategy for England, and have a Minister responsible for horticulture. The noble Lords, Lord Redesdale and Lord Colgrain, and many others, raised the issue of ministerial responsibility. Recognising the broad scope of the sector, ministerial responsibilities are shared in Defra between the Minister for Food, Farming and Fisheries, covering edible horticulture, and the Minister for Nature, covering ornamental horticulture. We work closely together, and across government, to ensure that the sector is fully represented.
On a horticultural strategy, we already take a strategic approach by working across government to ensure that resources are focused on major issues, such as labour, science and innovation, climate resilience, food security and plant health. However, I take the points made in today’s debate and will keep under review the need for a formal strategy.
I turn to the level of government support on offer. As the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, alluded to, the noble Lord, Lord Taylor, made a very inspiring speech about his family’s business and its growth over the last three or four generations. The subject was also raised by the noble Lords, Lord Redesdale, Lord Carter and Lord Colgrain, and many others. The Government are absolutely committed to supporting the horticultural sector and fully recognise its significance. We have shown this in several ways. A range of funding offers is open to our horticulture sector, including the sustainable farming incentive, the farming investment fund and the farming innovation programme, all of which help our growers to deliver improved environmental sustainability and to increase productivity and innovation.
Earlier this year, we announced a range of measures to boost resilience and innovation in the sector, including the largest-ever grant offer, expected to total £427 million. This includes doubling investment in productivity schemes, bolstering schemes such as the improving farm productivity grant, and solar installations to build on-farm energy security. As an element of that grant offer, we are offering £70 million for productivity equipment as part of the successful farming equipment and technology fund, and increasing the improving farm productivity grant from £30 million to £50 million, which covers robotics, automation and rooftop solar, to build and support on-farm energy security. Many of those new initiatives were the result of the committee’s report, and I will continue to work closely with the horticultural industry to ensure that growers understand the full range of grants available to them. We remain open to future suggestions, including looking at any potential underspend in Defra—a point raised by the noble Lord, Lord Carter.
Environmental land management schemes were also a focus of the report and questions today. Many horticulture growers and farmers are already benefiting from our schemes, helping to meet our food security commitments to produce at least 60% of the food that we consume in the UK and to grow their businesses sustainably. We have a strong existing offer for the sector across our environmental land management schemes, which we are further enhancing by improving existing actions and adding new ones as money flows from the common agricultural policy into ELMS over the transition period.
We encourage horticulture farmers and growers to join the 16,000-plus farmers who have already applied for the sustainable farming incentive. They can pick and choose from a range of actions for soils, integrated pest management, nutrient management and farm wildlife, and be paid for taking these actions. In addition, we will make up to 50 new actions available this year, including those to support the uptake of precision farming. This will enable horticulture farmers to reduce their use of costly pesticides and fertilisers, improve yields, productivity, and air and water quality, and benefit biodiversity and soil health—an issue raised by my noble friend Lord Caithness. To give him some reassurance: as part of the SFI, farmers are being awarded for actions that protect soil from erosion, increase soil organic matter, and enable plants and organisms that live in the soil to function correctly.
We will also continue to update farmers and growers on our current and emerging offers through our tailored communications to the sector, helping them to find a package that works for their business. As we continue the agricultural transition, we are keeping the eligibility and payment rates of our schemes under review, and we continue to work with farmers and growers to develop those offers. That includes tests and trials to shape the development and delivery of our schemes, showing that we are committed to working with farmers to identify issues and develop solutions.
Biosecurity and the border target operating model are key themes in the report in respect of trade. The Government are aware of concerns from the horticultural sector about the introduction of the border target operating model, especially as May is a particularly busy month for that sector. In all the very many meetings I have had with the HTA, I have been clear that the implementation of the border target operating model should be a gradual process and avoid any delays or interruptions to trade. I have written to this effect to all border control posts.
The pragmatic approach is not, as it was described by the noble Lord, a fudge or a disaster. It is simply that at the request of the industry we approach this with a degree of caution and work slowly into it as we all settle in. In response to his question as to who the responsible Minister will be and whether they will be from Defra, the answer is that it will be me, and I am a Defra Minister.
The Government are also keen to continue engaging with the sector in the run-up to 30 April, when import checks will move to border control posts and control points, and we will implement daily calls with key stakeholders such as the NFU and the HTA to provide further support. I have made that commitment and spoken to them. The hotline is available, and they are all connected to it.
The introduction of robust controls on EU imports will result in new costs to fund the operation of planned government-run border control facilities. These controls are vital to ensure that physical inspections on sanitary and phytosanitary imports can be undertaken safely and securely and improve our wider biosecurity regime.
I turn now to the issue of the common user charge, which was raised by many noble Lords. First, I quite accept that the communication around the charge itself was delayed, and I apologise for that. Consignments of medium-risk and high-risk plants and plant products will attract a charge of £29 but, as the noble Lord will know, we have capped this at a maximum of £145 per common health entry document to avoid a disproportionate cost to traders, particularly SMEs. I appreciate that any new costs are unwelcome, but we have endeavoured to make these costs as low and as fair as possible. We believe that this approach will bring a critical biosecurity control to goods coming in from the EU, and it uses global risk-based models, data and technology to reduce the burden on businesses wherever possible.
The place of destination scheme will not be carried forward beyond 30 April 2024. It was only ever intended to be a temporary solution, and moving controls to border control posts and control points is vital in achieving the biosecurity aims of the border target operating model, by increasing the percentage of consignments that we are able to inspect.
The noble Lord, Lord Redesdale, and the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, raised the issue of peat. The report also outlines how horticultural practices can contribute directly to climate change through reducing unsustainable practices such as peat extraction and use. The Government remain committed to our proposal to ban the sale of peat for use in amateur gardening, and plan to legislate as soon as parliamentary time allows. As noble Lords will be aware, we propose no restrictions on peat use by the professional sector until after 2026, followed by exemptions that will allow peat use to continue for those areas where no ready alternative currently exists.
I am conscious of the time and the wide range of questions raised. A number of noble Lords asked about labour, in particular seasonal workers and their conditions. I might respond in writing to those questions rather than go through all that detail here today. I am also aware that questions were asked about education, water, long-term funding, research and development and apprenticeships. There were quite a few other detailed questions, in particular from the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee. Again, rather than getting into all that detail this afternoon, I might write to noble Lords.
Once again, I thank those who contributed to this interesting, informative debate. In particular, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Redesdale, for his admirable work in chairing the committee and securing this debate in the Chamber.
Lord Redesdale (LD)
My Lords, I thank the Minister for his reply; members of the committee still believe, I think, that more could be done with the response. However, now that I have the opportunity to make a second speech, I will not fall into that trap, as many noble Lords do.
I thank the members of the committee who are present, as well as the many committee members who could not be here today and apologise for that, for the work they undertook. This was my first experience of chairing a committee. It was a most enjoyable experience, mostly due to the incredible knowledge expressed by many of the committee’s members.
I have one point to make. I really would not want the Minister’s job in the next couple of months. I feel that it will be a very testing time with the introduction of the new border control point. I wish him all the best.
Artificial Intelligence in Weapon Systems Committee Report
(4 weeks, 1 day ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Watch Debate Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Lord Lisvane
That this House takes note of the Report from the Artificial Intelligence in Weapon Systems Committee Proceed with Caution: Artificial Intelligence in Weapon Systems (HL Paper 16).
Lord Lisvane (CB)
My Lords, it is a pleasure to introduce this debate on the report of the AI in Weapon Systems Committee. I am very grateful to the business managers for arranging an early debate; this is a fast-moving subject and it is right that the House has an early opportunity to consider it.
It was a real privilege to chair the committee, for two reasons. The first was its most agreeable and expert membership, who were thoroughly collegiate and enthusiastic. The second was the outstanding staff support that we received. The excellent Alasdair Love led a first-class team by example. As well as Alasdair, I thank Sarah Jennings, our gifted policy adviser; Cathy Adams, who led us authoritatively through the complexities of international humanitarian law; Stephen Reed, who provided Rolls-Royce administration; and Louise Shewey, who was the ideal communications expert. Our two specialist advisers, Professor Dame Muffy Calder from the University of Glasgow and Adrian Weller from the Alan Turing Institute at the University of Cambridge, were invaluable.
AI will have a major influence on the future of warfare. Forces around the world are investing heavily in AI capabilities but fighting is still largely a human activity. AI-enabled autonomous weapon systems—AWS—could revolutionise defence technology and are one of the most controversial uses of AI today. How, for example, can autonomous weapons comply with the rules of armed conflict, which exist for humanitarian purposes?
There is widespread interest in the use of AI in autonomous weapons but there is concern as well. Noble Lords will be aware of recent reports that Israel is using AI to identify targets in the Gaza conflict, potentially leading to a high civilian casualty rate. In a society such as ours, there must be democratic endorsement of any autonomous weapon capability. There needs to be greater public understanding; an enhanced role for Parliament in decision-making; and the building and retention of public confidence in the development and potential use of autonomous weapons.
The Government aim to be “ambitious, safe, responsible”. Of course we agree in principle, but aspiration has not entirely lived up to reality. In our report, we therefore made proposals to ensure that the Government approach the development and use of AI in AWS in a way that is ethical and legal, providing key strategic and battlefield benefits, while achieving public understanding and democratic endorsement. “Ambitious, safe and responsible” must be translated into practical implementation. We suggest four priorities.
First, the Government should lead by example in international engagement on regulation of AWS. The AI Safety Summit was a welcome initiative, but it did not cover defence. The international community has been debating the regulation of AWS for several years. Outcomes could be a legally binding treaty or non-binding measures clarifying the application of international humanitarian law—and each approach has its advocates. Despite differences about form, an effective international instrument must be a high priority.
A key element in pursuing international agreement will be prohibiting the use of AI in nuclear command, control and communications. On one hand, advances in AI offer greater effectiveness. For example, machine learning could improve detection capabilities of early warning systems, make it easier for human analysts to cross-analyse intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance data, and improve the protection of nuclear command, control and communications against cyberattacks.
However, the use of AI in nuclear command, control and communications could spur arms races or increase the likelihood of states escalating to nuclear use during a crisis. AI will compress the time for decision-making. Moreover, an AI tool could be hacked, its training data poisoned or its outputs interpreted as fact when they are statistical correlations—all leading to potentially catastrophic outcomes.
Secondly, the Government should adopt an operational definition of AWS which, surprisingly, they do not have. The Ministry of Defence is cautious about adopting one because
“such terms have acquired a meaning beyond their literal interpretation”,
and an
“overly narrow definition could become quickly outdated in such a complex and fast-moving area and could inadvertently hinder progress in international discussions”.
I hear what the Government say, but I am not convinced. I believe it is possible to create a future-proofed definition. Doing so would aid the UK’s ability to make meaningful policy on autonomous weapons and engage fully in discussions in international fora. It would make us a more effective and influential player.
Thirdly, the Government should ensure human control at all stages of an AWS’s lifecycle. Much of the concern about AWS is focused on systems in which the autonomy is enabled by AI technologies, with an AI system undertaking analysis on information obtained from sensors. However, it is essential to have human control over the deployment of the system, to ensure both human moral agency and legal compliance. This must be buttressed by our absolute national commitment to the requirements of international humanitarian law.
Finally, the Government must ensure that their procurement processes can cope with the world of AI. We heard that the Ministry of Defence’s procurement suffers from a lack of accountability and is overly bureaucratic—not the first time such criticisms have been levelled. In particular, we heard that it lacks capability on software and data, both of which are central to the development of AI. This may require revolutionary change. If so, so be it—but time is short.
Your Lordships have the Government’s reply to our report. I am grateful for the work that has gone into it. There are six welcome points, which I will deal with expeditiously.
First, there is a commitment to ensuring meaningful human control and human accountability throughout the lifecycle of a system and the acknowledgement that accountability cannot be transferred to machines.
Secondly, I welcome their willingness to explore the establishment of an
“‘AI-enabled military operator’ skill set”
and to institute processes for the licensing and recertification of operators, including training that covers technical, legal and ethical compliance.
Thirdly, I welcome the commitment to giving force to the ethical principles in “ambitious, safe and responsible”. The Government must become a leader in setting responsible standards at every stage of the lifecycle of AWS, including responsible development and governance of military AI.
Fourthly, I am glad that the Government are reviewing the role of its AI ethics advisory panel, including in relation to our recommendation to increase transparency, which is key if the Government are to retain public confidence in their policies.
Fifthly, I welcome the recognition of the importance of retaining ultimate ownership over data, and making this explicit in commercial arrangements with suppliers, as well as the importance of pursuing data-sharing agreements and partnerships with allies. This is crucial for the development of robust AI models.
Finally, I welcome the Government’s readiness to make defence AI a more attractive profession, including by making recruitment and retention allowances more flexible, enabling more exchange between the Government and the technology sector and by appointing a capability lead for AI talent and skills. This is essential if MoD civil servants are to deal on equal terms with the private sector.
Two cheers so far—the Government could do more. They have no intention of adopting an operational definition of AWS, and I think they must if the UK is to be a more serious player. Perhaps the Minister can update us on a trip down the Damascus road on that one, but at the moment there appears to be no movement.
They do not commit to an international instrument on lethal AWS, arguing that current international humanitarian law is sufficient. If the Government want to fulfil their ambition to promote the safe and responsible development of AI around the world, they must be a leader in pressing for early agreement on an effective international instrument. The reports of the use of AI in the Gaza conflict are clear evidence of the urgency.
Our recommendation on the importance of parliamentary accountability is accepted, but the Government seemingly make no effort to show how accountability would be achieved. Parliament must be at the centre of decision-making on the development and use of AWS, but that depends on the transparency and availability of information, on anticipating issues rather than reacting after the event and on Parliament’s ability to hold Ministers effectively to account.
The Government accept that human control should be ensured in nuclear command, control and communications, but they do not commit to removing AI entirely. However, the risk of potentially apocalyptic consequences means that the Government should at least lead international efforts to achieve its prohibition.
The Government have accepted the need to scrutinise procurement offers more effectively and our recommendation to explore bringing in external expertise through an independent body, but they provide no detail on how they would create standards relating to data quality and sufficiency, human-machine interaction and the transparency and resilience of AWS.
Overall, the Government’s response to our report was “of constructive intent”. I hope that that does not sound too grudging. They have clearly recognised the role of responsible AI in our future defence capability, but they must embed ethical and legal principles at all stages of design, development and deployment. Technology should be used when advantageous, but not at an unacceptable cost to the UK’s moral principles. I beg to move.
Lord Hamilton of Epsom (Con)
My Lords, it gives me great pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Lisvane, the chairman of the committee, who was absolutely excellent in the way he carried out the job. I have no doubt that he had somewhat of an advantage over many of the rest of us on the committee, as he had spent quite a lot of time in the House of Commons on the Defence Select Committee, which must have given him great inside knowledge of what was going on in the defence field. That was very useful to all of us.
I am very glad to have been on the committee. I have always believed that, if we are to win wars, we need two major components. First, we have to train and motivate our troops properly. I do not think anybody doubts that the British are world leaders in training the military; indeed, we do it for many other countries as well. The professionalism that our Armed Forces show is the envy of the world. I wish I could say the same of the ability of the Ministry of Defence to procure equipment, which has been lacking for years, even in the days when I was responsible for some of it.
The interesting thing that has changed is that, in the old days, industry used to look to defence to spend taxpayers’ money on research and development, hoping that some of that technology would move over into the private sector and it would benefit. That has all completely changed now. The sums of money that have been spent on research and development by the private tech companies in the United States, for instance, are so enormous that technological change is moving at a very fast rate. Let us face it: defence is benefiting from the private sector rather than the other way around. As a result, technology is moving on so fast that it is very difficult for any of us to keep up with it.
So I am very keen that we should embrace AI. We will be left at a serious disadvantage if our enemies adopt AI with enthusiasm and we do not. It is extremely important that we take this on board and use it to save the lives of our troops and improve our chances of winning wars.
There have been a number of very alarmist stories going around. It caused me a certain amount of concern that the committee might think that this is a business that should be regulated out of business altogether due to the possibility of things going wrong. Indeed, while we were on the committee, there was a report in the newspapers of a piece of AI equipment being trialled by the United States that went completely wrong on the simulator and ended up killing the operator and then blowing itself up. We asked the United States what its reaction had been to this. The answer we got was that it had never happened. That might be true—who knows?—but it is slightly sad as we want to learn lessons from all these things, rather like the airlines do when things go wrong. They share the information with everybody in the business and that makes the whole airline business much safer than it would otherwise be. I imagine that, if this did happen, the United States withdrew the whole system from its inventory and went back to the manufacturers and told them to get their act together and not make these sort of mistakes in the future.
My concerns about the committee being somewhat Luddite were misplaced. The report we have produced recognises that we have to take on AI in our defence equipment and that, if we do not, we will be put at a singular disadvantage.
The noble Lord, Lord Lisvane, mentioned the question of international humanitarian law. I am not as much in support of this as perhaps I should be, having signed up to the committee report. I am absolutely certain that nothing whatever is going to happen on this front. The committee was given clear evidence that there is no international agreement to tighten up international humanitarian law. I do not think that we should look to international humanitarian law as an answer to our problems.
The noble Lord, Lord Lisvane, also mentioned the question of nuclear. Unilaterally, we have to ensure that human control remains an element in the whole use of nuclear weapons. I share his concerns about leaving all this to machines: machines can very easily go wrong.
We took a lot of evidence from people who called themselves Stop Killer Robots. I did not understand why so many of them seemed to be put in front of us, but we ended up with these people. When we asked them about Phalanx, they said that this did not apply to that. Your Lordships will know that Phalanx is a point defence system on most of our major Royal Navy ships. It can be used manually or as a completely automated weapons system, identifying targets and opening fire on them if they are coming towards the ship. I would be surprised if it was not being used as an AWS in the Red Sea, where there is the constant threat of Houthi missiles coming in. That system saves the lives of sailors in our Royal Navy.
We should always recognise that AI has a very important role to play. We should be careful about saying that we want to stop all lethal robots, given that they could make all the difference between us winning and losing wars.
Lord Browne of Ladyton (Lab)
My Lords, I am pleased to follow the noble Lord, Lord Hamilton. Like him, I congratulate the committee’s chair, the noble Lord, Lord Lisvane, and thank him for securing an early debate on the report, for his comprehensive and powerful opening speech and for his adroit and inclusive chairing of the committee. It is most important in these circumstances to have a chair who is inclusive. It was a pleasure to serve under his chairmanship and it is an equal pleasure to recognise and thank the clerks, the staff and advisers for their exemplary support.
The report and the record of its proceedings contain a great deal that is of value, including testimony from a range of experts which would repay concerted attention from Ministers and officials. Mindful of the time constraint, I wish to focus on one specific area: our working definition of AWS, or rather, the absence of one, which presents very real difficulties, both domestic and international.
The gateway through which I entered this somewhat Kafkaesque debate was a sentence from the Ministry of Defence which purported to explain why this country does not have an agreed definition of AWS. Cited on page 4 of the report and intermittently thereafter, it suggests that we do not have a working definition of AWS because, as the noble Lord, Lord Lisvane, has quoted more broadly than I will, such terms
“have acquired a meaning beyond their literal interpretation”.
The floor of your Lordships’ House is not an appropriate forum for a detailed textual exegesis, although I do enjoy that. However, that sentence recalled Hazlitt’s criticism of the oratory of William Pitt, which he stigmatised as combining
“evasive dexterity, and perplexing formality”.
This impression reflects the conclusion of the committee that this explanation is plainly insufficient. How can we actively seek to engage with policy in regulating AWS if we cannot find even provisional words with which to define it? It is like attempting to make a suit for a man whose measurements are shrouded in secrecy and whose very existence is merely a rumour. These are, of course, enormously complex questions but in making good policy, complexity should not be a refuge but a rebuke. It is the job of Governments of any political stripe to be able to articulate their approach and have it tested by experts and dissenting voices.
In advising the Government to adopt a definition, the committee was careful. While it suggested that a future-proofed definition would be desirable, the report makes it clear that even a more provisional operational definition would be useful. We understand that this could change as the technology dictates, but it would at least have the advantage of reflecting the Government’s contemporary thinking. In lieu of that, we are forced to make a series of inferential leaps in guessing details of the Government’s approach to this question. We are given to understand that the Government use the NATO definition of “autonomous”, which takes us a small step forward, although as the report makes clear, that leaves terms such as “desired”, “goals”, “unpredictable” and, extraordinarily, “parameters”, entirely undefined.
Questions about an agreed definition have vexed policymakers in other domestic and international fora, but we should at least be working towards a definition that would bring some measure of clarity to our regulatory and developmental efforts. I would urge, therefore, the Minister to reconsider the question of an operational definition.
In so doing, I remind the Minister of the evidence of Professor Stuart Russell, who noted that the lack of specificity was creating damaging ambiguity in intergovernmental co-operation, and of Professor Taddeo’s concern that the current definitional latitude allows unscrupulous states to develop AWS without ever describing them as such, and her further exhortation upon this Government to develop
“a definition that is realistic, that is technologically and scientifically grounded, and on which we can find agreement in international fora to start thinking about how to regulate these weapons”.
Lord Houghton of Richmond (CB)
My Lords, it is a delight to follow the noble Lord, Lord Browne, whose companionship in the committee was but one of its many delights.
I start by drawing attention to my relevant interests in the register, particularly my advisory role with three companies, Thales, Tadaweb and Whitespace, all of which have some interest in the exploitation of AI for defence purposes.
It is great to see a few dedicated attendees of the Chamber still here late into Friday. My motivation to speak is probably as much to do with group loyalty as the likelihood of further value added, so I will keep my comments short and more focused on some contextual observations on the committee’s work, rather than in the pursuit of additional insights. There is not much more I want to stress and/or prioritise regarding the actual conclusions and recommendations of the report, and our chairman’s opening remarks were typically excellent and comprehensive. However, there are some issues of context that it is worth giving some prominence to. I will offer half a dozen, all of which represent not the committee’s view but a personal one.
The first comment is that the committee probably thought itself confronted by a prevailing sense of negativity about the risks of AI in general and autonomous weapons systems in particular. The negativity was not among the committee’s membership but rather among many of our expert witnesses, some of whom were technical doom-mongers, while others seemed to earn their living by turning what is ultimately a practical problem of battlefield management into an ethical challenge of Gordian complexity.
My second comment is specifically on the nature of the technical evidence that we heard, which, if not outright conflicted, was at least extremely diverse in its views on risk and timescale, particularly on the risks of killer robots achieving what you might call self-generated autonomy. The result was that, despite much evidence to the contrary, it was very difficult to wholly liberate ourselves from a sense of residual ignorance of some killer fact. I judge, therefore, that this is a topic that will as we go forward require persistent and dynamic stewardship.
My third observation relates to the Damascus road. I think that the committee experienced a conversion to an understanding of how, in stark contrast, for example, to financial services, the use of lethal force on the modern battlefield is already remarkably well regulated, at least by the armed forces of more civilised societies. In this context, I think that the committee achieved a more general understanding, confirmed by military professionals, that humans will nearly always be the deciding factor in the use of lethal force when any ethical or legal constraint is in play. Identifying the need to preserve the pre-eminence of human agency is perhaps the single most important element of the committee’s findings.
My fourth comment is that the committee’s deliberations played out in the context of the obscene brutality in Ukraine and Gaza. It was a constant concern not to deny our own people of, if you like, the benefits of ethical autonomy. There is so much beneficial advantage to be derived from AI in autonomy that we would be mad not to proceed with ways to exploit it, even if the requirements of regulations will undoubtedly constrain us in ways that patently will not trouble many of our potential enemies.
My fifth comment, it follows, is on our chosen title, Proceed with Caution. I forget whether this title was imposed by our chairman or more democratically agreed by the whole committee. I wholly accept that “proceed with reckless abandon” would not have survived the secretariat’s editorship, but, on a wholly personal level, I exhort the Minister to reassure us that the Government will not allow undue caution to inhibit progress. I fear that defence is currently impoverished, so it has to be both clever and technically ambitious.
I want to say something by way of wider context. The object of our study, AI in autonomous weapons systems, necessarily narrowed the focus of the committee’s attention on conflict above the threshold of formalised warfare. However, I think the whole committee was conscious of the ever-increasing scale of conflict in what is termed the grey zone, below the threshold of formalised warfare, where the mendacious use of AI to create alternate truth, undermine democracy and accelerate the decline of social integrity is far less regulated and far more existentially threatening to our way of life. This growing element of international conflict undoubtedly demands our urgent attention.
Earl Attlee (Con)
My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Lisvane, for introducing this debate.
I read the report as soon it was published. I agree with it and with the position of HMG and the MoD. However, looking around the corner, I see that reality may conflict with what the report says. Its title is of course very appropriate—although we might wonder how we got it. I am relaxed about the MoD’s reluctance to define AWS. A definition has the danger of excluding certain unanticipated developments.
It may be helpful to the House if I illustrate a potential difficulty with a fully autonomous system, to show why we should not willingly go in this direction. Suppose His Majesty’s Armed Forces are engaged in a high-intensity conflict and an officer is in control of a drone system. He reads his intelligence summary—INTSUM—which indicates fragility in the cohesiveness of enemy forces. The officer controls the final decision for the drone to engage any target, in accordance with our current policy. The drone detects an enemy armoured battalion group but the AFVs are tightly parked in a square in the open, not camouflaged, and the personnel are a few hundred metres away, sitting around campfires. In view of the INTSUM, it would be obvious to a competent officer that this unit has capitulated and should not be engaged for a variety of reasons, not least international humanitarian law. It is equally obvious that a drone with AI might not recognise that the enemy unit is not actively engaged in hostilities. In its own way, the report recognises these potential difficulties.
My concern centres on the current war in Ukraine. Both sides will be using electronic warfare to prevent their opponent being able to receive data from their own drones or give those drones direction. That is an obvious thing to do. But if you are in a war of survival—and the Ukrainians certainly are—and you have access to a drone system with AI that could autonomously identify, select and attack a target, absent any relevant treaty you would have to use that fully autonomous capability. If you do not, you will lose the war or suffer heavy casualties because your enemy has made your own drones ineffective by means of electronic warfare. So long as drones are being used in the current high-intensity conflict, we need to recognise that it will be almost impossible to prevent AI being used fully autonomously. Equally, it will be hard to negotiate a suitable treaty, even if we attach a very high priority to doing so.
The whole nature of land warfare is changing very rapidly—the noble Lord, Lord Lisvane, used the phrase “fast-moving”—and we do not know what the end state will be. However, we can try to influence it and anticipate where it will end up.
Lord Stevens of Birmingham (CB)
My Lords, I too welcome the excellent report from the committee and thank it for this work. My brief contribution will focus on AI in the maritime domain. My starting point is that if, like me, you believe we need a bigger Navy then it is obvious that we will need to use AI-enabled systems as an effective force multiplier.
We should therefore enthusiastically welcome the Royal Navy’s leadership in a wide range of maritime use cases. For example, in the surface fleet there is the so-called intelligent ship human autonomy teaming; in the subsurface environment, autonomous uncrewed mine hunting, partly supported by the new RFA “Stirling Castle”, as well as new sensor technologies and acoustic signature machine learning for anti-submarine warfare; and in maritime air defence, AI-enhanced threat prioritisation and kinetic response using tools such as Startle and Sycoiea, which are obviously vital in an era of drone swarms and ballistic and hypersonic missiles. These and other AI systems are undoubtedly strengthening our nation’s ability to deter and defend at sea. They also enhance the Royal Navy’s centuries-old global contribution to rules-based freedom of navigation, which underpins our shared prosperity.
Looking forwards, my second point is that Parliament itself can help. When it comes to experimentation and trialling, there is a sense in some parts of defence that peacetime risk-minimisation mindsets are not currently well calibrated to the evolving and growing threats that we now face. Parliament could therefore accept and encourage a greater risk appetite, within carefully set parameters. Many innovations will come from within the public sector and we should support investment, including in the excellent Dstl and DASA. But in parentheses, I am not convinced by the report’s recommendation at paragraph 17 that the MoD should be asked to publish its annual spending on AI, given that it will increasingly become ubiquitous, embedded and financially impossible to demarcate.
Where Parliament can help is by recognising that most innovation in this space will probably involve partnerships with the commercial sector, often with dual-use civil and military elements, as the noble Lord, Lord Hamilton, argued. In fact, figures from Stanford published in Nature on Monday this week show that the vast majority of AI research is happening in the private sector, rather than in universities or the public sector. The MoD’s and the Navy’s accounting officers and top-level budget holders should be given considerable latitude to use innovative procurement models and development partnerships, without post-hoc “Gotcha” censure from us.
This brings me to my third and final point, which is that we need to be careful about how we regulate. The Royal Navy is, rightly, not waiting for new international public law but is pragmatically applying core UNCLOS requirements to the IMO’s four-part typology of autonomous maritime vehicles and vessels. As for the Navy’s most profound responsibility, the UK’s continuous at-sea deterrent, the Lords committee’s report rightly reasserts that nuclear weapons must remain under human control. Anyone who doubts that should Google “Stanislav Petrov” or “Cold War nuclear close calls”. But the report is also right to argue, at paragraph 51, that this paradigmatic case for restraint is not wholly generalisable. Parliament would be making a category mistake if we attempted to regulate AI as a discrete category of weapon system, when in fact it is a spectrum of rapidly evolving general-purpose technologies.
An alternative approach is set out in the 2023 Political Declaration on Responsible Military Use of Artificial Intelligence and Autonomy, which includes key ethical and international humanitarian law guard-rails. That framework is now endorsed by more than 50 countries, including the US, France and the UK, but, regrettably, not by the other two permanent members of the UN Security Council, Russia and China, nor of course by Iran or North Korea. Work should continue, however, to expand its reach internationally.
To conclude, for the reasons I have set out, AI systems clearly offer enormous potential benefits in the maritime environment. Parliament can and should help our nation capitalise on them. Although the committee’s report is titled Proceed with Caution, for the reasons I have given today, the signal we should send to the Royal Navy should be: continue to proceed with speed.
The Lord Bishop of Newcastle
My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Lisvane, for his opening summary of this important report and to the noble Lord, Lord Stevens, for his remarks just delivered, reminding us of the maritime context of this debate as well. I also thank those involved in the creation of the report. Perhaps this alone is worth noting: AI did not produce this report; human beings did.
My friend the right reverend Prelate the former Bishop of Coventry was a member of the committee producing the report and he will be delighted that it is receiving the attention it deserves. He is present today, and I hope he does not mind me speaking on his behalf in this regard.
The principles of just war are strongly associated with the Christian moral tradition, in which it is for politicians to ensure that any declaration of war is just and then for the military to pursue that war’s aims by just means. In both cases, justice must be measured against the broader moral principles of proportionality and discrimination. This, then, is where AI begins to raise important and urgent questions. AI opens new avenues of military practice that cannot be refused, together with new risks that must not be ignored. The report rightly says that we must “proceed with caution”, but it does say “proceed”. Here, there is an opportunity for the UK to fulfil its commitment to offer leadership in this sphere in the international field.
There is a risk of shifting the decision-making process and the moral burden for each outcome on to a system that has no moral capacity and too much opacity. To implement AI’s benefits well, military cultural values need to be named, explained and then translated into AWS’ command and control—especially where the meaning of “just” diverges from the kind of utilitarian calculus that most easily “aligns” digital processes with moral choice.
Inherent human values, including virtue, should also be embedded in the development, not just the deployment, of new AI-enabled weapon systems. As recent use of AI systems shows in the context of global conflict, AI changes questions of proportionality and discrimination. When a database identifies 37,000 potential targets using “apparent links” to an enemy, or an intelligence officer says
“The machine did it coldly. And that made it easier”,
it is vital to attach human responsibility to each action.
AWS designed according to military culture will, at best, practically strengthen the moral aspects of just war by reducing or eliminating collateral damage, but we should guard against a cultural rewiring or feedback loop that dilutes or corrodes the moral human responsibility that just war depends on. It is reassuring, therefore, as other noble Lords have noted, to see a clear statement that accountability cannot be delegated to a machine in the Government’s response to the report, together with the Government’s commitment to fully uphold national and international law.
Current events across the globe and the rapid pace of development of AI in both civil and military contexts make this a timely and important debate. I commend the committee, and those in government and in the MoD charged with transforming its helpful insights and practical recommendations into concrete action.
Public confidence and democratic endorsement of any plans the Government might have in the development of AI are vital. I therefore urge the Government to commit to ensuring public confidence and education in their ongoing response to this report.
The Earl of Erroll (CB)
My Lords, this has been a very useful report, because it gets us thinking properly about these things.
I declare an interest in the whole world of generative AI and LLMs, with Kaimai and FIDO, which is looking at curated databases to extract information. It is very useful for that sort of thing. With that, as mentioned in the report, comes the whole issue of training materials. The results you get depend on what the AI is looking at. If you fire it off against a huge amount of uncurated stuff, you might, and you can, get all sorts of rubbish back. Certain tests have found AI returning things that were 70% to 80% inaccurate. On the other hand, if put against something carefully targeted, such as medical research, where everything that has gone into the dataset has been studied and put together by someone, it will find stuff that no one has had time to read and put together, and realise that it is relevant.
In the same way, AI will be very useful in confusing scenarios facing a military commander, or in military decisions, to help them weed out what is right and what is wrong and what is true and what is not. I seem to remember, though I cannot remember when it was, that there was nearly a nuclear war because, at one point, various sensors had gone wrong and they thought there was a military attack on the United States. They nearly triggered all the defences, but someone suddenly said, “Hang on, this doesn’t look quite right”. It may well be that an artificial intelligence system, which may not be confused by some of the fluff, might have spotted that more easily or accurately, and reported it and said, “Don’t believe everything you’re looking at; there is another problem in the system”. On the other hand, it might have done the opposite. This is the trouble, which is why the human intervention point is very important.
We also have to remember that, although AI started being developed in the 1980s, with neural networks and things like that, it is only really getting into its stride now. We do not know quite where things will end up, and so it is very difficult to regulate it.
My interest in this stems from the fact that I served with the TA for 15 years, and so I am interested in this country’s ability to defend itself. I worry about what would happen if we start trying to shackle ourselves to a whole lot of things that reduce that capability—I entirely agree with the noble Lord, Lord Hamilton. We should worry about that, because many countries may well pay lip service to international humanitarian law but an awful lot of them will use it to try to shackle us, who tend to obey it, while they themselves will not feel constricted by it. Take, for instance, the international Convention on Cluster Munitions. We are signed up to that, and so are many good countries, but there are one or two very serious countries, including one of our allies, that did not sign up to it. I personally agree with it, absolutely—it is a most appalling munition, because of the huge problems with the aftermath and the tidy-up.
I was also amused by conclusion 8 in the report, which mentioned testing AI “against all possible scenarios”. I seem to remember that there was a famous German general who said, “When anybody has only two possible courses of action, he will always adopt the third”. That is the trouble. I think the British are quite good at finding the third way in these things; that is possibly how we run, because of the unlikelihood of what we do.
The other thing I worry about with autonomous weapons systems is collateral damage. If you start programming a thing with facial recognition—you program in a face and ask it to take out a particular person or group of people, and off shoots the drone to make a decision on it—how do you tell it how much collateral damage to allow, if any? That is a problem. Particularly recently, we have seen that with other things, where people have decided that the target is so important that it is all right killing a few others. But it is not really—at least, I do not feel so. When you create a lot of collateral damage, particularly if it is not in a war but an insurgent situation, you reinforce the insurgents’ desire to be difficult, and that of their family and friends and all the other people. People forget that.
The other thing is that parliamentary scrutiny will be too slow. We are no good at scrutinising at high speed, and things will be changing quite rapidly in this area. We need scrutiny, we need human control at the end, and we need to use AI when it is useful for making that decision, but we must be very careful about trying to slow everything down with overbearing scrutiny.
Baroness Hodgson of Abinger (Con)
My Lords, like others, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Lisvane, for his excellent introduction and for chairing the committee so ably. I also thank all fellow colleagues on the committee. We had some very interesting discussions, and those who were more informed were patient with people like me who were probably less informed. I also thank our advisers and the clerks, who supported us so well. This has indeed been a fascinating committee to serve on and is an example of how the House of Lords plays an outstanding role in highlighting some of the most pressing concerns of the day. My remarks are mostly personal reflections.
Whether we like AI or not, it is here to stay and is developing exponentially at a previously unimaginable rate. This complex technological revolution has the potential to reshape the nature of warfare, with advantages but also disadvantages. As the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Houghton, mentioned, today’s warfare, in a competitive, volatile and challenging world, is often conducted in the grey zone, through hyper competition, on the internet and in so many areas of life. It begs the question: what is a weapon in today’s world? Interference with a country’s systems, be they economic, infrastructure or social, can be subtle but effective in undermining and disabling. However, with a limited time to report, we confined our conversations to lethal weapon systems.
Although AI creates the ability to calculate with such stupendous speed, we should be mindful that there are areas not covered by binary calculations—humanity, empathy and kindness, to name a few. Will faster analysis fuel escalation, due to rapid response and a lack of time to consider repercussions? As others have mentioned, we can see the chilling ability to quickly identify thousands of targets, as the use of the Lavender system in Gaza reveals, with, it is reported, 20 seconds’ consideration given to each individual target.
Whatever military systems are used, we have a national commitment to the requirements of international humanitarian law, and there are huge ethical implications in relinquishing human control over lethal decision-making, with profound questions about accountability and morality. To what point can machines be entrusted with the responsibility of the enormity and breadth of decision-making about life and death on the battlefield?
The MoD’s defence AI strategy, published in 2022, signalled its intention to utilise AI
“from ‘back office’ to battlespace”,
demonstrating how all-pervasive AI will be in every system. While recognising the advantages in many ways, we also have to recognise the dangers in this strategy. Systems can be hacked, so it is equally important to develop security to ensure that they are not accessible by those who wish us harm. The strategy also sets out an autonomy spectrum framework, demonstrating the different levels of interrelationships between humans and machines.
AI is being developed mostly in companies and academic institutions. This too presents challenges: the threat of an arms race with systems that can be sold to the highest bidder, who may or may not be hostile. The majority of this development is being carried out by men, but, as half the world is female and women see things in a different way, we must encourage more girls and women to play their part to ensure a lack of gender bias.
With the glaring example of the Post Office scandal, the opaque nature of AI algorithms makes it difficult to judge whether they are accurate, up to date and appropriate. However much testing is carried out, it is not easy to know for sure whether systems are reliable and accurate until they are deployed. But the reality is that there is no going back, and as these systems proliferate, hostile nations and non-state actors may have access to, interfere with and deploy their own systems, and they may not wish to conform to any international standards imposed.
I thank the Government for their response to our report and congratulate them on the AI summit held last November at Bletchley Park, resulting in a commitment from 28 nations and leading AI companies with a focus on safety. However, I understand that weapon systems were not part of the conversation. It will be difficult to harness the development of this new technology as it gathers speed, so I hope that weapon systems will be part of the conversation at future summits.
Stephen Hawking once warned that the development of full AI
“could spell the end of the human race”,
so “proceed with caution” has to be the mantra with regard to AI in weapon systems.
Lord Mitchell (Lab)
My Lords, I have had the honour to sit on many committees of your Lordships’ House; some were good, some not so good. This committee and its investigation into autonomous weapon systems have been in a different league. The committee was masterfully chaired by the noble Lord, Lord Lisvane, and I have never witnessed such skill in chairing a committee and then combining our deliberations so seamlessly. And what did we produce? A cracking report, which is of the moment. We should all be very proud.
Sadly, I cannot be so complimentary about the Government’s response. Ours was a serious and well-researched document, but the Government took little on board. Their reply was tepid and, on occasion, wrong. We deserve better. Because the subject matter is so dynamic and changes by the day, I pushed hard to set up a formal review mechanism to keep this report up to date but, predictably, the Government totally ignored this request. Is the Minister able to suggest a structure for keeping this important subject continuously reviewed and relevant?
I will confine my comments to the section dealing with procurement, innovation and talent. My constant worry with government procurement in the fast-moving tech market is that Whitehall is ill equipped to manage relationships with tech companies. Instinctively, the MoD is old school, totally at home purchasing hardware equipment from the likes of Lockheed Martin, BAE Systems and Raytheon—they have been doing it for years. But AI is a different story. At its heart, it is sophisticated software designed by the informal tech bros in Silicon Valley, emotionally ill matched to the arms suppliers of yesteryear. It is a measure of the pace of external developments that some key actors in the AI sector today are barely referenced in our report, not because of incompleteness in our deliberations but because of the sheer pace of development.
Let us take the case of Nvidia. In our report it warrants just one footnote but, today, it is the third most valuable company on the US stock market. It is a leader in designing AI chips and is indispensable in building many forms of autonomous weapon systems. It has come from nowhere to world leader in just a few short years. Anduril Industries is also based in California. It manufactures AI weapons that can hover and then identify their target—in effect, attack drones. It did not cross our radar either, but now its weapons are in use in Ukraine. Its founder, on a formal day, wears Hawaiian shirts, shorts and flip-flops—he is 30 years old. There are many like him in the tech world and, more and more, they are turning to weapon systems.
Our report highlights that the MoD procurement processes are particularly lacking in relation to software and data, both of which are important for the development and use of AI. Tech bros and Whitehall mandarins are not natural bedfellows. We need translators. I wonder whether our Ministry of Defence procurement officials are temperamentally equipped to engage with those Silicon Valley companies. My guess is that they are not. Perhaps the Minister can comment on this.
Finally, let us look at salaries. Top AI programmers and system designers can earn six or even seven-figure amounts, which is light years away from what our public sector can pay. Such disparities will grow and it will be increasingly difficult for the MoD to recruit top employees. So what do we do? One answer could be for private companies to second their staff to the public sector. We suggested that, but I am not sure that we were heard.
Ours was an outstanding report. The Government could have produced a much more helpful response but, sadly, they did not.
Viscount Waverley (CB)
My Lords, “proceed with caution” is for an ideal world, but with warfare on the horizon, it is important to move on from abstract and procedural. With the world headed into a dark place, the geopolitical implications of autonomous weapon systems in modern warfare are immeasurable and will require crucial global diplomacy.
The race for AI supremacy and the increased speed of warfare with first-mover advantage, armed with automated systems, drones and predictive analytics, have implications for the balance of military power between states, even transcending national states, with a far-ranging impact on global peace. Non-state actors that also have access, by one means or another, to this advanced technology will have to be added into the conundrum.
Weapon systems that involve no human oversight present challenges but also opportunities beyond ethical questions. They will test democracy and geopolitics and will change the nature of warfare, in that placing human soldiers in harm’s way will become untenable. Autonomous unmanned underwater, surface and air weaponry can also be set to perform the same tasks of automatically engaging incoming missiles. This becomes machine-speed warfare, with humans no longer the central lethal force in the battlefield.
This is closer than many anticipate. Defensive and offensive AI-controlled fighter jets will become smaller, far faster and more manoeuvrable, and will be able to operate in swarms. Predicting intelligence behaviour with the deployment of kinetic forces against a third party that is not human will accelerate, with the rights norms to proportionate military response in effect no longer applicable.
At state level, therefore, countries should work to establish conventions in which the use of lethal force or nuclear is always subject to human command and control mechanisms, never automated, with emergency communication trip-wire channels or early warning system activates established. As immediate retaliatory responses may no longer be legally or morally justified, the historic conventions of war will require revision, with alternate arbitration systems devised at UN Security Council level.
I have three conjectural questions in conclusion. If an AI system were to physically operate on a human, to what extent should its algorithmic programming be open to public due diligence? Who would be liable in the case of misuse when human oversight is required? How do we counter the spatial distance of a development team at the far end of the world from unethical behaviour, making accountability impractical?
It would be amiss of me to end by not thanking the noble Lord, Lord Lisvane, and his committee.
Lord Holmes of Richmond (Con)
My Lords, it is a pleasure to take part in this critically important debate. In doing so, I declare my technology interests as advisor to Boston Ltd. I too congratulate all those involved with the committee—not least its chair, the noble Lord, Lord Lisvane, for his potent introduction to this afternoon’s debate—and indeed all the committee staff who have been responsible for putting together an excellent, pertinent and timely report.
I believe that, when it comes to AI across the piece, it is time to legislate and it is time to lead, with principles-based, outcomes-focused, input-understood legislation and regulation. This is no more true than when it comes to AWS. I remember when we did the Lords AI Select Committee report in 2018. With all the media lines that we put out, the one line that the press wanted to focus on was something like, “Killer robots will destroy humanity, says Lords committee”. It was incredibly important then and is incredibly important today. If we have principles-based, right-size regulation, we have some chance of security, safety and stability.
We know how to do that. I will take a previous example of something as significant: IVF. What can be more terrifying and more science fiction than bringing human life into being in a laboratory test tube? Why is it today not only a success but seen as a positive, regular part of our lives? Because of a previous Member of your Lordships’ House, the late and great Lady Warnock, and the Warnock commission publicly engaging on such an important issue. We need similar public engagement, not just on AWS but on all the potential and current applications of AI—and we know how to do that.
I will discuss just one of the recommendations of the report—I agree with pretty much all of them—recommendation 4, which has already been mentioned, rightly, by many noble Lords. Without a meaningful definition, it is difficult to put together a mission, plan and strategy to address optimally the issue of AWS. Can my noble friend the Minister say whether the Government will consider reopening the question of a meaningful definition? That will then help everything that flows from that. Otherwise, I fear that not only are we trying to nail jelly to the wall but it is that serious that we are attempting to nail gelignite to that same wall.
We should feel confident that we know how to legislate for these new technologies. Look at what we did with the Electronic Trade Documents Act last year. We know how to do innovation in this country: look at Lovelace, Turing, Berners-Lee and more. Yes, the Bletchley summit was a great success—although it did not involve defence and many other issues that need to be considered—but perhaps the greatest lesson from Bletchley is not so much the summit but more what happened two generations ago, when a diverse team gathered to deploy the technology of the day to defeat the greatest threat to our human civilisation. Talent and technology brought forth the light at one of the darkest periods of our human history. From 1940s Bletchley to 2020s United Kingdom, we need to act now, not just on AWS but across the piece on human-in-the-loop, human-led and human-over-the-loop AI. It is time to legislate and lead for our safety, security and stability, for our very human civilisation, and for #OurAIFutures.
Lord St John of Bletso (CB)
My Lords, I join in congratulating my noble friend Lord Lisvane and his committee on this detailed report. Coming last to the crease, I will try to raise a few issues that have not been raised by others.
We are certainly living in very uncertain and precarious times, with the emergence of this new form of fast-moving AI battlefield management systems. It is perhaps opportune that we are having this debate today, within just a week of the aggressive Iranian attack on Israel, diffused by the effective use of AWS. The power of AI systems applied to battlefield management has been powerfully demonstrated by Ukraine, in its continuing war with Russia, harnessing the limited resources provided by the West. We are, clearly, in a new form of arms race, with nations seeking superiority in military AI technologies.
I find it alarming that, in his recent Budget, the Chancellor made no provision for increased military expenditure. I refer to the very pertinent point made by my noble and gallant friend Lord Houghton of Richmond, who referred to defence as being impoverished. I also could not find any statistics on the percentage of the defence budget that will be allocated to the development of AI weaponry.
Page 70 of the report, and the Financial Times a few days ago, draws reference to the fact that the European Parliament has taken a far tougher approach to the regulation of AI weaponry systems than the UK. Many commentators believe that overregulation is counterproductive to innovation in the sector. There is, of course, the risk of singularity. Singularity refers to the possibility of computer intelligence surpassing that of humans, but this is unlikely in the short term. We need to harness and promote innovation.
Much has been written in this report on the different spectrums of autonomy. The prospect of fully autonomous weapons capable of making lethal decisions without human intervention raises questions of accountability, morality and compliance with international law.
AI warfare is so much more complex than traditional war, and I am no expert in the military field. AI has the capability to shape new realities, generate deepfakes or even show false videos of masked surrender to lower battlefield morale. This was referred to on page 38 of the report as “intelligentised”—I can hardly pronounce the word—warfare. Clearly, the nature of warfare is continually being redefined.
As several noble Lords have mentioned, AI algorithms have the ability to enhance the accuracy and reliability of missile systems and other precision-guided munitions, facilitating strike capability with reduced collateral damage. Time precludes me delving into the subject of cybersecurity risks and the malfunction of lethal weapon systems, which was referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Hamilton.
The future landscape of AI in weapon systems will depend significantly on international co-operation, regulatory frameworks and ongoing dialogues on ethical standards and accountability mechanisms. Balancing technological advancements with responsible use will be paramount in ensuring global security and stability.
There is no doubt that AI weapon systems are having and will continue to have profound implications for future warfare by enhancing capability but also challenges. I welcome the report, but I hope that the Minister in winding up can give us assurances that the Government will give a lot more focus to funding this important sector.
Lord Clement-Jones (LD)
My Lords, I add to the congratulations to the noble Lord, Lord Lisvane, on his excellent chairing of the committee and his outstanding introduction today. I thank the staff and advisers of the committee, who made an outstanding contribution to the report. It has been a pleasure hearing the contributions today. I add my thanks to the military who hosted us at the Permanent Joint Headquarters, at Northwood, where we learned a huge amount as part of the inquiry.
Autonomous weapon systems present some of the most emotive and high-risk challenges posed by AI. We have heard a very interesting rehearsal of some of the issues surrounding use and possible benefits, but particularly the risks. I believe that the increasing use of drones in particular, potentially autonomously, in conflicts such as Libya, Syria and Ukraine and now by Iran and Israel, together with AI targeting systems such as Lavender, highlights the urgency of addressing the governance of weapon systems.
The implications of autonomous weapons systems—AWS—are far-reaching. There are serious risks to consider, such as escalation and proliferation of conflict, accountability and lack of accountability for actions, and cybersecurity vulnerabilities. The noble Baroness, Lady Hodgson, emphasised the negatives—the lack of empathy and kindness that humans are capable of in making military decisions. I thought it was interesting that the noble Earl, Lord Attlee, in a sense argued against himself, at the beginning of his contribution, on the kinds of actions that an AI might take which a human would not. There were issues mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord St John, as well, about misinformation and disinformation, which is a new kind of warfare.
Professor Stuart Russell, in his Reith lecture on this subject in 2021, painted a stark picture of the risks posed by scalable autonomous weapons capable of destruction on a mass scale. This chilling scenario underlines the urgency with which we must approach the regulation of AWS. The UK military sees AI as a priority for the future, with plans to integrate “boots and bots” to quote a senior military officer.
The UK integrated review of 2021 made lofty commitments to ethical AI development. Despite this and the near global consensus on the need to regulate AWS, the UK has not yet endorsed limitations on their use. The UK’s defence AI strategy and its associated policy statement, Ambitious, Safe, Responsible, acknowledged the line that should not be crossed regarding machines making combat decisions but lacked detail on where this line is drawn, raising ethical, legal and indeed moral concerns.
As we explored this complex landscape as a committee—as the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Houghton, said, it was quite a journey for many of us—we found that, while the term AWS is frequently used, its definition is elusive. The inconsistency in how we define and understand AWS has significant implications for the development and governance of these technologies. However, the committee demonstrated that a working definition is possible, distinguishing between fully and partially autonomous systems. This is clearly still resisted by the Government, as their response has shown.
The current lack of definition allows for the assertion that the UK neither possesses nor intends to develop fully autonomous systems, but the deployment of autonomous systems raises questions about accountability, especially in relation to international humanitarian law. The Government emphasise the sufficiency of existing international humanitarian law while a human element in weapon deployment is retained. The Government have consistently stated that UK forces do not use systems that deploy lethal force without human involvement, and I welcome that.
Despite the UK’s reluctance to limit AWS, the UN and other states advocate for specific regulation. The UN Secretary-General, António Guterres, has called autonomous weapons with life-and-death decision-making powers “politically unacceptable, morally repugnant” and deserving of prohibition, yet an international agreement on limitation remains elusive.
In our view, the rapid development and deployment of AWS necessitates regulatory frameworks that address the myriad of challenges posed by these technologies. I was extremely interested to hear the views of the noble Lord, Lord Stevens, and others during the debate on the relationship between our own military and the private sector. That makes it even more important that we address the challenges posed by these technologies and ensure compliance with international law to maintain ethical standards and human oversight. I share the optimism of the noble Lord, Lord Holmes, that this is both possible and necessary.
Human rights organisations have urged the UK to lead in establishing new international law on autonomous weapon systems to address the current deadlock in conventional weapons conventions, and we should do so. There is a clear need for the UK to play an active role in shaping the nature of future military engagement.
A historic moment arrived last November with the UN’s first resolution on autonomous weapons, affirming the application of international law to these systems and setting the stage for further discussion at the UN General Assembly. The UK showed support for the UN resolution that begins consultations on these systems, which I very much welcome. The Government have committed also to explicitly ensure human control at all stages of an AWS’s life cycle. It is essential to have human control over the deployment of the system, to ensure both human moral agency and compliance with international humanitarian law.
However, the Government still have a number of questions to answer. Will they respond positively to the call by the UN Secretary-General and the International Committee of the Red Cross that a legally binding instrument be negotiated by states by 2026? How do the Government intend to engage at the Austrian Government’s conference “Humanity at the Crossroads”, which is taking place in Vienna at the end of this month? What is the Government’s assessment of the implications of the use of AI targeting systems under international humanitarian law? Can the Government clarify how new international law on AWS would be a threat to our defence interests? What factors are preventing the Government adopting a definition of AWS, as the noble Lord, Lord Lisvane, asked? What steps are being taken to ensure meaningful human involvement throughout the life cycle of AI-enabled military systems? Finally, will the Government continue discussions at the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons, and continue to build a common understanding of autonomous weapon systems and elements of the constraints that should be placed on them?
As the noble Lord, Lord Lisvane, started off by saying, the committee rightly warns that time is short for us to tackle the issues surrounding AWS. I hope the Government will pay close and urgent attention to its recommendations.
Baroness Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent (Lab)
My Lords, I remind your Lordships’ House of my register of interests, specifically my association with the Royal Navy.
I feel that I should start my contribution with an apology to the noble Lord, Lord Lisvane. When I joined your Lordship’s House, I was delighted to be appointed to the AI in Weapon Systems Committee and very much enjoyed my attendance. However, my work on the Front Bench did not allow me to fully participate, so I apologise that I was unable to remain on the noble Lord’s committee. I am, however, delighted to be responding on behalf of His Majesty’s Opposition to such a timely and considered report, and congratulate both the noble Lord, Lord Lisvane, and his committee on the report and today’s informed and challenging debate.
As has been highlighted throughout the debate, if we ever needed a reminder of the changing strategic environment within which we operate, we need only consider the use of drone warfare in both the Ukrainian theatre and the targeting of Israel by Iran at the weekend, compounded by events overnight. Technology is developing at speed, hybrid warfare is increasingly the norm, and consideration of autonomous weapons systems as part of our coterie of defensive platforms is no longer the exception. As the technology develops, the onus is therefore on us to ensure that we are considering the lethality and ethical impact of each new system and tool available to us, ensuring that any AI-enabled systems help to augment our defensive capabilities, not replace them, and that human decision-making remains at the core of every military action. This report has thoughtfully highlighted some of the key challenges this and any future Government will face when procuring and deploying new technology, and working with allies to ensure that our defensive platforms operate within the currently agreed norms.
Turning to the detail: in order to explore and manage an issue, it is vital that we can agree what we are talking about. Although I appreciate the Government’s concerns regarding a narrow definition and the potential legal pitfalls which may follow, the lack of an agreed definition must make conversations harder with partners, including industry. As the committee established, there is no internationally agreed definition of AWS currently in place with NATO allies and our Five Eyes partners. It is vital that, with our key allies, we seek to broadly define and agree the concept of AWS, if only to ensure clear communication channels as the technology develops—defence is rarely an ideal area for ambiguity. If a definition is considered unhelpful by the Government, would the Minister consider the adoption of an agreed framework in this area as an alternative?
“Artificial intelligence” is a fashionable term, and the impact of advanced machine learning is being considered in every field. For defence, the embrace of new technology is nothing new, and the use of machine learning has been a core part of the development of our capabilities during my lifetime. However useful machines are and however effective our technology becomes, the reality is that humans must always be accountable for the operations that our military undertakes. This is a necessary guarantee to ensure compliance with international humanitarian law, and I welcome the Government’s ongoing commitment to this premise. However, as this technology develops, can the Minister provide us with slightly more detail than was afforded by the Government’s response to this report? Specifically, what new processes are being considered by the department to ensure human accountability if some weapons systems are fully autonomous, as seems increasingly likely?
As the events of the past two years have made all too clear, we are living through a period of global turmoil that requires renewed consideration of our defence capabilities. No one in your Lordships’ House is seeking to undermine the efforts of the United Kingdom to defend itself and work with its allies; in fact, it is increasingly clear that a technological edge in defence capabilities, in concert with our allies, is as crucial to our doctrine of deterrence now as it ever has been. To that end, can the Minister update us on how the department plans to reform the procurement process in order to reflect the changing nature of the available technology? The committee recommends that the MoD’s procurement process should be revamped to be appropriate for the world of AI, and says that the current process lacks capability in software and data, which are essential to AI, and has limited expertise in the procurement of these platforms.
As the Minister will be aware, the Labour Party has pledged, if we are fortunate enough to form the next Government, to establish a fully functioning military strategic HQ within the MoD as a strategic authority over the capability that our Armed Forces must have and how it is procured, in order to make Britain better defended and fit to fight. We will also seek to create new strategic leadership in procurement by establishing a national armaments director. The NAD will be responsible to the strategic centre for ensuring that we have the capabilities needed to execute the defence plans and operations demanded by the new era. This role will be key to the development of a new procurement process, which will secure the platforms and technologies needed across all services as the strategic environment changes and will be core to the procurement plans under a future Labour Government, including the procurement of AI-enabled weapon systems.
So, although I welcome the fact that the Government have recognised the need for significant change to transform the MoD procurement process on this and every other issue in order to commission AI-ready platforms effectively, can the Minister update your Lordships’ House on the Government’s plans and how the MoD procurement process will be reformed to ensure that it has the capacity and expertise for the software and data procurement projects that are essential for developing AI?
In his Lancaster House speech earlier this year, the right honourable Grant Shapps MP stated that we are
“moving from a post war to a pre-war world”.
Given recent events and the range of hot conflict zones now impacting UK strategic interests, it is vital that we use every tool available to us to protect our national interest. This includes the use of AI and AWS; we just need to make sure that we always develop and deploy them in line with our shared value systems.
I thank the noble Lord, Lord Lisvane, and the committee for their thoughtful work and for ensuring that we have taken the time at the right juncture to consider how we will progress in defence as technology develops so rapidly.
The Minister of State, Ministry of Defence (The Earl of Minto) (Con)
My Lords, I am grateful to those present for their considered and, at times, heartfelt contributions to this debate. I am equally grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Lisvane, for bringing this debate to the House and for his excellent opening remarks; and to the entire committee for its informative report on artificial intelligence in weapon systems, which was published at the end of last year and which the Government have considered and contributed to most seriously.
As many noble Lords will be aware, the Government published their formal response to the committee’s recommendations in February. They concurred with the committee’s advice, as a number of noble Lords pointed out, to proceed with caution in this domain. As we have heard today, all sides of this House appreciate that artificial intelligence will be transformative in many ways—a balance of risk and opportunity.
For defence, we can already start to see the influence of artificial intelligence in planning operations, in the analysis of vast quantities of data and imagery, in protecting our people, in the lethality of our weaponry and, crucially, in keeping both our Armed Forces and innocent civilians out of harm’s way.
Take the example of revolutionising the efficacy of CCTV, and surveillance more broadly, in removing the serious levels of risk in bomb or mine disposal, or in refining the pinpoint accuracy of a military strike specifically to avoid collateral damage, as the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Houghton, identified. In this fast-evolving sector, as the noble Lord, Lord Hamilton, and the noble Baroness, Lady Hodgson, also rightly pointed out, it is essential that our Armed Forces are able to embrace emerging advances, drive efficiencies and maintain a technological edge over our adversaries who, noble Lords can be sure, will be pursuing the opportunity with vigour.
The MoD has established the Defence AI Centre to spearhead this critical work, bringing together experts from its strategic command centre in Northwood, its Defence Equipment and Support body in Bristol, and its science and technology laboratories near Salisbury, alongside a broad range of industry and academia: a genuine government and private sector partnership of significant potential.
The MoD also has some 250 projects either already under way or imminently starting work, and has tripled investment in artificial intelligence-specific research over the last three years, reaching more than £54 million in the last financial year. It is £115 million directly over the last three years, to answer the question from the noble Lord, Lord St John of Bletso.
AI is an enabling component, not a capability per se. It is contained within so many capabilities that, probably, the investment is nearer to about £400 million in activities outside raw research.
Evidently, the potential of artificial intelligence in defence will continue to raise myriad technical, ethical and legal questions and challenges. This Government will continue to work through these judiciously, with as much transparency and consultation as possible, within the obvious national security constraints. To guide its work and its use of artificial intelligence in any form, defence is governed by clear ethical and legal principles. In June 2022, defence published its defence AI strategy alongside our “Ambitious, safe, responsible” policy statement, which set out those principles. We were one of the first nations to publish our approach to AI transparently in this way.
To inform our development of appropriate policies and control frameworks, we are neither complacent nor blinkered. The MoD regularly engages with a wide range of experts and civil society representatives to understand different perspectives. Equally, it takes the views expressed in this House and the other place most seriously.
To categorically reassure noble Lords, the British Ministry of Defence will always have context-appropriate human involvement and, therefore, meaningful human control, responsibility and accountability. We know, however, that other nations have not made similar commitments and may seek to use these new technologies irresponsibly. In response to this, we are pushing and pursuing a two-pronged approach. First, the UK is working with its allies and international partners to develop and champion a set of norms and standards for responsible military AI, grounded in the core principles of international humanitarian law. Secondly, we are working to identify and attribute any dangerous use of military AI, therefore holding those irresponsible parties to account.
I realise that the question of how and whether to define autonomous weapons systems is extremely sensitive. The noble Lords, Lord Lisvane and Lord Clement-Jones, and the noble Lord, Lord Browne of Ladyton, who is no longer in his place, have raised this matter. These systems are already governed by international humanitarian law so, unfortunately, defining them will not strengthen their lawful use. Indeed, it is foreseeable that, in international negotiations, those who wilfully disregard international law and norms could use a definition to constrain the capabilities and legitimate research of responsible nations. It is also for that reason that, after sincere and deep consideration, we do not support the committee’s call for a swift agreement of an effective international instrument on lethal autonomous weapons systems—that would be a gift to our adversaries. However, I must emphasise that this Government will work tirelessly with allies to provide global leadership on the responsible use of AI.
On the question of fully autonomous weapons, we have been clear that we do not possess fully autonomous weapons systems and have no intention of developing them. On the very serious issue of autonomous nuclear weapons, which is understandably a troubling thought, as identified by a number of noble Lords, specifically the noble Lords, Lord Lisvane and Lord Hamilton, we call on all other nuclear states to match our commitment to always maintaining human political control over nuclear capabilities.
We will continue to shape international discussions on norms and standards, remaining an active and influential participant in international dialogues to regulate autonomous weapons systems, particularly the UN group of governmental experts under the scope of the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons, which we believe is the most appropriate international forum to advance co-operation on these issues.
International compliance will continue to be paramount, as the noble Earl, Lord Erroll, brought attention to and the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, mentioned. I will write in detail about the many questions that he asked about this specific point; I am afraid we just do not have the time now.
We believe the key safeguard over military AI is not a definition or document but, instead, ensuring human involvement throughout the life cycle. The noble Lords, Lord Lisvane and Lord Clement-Jones, and the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Houghton, rightly raised that issue. What that looks like in practice varies from system to system and on the environment in which they are deployed. That means every defence activity with an AI component must be subject to rigorous planning and control by suitably trained, qualified and experienced people to ensure that we meet our military objectives in full compliance with international humanitarian law, as well as all our other legal obligations.
This year we will publish governance, accountability and reporting mechanisms. We will build challenge into our processes and input from outside experts in the form of an independent ethics panel. The MoD accepts the committee’s recommendation to increase the transparency of that panel’s advice, and we have just published the minutes of all six previous advisory panel meetings on GOV.UK, alongside the panel’s membership and terms of reference. We are also re-examining the role and options for the ethics advisory panel to include the views of more external experts in sensitive cases.
The committee made a number of recommendations around expertise, training, recruitment and pay, and quite rightly so. The MoD offers some unique opportunities for people interested in national and international security, but we are far from taking this for granted. We have accepted recommendations for the Haythornthwaite review, which will be familiar to many in the House and the other place, to enable any new joiners the option of careers that zigzag between regulars and reserves and, importantly, between the public and private sectors.
This is a highly attractive and highly competitive market, as outlined by a number of noble Lords, in the widest context. We are taking a range of additional steps to make defence AI an attractive and aspirational choice. We are looking at recruitment, retention and reward allowances, developing new ways to identify and incubate existing AI talent within our ranks, and developing new partnerships with private sector companies of whatever company size—particularly SMEs, because they are particularly strong in this area—to encourage more exchanges of expertise.
I also point out that my honourable friend the Minister for Defence Procurement is alive to this issue and has been driving substantial reform through the integrated procurement model, injecting agility and challenge into a system that I think everybody accepts needs considerable work. We will also shortly appoint a capability lead for AI talent and skills to drive this work forward in partnership with the frontline commands and our enabling organisations.
The committee also made a number of eminently sensible recommendations around testing of AI systems and operators. The MoD already has effective processes and procedures in place to ensure that new or novel military capabilities are safe and secure and operate as intended. As the noble Lord, Lord Stevens, illustrated, trial and risk appetite is an important aspect of consideration. We will ensure these are reviewed and updated as necessary as we integrate AI technologies into our armoury.
The Government are committed to providing as much transparency as possible around defence AI investment to aid public and parliamentary scrutiny. However, AI is always going to be an enabling component of much broader systems and programs. It can therefore be very difficult to isolate and quantify the cost of the AI element separate to the wider system. However, we are exploring solutions in the medium term that may give a better picture of specific and overall AI spending and investment across defence.
In conclusion, the department welcomes the overarching conclusions of the committee and the very wise advice to “proceed with caution”. We are determined to use AI to preserve the strategic edge, but we are equally committed to do so responsibly and in conformity with our values and obligations. Defence has a proven track record of integrating new technologies across the UK Armed Forces, and we should meet this one head-on. While we recognise that the adoption of AI will raise many new challenges, we believe that being open to challenge ourselves, including from Parliament, is an important part of the way forward.
Lord Lisvane (CB)
My Lords, 3 pm on a Friday afternoon is not a particularly auspicious time for a long final spot, but I am extremely grateful to noble Lords on all sides of the House who have taken part in the debate. Their interest, views and expertise have made this a very valuable proceeding. I am extremely grateful for the kind remarks from many about the committee’s work. I especially thank the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, whose idea it originally was that the committee should be set up. I hope that he is pleased with the result.
I am also grateful to the Minister for some positive announcements made during his speech, although he will accept there are issues on which he and I will need to agree to disagree, at least for the time being. Finally, the importance of the subject and the speed of developments make it certain that your Lordships’ House will need to consider these matters again before long, and I look forward to the occasion.