Environment Bill

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Consideration of Commons amendments
Tuesday 26th October 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Teverson (LD)]

My Lords, I always think that ping-pong can be rather a brutal affair. I have spent months working on an amendment; the combined House of Commons comes back and says

“the provision made by the Amendment is unnecessary”—

and there we are, it has been written off. However, the House of Commons, in its wisdom, is absolutely right: the amendment was unnecessary because all it actually needed was for the Prime Minister and this Government to declare, as many local authorities have, a climate and biodiversity emergency. Therefore, I accept what the Minister has said. The Prime Minister in his foreword to the Net Zero Strategy—a document that we all welcome, although it is rather late, before COP 26—says:

“We will meet the global climate emergency”.


I truly welcome that; it is a shame in a way that he then says

“but not with panicked, short-term or self-destructive measures as some have urged.”

That somewhat takes the shine off it—but I accept that that declaration is there; it is by the Prime Minister and it is published in one of the most important documents that the Government have released in recent times, in the run-up to COP 26. However, I also point out that it does not include the biodiversity crisis, which is particularly pertinent to this Bill. The motive for this amendment was to give equality to both those emergencies, and to stress their interconnectedness—the vital relationship between the two.

However, that declaration is there. The other Motions that we are going to debate during this afternoon are, perhaps, of greater practical importance to the future of the environment, our country and our planet, so I shall not contest this. I thank the Minister and his officials for the conversations that we have had since passing the Bill in this House and today in finding ways in which to solve this area. I shall not contest this judgment, brutal as it was, by the House of Commons.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, and to agree with every word that he just said. I thank the Minister for his introduction to this debate and thank him and his officials for the very detailed and useful discussion this morning, particularly with such a lively avian accompaniment.

I shall take a second to reflect on the place of your Lordships’ House. I had a discussion a couple of days ago with a Cross-Bench Peer for whom I have the greatest respect, who expressed great frustration at the huge amount of work done in your Lordships’ House, which so often—as the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, has just said—gets casually dismissed in the other place. Yet we are so often told, “Oh, we can’t send too many things back to them; we can’t resist too hard; we’re the unelected House.” That, of course, raises a whole other question about the constitution. None the less I fear—and we have seen some cases of this already—that many of our strong, fine Peers are getting fed up and really considering whether they are going to continue to devote their time to your Lordships’ House. It is crucial that we recognise that we are in a different political time and that we are crucial to the future of this country, its environment and people, and we need to stand firm.

I have come under strong pressure, as I am sure many are aware, not to push forward with the soils amendment. Those looking closely will notice that I have not pushed forward with the same amendment as was sent to the other place. My amendment in lieu simply refers to soil quality rather than soil quality and soil health, as in the amendment sent to the other place. Health very often talks about the biology of the soil; quality is frequently used to refer to the structure. I am guided here particularly by the Sustainable Soils Alliance but also by academics, independent experts and farmers, who say that it is possible to use the metrics from the soil structure monitoring scheme to establish a target specifically for soil structure which would fit the definition of quality. As the Minister said on Report, targets can be iterative—they can be developed, evolved and finessed over time.

I acknowledge that the Minister here and those in the other place have spoken often and very clearly, and clearly are engaged with the issues of soil that are so crucial, but we all know that Ministers change. The only thing that will guarantee a way forward is with soil being on the face of the Bill. I put it to noble Lords that this Bill will be fundamentally deficient if we do not have soils there with equal weighting and place alongside air and water. I am afraid that the Minister in debate also said at one point that, if we were looking after air and water, we will sort of be looking after soils as well. I am afraid that very powerfully makes the argument for me—that soil risks falling into a second order unless it is given the same status.

I note that, in your Lordships’ House on Report, the margin by which this vote was won was equal top with that for the amendment on sewage tabled by the noble Duke, the Duke of Wellington. This was a very clear voice from your Lordships’ House on Report.

I also particularly wish to acknowledge the very strong efforts in this area by the noble Earl, Lord Caithness, who has done a tremendous job and has seen some steps forward from the Government. But those steps are still not enough.

I finish, given the pressure of time, by noting that I do not believe that the amendments we are looking at today are either/or. All the amendments that have been retabled today are crucial. My noble friend Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb will address interim targets in more detail, but I stress that that is crucial as well. I also want to acknowledge the efforts of the noble Lord, Lord Deben, and the noble Baroness, Lady Brown, in supporting my amendment last time. I urge your Lordships to show that we are really here to make a difference. I give notice of my intention to push this Motion to a vote.

[The Earl of Caithness (Con)]

My Lords, I rise to support the amendment on soil from the noble Baroness who has just spoken. This is a crucial issue. But first I want to ask my noble friend the Minister a question about what he said when he introduced the discussion on this. He quoted the Prime Minister, who said that there is a climate crisis that will be solved but not by panicked measures. That seemed to indicate that he thought some of the amendments put forward by this House were “panicked measures.” If that is the case, I would be grateful if my noble friend could tell us which of these amendments, which we so carefully debated in Committee and on Report, could be classed as a “panicked measure”.

The noble Lord, Lord Teverson, was absolutely right to tell us that the Prime Minister did not acknowledge that there is a biodiversity crisis. One-quarter of the world’s biodiversity crisis is in the soil, and that is a major problem for us. There ought to be an alignment between the Environment Bill and the Agriculture Act. We got soil into the Agriculture Act and we were then told that that was not the right place for it and that it ought to go in the Environment Bill; now we have got to the Environment Bill and my noble friend tells us it is not necessary in this Bill. It is necessary in this Bill. It should be put into this Bill.

Only 0.4% of 1% of England’s environmental monitoring budget is spent on soil. That is derisory. Could my noble friend tell me what he anticipates that spend to be within one year and within five years? Soil is the basis of everything. The Game & Wildlife Conservation Trust, which has done a huge amount of research over many years on soil, says that we cannot reach net zero without dealing with soil. That has been taken up by the Climate Change Committee, which has said exactly the same thing, and even my noble friend the Minister has said that we cannot solve the problem without addressing soil; yet soil is not going to be in this Bill.

I remember my noble friend Lord Deben said something on Report to the effect of: unless it is in the Bill, it is not going to be done. At that stage, I backed my noble friend the Minister against my noble friend Lord Deben’s advice. This time, I back my noble friend Lord Deben and say that this ought to be in the Bill.

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Moved by

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle]

At end insert “, and do propose Amendment 2B in lieu—

2B: Clause 1, page 2, line 1, at end insert—
“(e) soil quality.””

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[Lord Cameron of Dillington (CB)]

My Lords, as someone who spoke passionately about the independence of the OEP at earlier stages of the Bill, I support my noble friend Lord Krebs in his amendment.

The OEP will be at the centre of our country’s new environmental future: post Brexit, post COP 26 and post COP 15. The world is changing fast, and I am pleased to say that, as the Minister mentioned earlier, we are slowly waking up to the environmental dangers we face and gradually—very gradually—moving in the right direction.

We all have great hopes for and expectations of the OEP, and within the nation’s ambitions to drive a cleaner, more sustainable and more biodiverse future, I cannot stress how important it is that we get the OEP right. The success or otherwise of everything in the Bill depends on it. At the moment, it still looks as though it will be a tool of the very department it should be overseeing, as has been mentioned.

Let us not forget that Defra is in charge of and funds our most important environmental bodies: Natural England and the Environment Agency. Even local authorities do much of their environmental work in partnership with Natural England and the Environment Agency, so the auditing and bringing to book of these, our most important environmental bodies, will be crucial. Sadly, in my experience of working with NDPBs within the Defra family, I believe this is unlikely to happen if Defra is allowed to exert undue influence over the OEP. As I said in debates at earlier stages, the OEP has not only to be independent but to be seen to be independent, and at the moment there is a severe danger that it will be neither.

This House’s views on the vital importance of the independence of the OEP have been expressed again and again by noble Lords from all sides of the House with much more eloquence than I can muster, so I will not go on, but I urge Defra, which originally fired the arrow of an independent OEP when Michael Gove was Secretary of State, to now let it fly. This is the department’s chance to do that.

This excellently crafted compromise amendment proposed by my noble friend Lord Krebs is, like all compromises, probably not to the satisfaction of all, but I strongly believe that the Government and all noble Lords should now grasp this opportunity to resolve the impasse and give us an OEP we can be proud of by voting for my noble friend’s Motion F1.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lord, extremely briefly, I offer the Green group’s support for all the opposition amendments in this group. On Motion E1, I have a question for the Minister. Will he acknowledge to the House that we cannot keep the same mantra of “It is either deal with climate change or deal with national security” and acknowledge that, as the integrated review says, the climate emergency is the number one threat that the Government should be focused on internationally?

On introducing this debate on Motions F1 and G1, the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, said that he was not commenting on any individual involved in the OEP. I shall comment on individuals, to note the two noble Lords moving those Motions and urge noble Lords to support those extremely distinguished Members of our House in their area of absolute expertise and get behind them.

[Lord Mackay of Clashfern (Con)]

My Lords, when these amendments were dealt with in the House of Commons, the Minister said that she was very satisfied to have the office of environmental protection independent. That is what I want, and I believe that that is what the Government want, but she went on to say that the Secretary of State will be accountable for the OEP. I am in difficulty about the precise nature of that accountability. This is not the easiest question to answer, so I gave notice this morning that I proposed to ask it, so that my noble friend might have an opportunity, if he wished, to think it over. Obviously, the Minister dealing with this in the House of Commons must have had an idea in mind.

This arises in connection with the giving of instructions. The strange thing about the instructions and guidance is that the guidance does not need to be followed. It has to be seen by the Houses of Parliament before it passes, but once it is passed, it need not be performed. To my mind, that is a rather exceptional situation. Why should Parliament be asked to study carefully what the department—the Secretary of State—is proposing but then the organisation that is to receive the instructions need do nothing about it? That is a remarkable situation, but it ties into the idea of the accountability of the Secretary of State for this independent body.

I should be glad to know precisely how this operation is supposed to work. How is the Secretary of State responsible, apart from saying that the OEP is independent and he must secure that at all costs? If that is all, very good, but I suspect that the Minister in the Commons was thinking of something a little more complicated than that, and I hope the Minister can explain it to us in due course.

I think that the Motions in the names of the noble Lords, Lord Krebs and Lord Anderson, are pretty essential to the working of this arrangement, but the principal fact that I wish established is that the OEP should be independent, as the Minister said in the House of Commons.

Social Security (Up-rating of Benefits) Bill

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 26th October 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I begin by apologising to your Lordships for not taking part in Second Reading due to the volume of Bills currently before your Lordships’ House.

I will be very brief. I rise to offer the Green group’s support for the intention of all these amendments. I express my pleasure in following the noble Baroness, Lady Drake, and stress her point that we are not talking about a contest between generations here. There are some very poor people among our older communities, and they deserve not to live in poverty, but that does not mean taking money away from the young. I also stress the point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Wheatcroft, about how pensioner poverty is rising and that we should have a society where no pensioner is living in poverty.

I particularly want to address Amendment 3, which is the one I would most like to have attached my name to, had there been space. It is crucial: pension credit gets so many people to at least a basically decent, not awful, standard of living, but the fact is that that is useful only if you actually get it. I had a conversation—or a debate—with the Minister about a year ago. At that stage, the rate of pension credit take-up was 60%; that meant about a million pensioners were not receiving pension credit who would have been entitled to it. That was money the Government were not paying out—about £3 billion. It was estimated that it was costing the NHS and social care a spend of £4 billion. So not paying pension credit is actually costing the Government money. Can the Minister now—or later in writing, sharing it with other Peers—update me, a year later, on whether those figures still hold? Have the Government planned, as they did not plan a year ago, a programme to promote pension credit to ensure that those who are entitled to it take it up?

[Baroness Janke (LD)]

My Lords, as the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, says, all these amendments seek to protect pensioners against price increases during a temporary suspension of the triple lock. I very much welcome the proposals made in Amendments 1, 2 and 3, and particularly welcome the proposal to include pension credit in the link with earnings.

I want to speak to Amendment 4 in my name, which seeks to base the uplift on the predicted increase as forecast by the Bank of England for April 2022. My amendment proposes that, as the pension increase will be in April 2022 and the previous pension increase was in April 2021, the best measure would surely be price increases between those two dates.

Circumstances have changed considerably since the Bill completed its passage through the Commons, including rising costs, rising inflation, unreliability of supply chains and the various pressures brought about by those circumstances. While we do not know what inflation will be by next April, there is plenty of reason to think that it will be higher than currently—that is sadly what the Bank of England thinks. For example, the energy cap went up 12% on 1 October, and is expected to go up again next April. I do not think the Government should be happy that these cost rises are not included in the inflation figure that they have used.

We know that pensioners, and older pensioners in particular, tend to spend more time at home and feel the cold more, and so energy bills tend to be a higher share of their household budgets. Given soaring energy costs, pensioner inflation is likely to be higher than average inflation. This is another reason to think that just linking to September’s average figure, when setting the state pension rate, is the answer to the wrong question. I know that some Members will think that using a forecast is not as robust as using an outturn, but this legislation is only for one year, so really we are not setting a precedent. In fact, I am reliably informed that, in the 1980s, the DWP used to use forecast inflation for benefit uprating.

Mention was made in the previous debate of the need to implement the new rates as quickly as possible. This really does not take as long, in this day and age; there are processes in place to make it much easier. Surely it would not take long for the preferred body—the Bank of England or the OBR—to come up with an inflation forecast; presumably the Budget will bring new inflation forecasts in any case.

If the Government are committed to protecting pensioners against rising prices when they set the pension in 2022, they should see that this is a more transparent, easily understood method of ensuring that pensioners are protected against the expected rise in prices, costs and pressures in the year ahead.

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[Lord Davies of Brixton (Lab)]

My Lords, I am pleased to speak in support of my noble friend Lord Sikka and in favour of retaining the existing legislative provisions by leaving out Clause 1 entirely. As the noble Baroness said, it is about whether Clause 1 should appear in the Bill at all. Clearly, to leave it out would vitiate the entire Bill but it would invite the House of Commons to think again, which is the primary role of this House. The intention now is to enable those of us who believe it would be reasonable and right to go for the full 8.3% increase that the Government have stated is the appropriate figure to debate it.

The triple lock has come in for some criticism. It does not enjoy universal support. I understand some of those criticisms and perhaps, in a perfect world, it should not be necessary. We would like to live in a world where pensioners would simply share in the same increases in living standards as those enjoyed by the working population. This is not where we are. For me, the triple lock serves a dual purpose. First, it is needed to protect pensioners’ living standards. Secondly, and in some ways more importantly, it is a way of increasing the flat-rate benefits towards a more adequate level. I am glad to say that I do not have to expound at length on that point because the case has been made so clearly by my noble friend Lady Drake. It is an accelerator which will project the basic pension to a more adequate level.

What is clear is that it is not at an adequate level at present, which is why what is described as the “ratchet effect” of the triple lock is so important; of course, the same would be true of a double lock, based on prices and earnings, which is why we shall return in a moment to the important role of the 2.5% element. Introduced as a political fix at a time when inflation was somewhat higher than it has been for most of the last decade, it has turned out to be of real benefit to pensioners.

As was so clearly explained by my noble friend Lady Drake, the job of the triple lock is not just to protect pensioners in relation to earnings and prices; it is, over time, to achieve real increase in their incomes when measured against either of these indices. As I have said before, it is an inherent feature of the triple lock, not a bug. Whether you agree depends on whether you think the state basic pension or the new state pension are currently high enough. If you think they are, you might consider that we do not need the triple lock, but if you want to see them increase, as I do, the triple lock has a proven track record of gaining ground on that objective. The triple lock may not be pretty, but experience has shown us that it works. During periods when the triple lock—or, in the case in the long-distant past of the 1974-79 Labour Government, a double lock—has applied, we have seen a consistent incremental move of the state flat-rate pension towards a more adequate level.

The element of the triple lock that has attracted most criticism, not least from my noble friend Lady Lister, is the 2.5% minimum increase. It has been said that it is arbitrary and without any justification. Maybe, but so are many other figures in legislation. When we analyse the real increase that pensioners have benefited from since 2011 with the triple lock, almost half the improvement has been due to the 2.5% element. To me, that in itself justifies its inclusion. Does anyone here believe that the basic state pension should be 18% of earnings rather than 19%? It might not sound like much but, to the poorest pensioners, everything counts.

Perhaps we need a debate about what level of flat-rate state pension we need and what the target should be when we have a ratchet effect. I would favour a commission to address the issue, building on the work of the earlier Pensions Commission, which set out the present structure of pension provision in this country. The commission itself did not feel able to specify with any precision what the basic pension should be in earnings terms, but the structure it established depends as much on the level of the flat-rate element as it does on the pension produced by automatic enrolment. I am pleased, therefore, to see that more work is being done in this area, through initiatives such as those from the Living Wage Foundation and the Pension and Lifetime Savings Association, with its retirement living standards.

Particularly given the hour, now is not the time to have a full-scale debate on the conclusions of that work, although it would be valuable to do so when appropriate. What is clear from the work that has been undertaken is that 19% is not nearly enough; it is well short even of the 26% that was attained back in 1979. These benefits are not just inadequate; there is a long way to go before they can become adequate. Consequently, we definitely still need a triple lock and its ratchet effect, and I would be prepared to see something better and faster replace it. That brings us to the increases due in 2022, as determined by this Bill. I believe that we can and should stick to the triple lock, as provided in the legislation, which means the 8.3% increase. Taking the increases to be made in 2021, 2022 and 2023, this provides an ideal opportunity to achieve a significant increase in flat-rate pensions towards a more adequate level in the longer term, which can only be a good thing.

It will no doubt be pointed out that this would have to be paid for, with the figure of £5 billion per annum being quoted. My noble friend Lord Sikka has dealt with that but, for the purposes of today’s debate, I simply say that I support increases in general taxation on those with the broadest shoulders to meet this clear social need, with the obvious target of equalising what I still think of, in the old terminology, as unearned income, rather than earned income. I believe that this would best be done by the restoration of the Treasury’s supplement to the National Insurance Fund, for which there is already provision in legislation.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lords, Lord Sikka and Lord Davies of Brixton. Given the hour, I will be brief. I very much endorse the comments of the noble Lord, Lord Davies, about this Clause 1 stand part debate seeking to ask the other place to think again, and indeed to ask your Lordships’ House to debate this.

I would be more radical than either noble Lord who preceded me. I believe that the state pension should be set at a level where no pensioner is living in poverty—that is looking at the relative poverty levels, as outlined and widely discussed by the noble Baroness, Lady Lister. That would mean abolishing the contributory principle. Our debate tonight has demonstrated how discriminatory and actively massively unfair that is—because, as worked through now, it largely acknowledges only contributions through paid work. We know that many people, particularly women, make huge contributions to our entire society and future through care, community work and other activities which are simply not recognised in our pension system. This is leaving huge numbers, particularly of women, in a state of living that our whole society should regard as not acceptable.

I agree again with the noble Lord, Lord Davies, that the triple lock is far from perfect. We have talked about heating costs. Of course, another way in which we have very much failed our pensioners is the quality of the housing stock that they are living in. Reference has been made to the quality of council housing, but we also have a huge problem with more and more pensioners now living in private housing due to the huge privatisation of our housing stock through right to buy. Those people are living in extremely poor conditions and are placed in very difficult circumstances in that housing.

I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Sikka, that the cost of not going forward with ending the triple lock for this year—£4.7 billion—is very modest in the overall scheme of things. We have bailed out the banks. When Covid-19 hit, we bailed out many businesses. Surely we should look to bail out our pensioners.

I finish by noting that, when we talk about £14 a week, I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Sikka. There is a relatively small number of people in our society for whom £14 a week is small change, but there are very large numbers of people and pensioners for whom it is literally a matter of life and death. I invite noble Lords to consider our excess winter deaths, many of which occur among pensioners.

[Baroness Sherlock (Lab)]

I will be very brief. I thank my noble friend Lord Sikka for introducing this debate. We all share an underlying concern about the living conditions for poorer pensioners. I will not dwell on pensioner poverty; I made a perfectly long—arguably overlong—speech on the last group of amendments about this very subject.

Because the Bill has only two clauses and Clause 2 is the commencement clause, I suspect that, in coming back, the Minister will be tempted to focus on the fact that this may be regarded as a wrecking amendment because it would remove the entire contents of the Bill. We on this side accept that there is a difficulty in looking at and using the data for the earnings measure without adjustment, so that is not the position that we are in. I encourage her, when she responds, to answer and speak to the underlying concerns about pensioner poverty that have been expressed noble Lords, and perhaps give some assurance to the House about how the Government will tackle that, as well as looking at the immediate issue.

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[Lord Crisp (CB)]

My Lords, I, too, congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Stroud, for bringing this amendment to the House, together with the noble Lord, Lord Freud, and other noble Lords. They have done it in entirely the appropriate way, in recognition that there is a Budget tomorrow and other opportunities to take this whole debate forward. I have been very struck by the arguments on both sides and how well they were balanced and expressed. But I take the point of the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson, that the rules may not be quite as clear cut as they appear to be, that people will bend, expand or do something with the envelope as they see fit, and that this area needs much more discussion. I particularly agree with him on the planning laws, for example.

I want to make one substantive point which I do not think has been made yet, about the effect of this cut on health. I spent a lot of time recently in some of the poorer communities in the country working on health. In doing so, I have recognised, as we all have, the fragility of some people’s lives and the balances they need to strike to make things work. This may well knock many people on into poverty, as the noble Baroness has said. It will have an impact on physical and mental health and on other public services, and it will be damaging in the long term for society, not just for the people involved.

We have already heard one great paradox: how costly it is to be poor, and how you pay more. There is another great paradox, which is that quite a lot of cost-saving measures end up costing other budgets rather more.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I rise to make three brief points. I wish first to join other noble Lords in paying tribute to the noble Baroness, Lady Stroud, who has shown real bravery and great leadership this evening in moving these amendments from the Government Benches, and to the noble Lord, Lord Freud, for doing likewise. I commend the others who have supported them.

My second point is constitutional and builds on what the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson, said. Noble Lords may know from history that there has been a real shift in attitudes towards innovation. In the Middle Ages, innovation was a slur, a way of attacking people, whereas in the modern world we think of it as being a wonderful thing. The Government like to celebrate innovations. We have seen lots of innovations in our constitution from the Government, but they do not seem to like what they see as other people’s innovations— even though the noble Baroness, Lady Stroud, clearly set out a number of precedents to show that what she and others are doing here is not an innovation at all.

I want to go back a considerable number of hours to the Environment Bill. Noble Lords who have covered both Bills may have seen the noble Duke, the Duke of Wellington, a Cross-Bencher and hereditary Peer, lead a very cross-party charge, to the point where the Government eventually reversed their position—crucially, after there had been a huge public outcry about water treatment and water companies dumping sewage into our rivers and oceans.

This is a weird situation arising from our dysfunctional constitution and centuries of historical accident; but it was the House of Lords that enabled the people to speak and express their views in a way that eventually changed the minds of MPs. Were your Lordships’ House to go forward from this point and enable these debates, I have no doubt that the people of this country, the voters, would speak loudly and clearly through social media, letters and phone calls to their MPs about their very strong views on the £20 universal credit uplift. Your Lordships’ House could have the opportunity to make that happen. That, I would argue, would be intensely democratic.

My third point is very brief. The Minister, sitting beside the Leader of the House, knows that the circumstances of universal credit, its inadequacy, low wages, insecure employment and zero-hours contracts have given me many opportunities to plague her by talking about a universal basic income. The noble Baroness, Lady Lister, and many others have made hugely powerful points about the dreadful human impacts of the cut to universal credit, but I ask your Lordships to consider whether you believe in the human right to life. The right to life implies access to food, shelter, heating in winter and the basics of security, and that is what this amendment is about. We are talking about basic universal human rights, and that surely has to be a matter for your Lordships’ House.

[Lord Porter of Spalding (Con)]

My Lords, I have not spoken in this House for close on two years—18 months at least—through Covid. I was not intending to speak today because of the Environment Bill coming through and the things that I personally disagree with that were in it, which none of us has covered.

I have listened to my noble friends on this side in bringing forward this amendment. I understand the argument that this is the wrong place to bring through a technical argument that is in the wrong place, but, surely, we have all said that taking money away from our poorest people at this point in time and in where our communities are going is the wrong thing to do. We all know that the £20 uplift was a temporary arrangement to get our poorest people through Covid. As a country, we have not got through Covid; we are in the worst part of Covid’s impacts on our community. So I am hopeful that tomorrow the Chancellor, because he cares about our people in our country, will bring in some measures that alleviate the worst impacts of Covid on our poorest people.

But we cannot overturn all of those rules and regulations that all of you clever people understand about how this place is supposed to work. We cannot break the rules to introduce an amendment that cannot be bolted on, or else we will turn every piece of legislation into a Christmas tree. I will be the worst person in this House for doing this. Every time that you bring something through that I do not like the look of, I will put another bauble on it. That is what we are risking tonight.

I am pleased that my noble friends, who passionately care about this issue, have said that they will not press this to a Division. We must be ready to give a voice to the people outside of this Chamber, if the Government do not understand the seriousness of that return to a previous set of benefits. I will not call it a cut because it is not one; it was a temporary bringing in of alleviation for a problem. The problem has not gone away, and we must try to convince the Government that they need to slowly reduce that alleviation or, at least, re-evaluate what universal credit is supposed to be about. It is supposed to be about making sure that everyone has a decent standard of living and that, if they can work, they go to work and work harder to get more money: “If you can’t work, don’t go to work; we will look after you. But if you don’t want to go to work, we won’t look after you.” That surely has to be part of that conversation. The benefit bill should be for those who need us most. They are our friends, neighbours and families; we should look after them.

I do not see that 11.45 pm is the right time to speak much longer, even though it is the first time that I have spoken for a long time. I am sorry.

Environment Bill

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Report stage
Wednesday 15th September 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Krebs (CB)]

My Lords, the amendment is in my name together with those of the noble Baronesses, Lady Parminter, Lady Jones of Whitchurch and Lady Bennett of Manor Castle.

The amendment replaces four amendments that we debated in Committee. It has the same intent as those four amendments: to ensure that the Secretary of State cannot amend the habitats regulations without due process and constraints.

Bearing in mind the admonition we recently heard, let me recap very briefly. The habitats regulations protect our most valuable conservation sites, habitats and species. While these sites account for only a modest proportion of our land and marine area, they certainly punch well above their weight when it comes to protection of species. Unlike the targets in Clause 3, which apply to the country as a whole, the habitats regulations refer to specific places. This is an important distinction.

Clauses 108 and 109 allow the Secretary of State to amend these regulations, and they do not give enough safeguards to ensure that our most valuable habitats will be protected in future. Amendment 99 would provide those safeguards, stating explicitly that any changes to the habitat regulations would not breach any of our international obligations, would contribute to enhancing the conservation of habitat sites and species and would not reduce current levels of protection. It would also require the Government to consult the appropriate statutory expert bodies and other relevant experts. In short, it places in the Bill the commitments that the Government have already made in debate in Committee, when the Minister reassured us on every point.

So what is not to like? The Minister told us that key reasons for Clauses 108 and 109 were contributing to “international obligations” and ensuring

“our protected sites can be restored to good condition”.

This is made clear in Amendment 99. He also told us that the powers in these clauses would be used only to strengthen environmental protection. However, as it stands this would be a test of the Secretary of State being satisfied that protections are not reduced. Although the Minister described this as a “high bar”, it is a subjective judgment. Amendment 99 would replace this subjective test, whereby Ministers mark their own homework, with an objective requirement. The Minister pointed out that the Secretary of State’s judgment could be challenged in the courts, but that seems to me to be setting up a system that would generate money for lawyers and take up large amounts of time with uncertain outcomes. Why not simplify with Amendment 99?

The Minister said that the Government would consult the office for environmental protection before making any changes to the habitats regulations. Amendment 99 extends the consultation requirement to include other relevant bodies. He also referred to a review led by the noble Lord, Lord Benyon, but did not tell us who was consulted in this review and what its impact will be. Perhaps he can expand on this in his reply.

As I have already mentioned, a crucial difference between the habitats regulations and the Clause 3 commitments is that the habitats regulations protect particular sites, habitats and species, while the Clause 3 targets do not. The Minister told us that Clause 108 is

“designed to allow requirements to specify … protections for habitats and species”.—[Official Report, 12/7/2021; cols. 1620-1.]

However, this does not guarantee those protections. The Minister also told us in Committee that the habitats regulations had not worked. I am not sure to which studies he is referring, but the evidence, as I understand it, from peer-reviewed literature, is that protected species fare better in countries where protection of the kind provided by the habitats regulations is most extensive and long-standing. This is not to say that things could not be improved. However, the Minister did not give us specific examples of how the powers of Clauses 108 and 109 would lead to an improvement. In fact, we heard from the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe, that this was a post-Brexit opportunity to cut red tape and bureaucracy—hardly a reassuring message.

In summary, I have not heard any convincing arguments against the habitats regulations being maintained, and Amendment 99 will ensure that any changes in future will strengthen rather than weaken them. I very much look forward to what the Minister has to say in his reply but, as things stand, I would wish to test the opinion of the House on this crucial amendment. I beg to move.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, your Lordships’ House will hear from me a great deal later on, so I will be very brief in this contribution. I have attached my name to this amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, which of course has full cross-party and non-party backing. The noble Lord has set out an overwhelmingly powerful case for why we should have this amendment.

I make two comments. We were promised non-regression with Brexit, and this would restore some of the protections that we lost with Brexit and, more than non-regression, we were promised improvements. This is simply standing still, so the Government really must commit to this amendment.

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[Lord Hope of Craighead (CB)]

My Lords, I was very much in sympathy with similar amendments in Committee, but I have a feeling that this amendment presses the argument just a step too far.

Perhaps I can provide an answer to my noble friend Lord Hylton’s question. I sat on the committee that looked at the HS2 line to Crewe, and I can say to him that it would be impossible, because of veteran trees along the line, to carry out that development as was proposed.

One remembers that this amendment directs attention not only to ancient trees but to veterans. It also asks us to accept that every single tree

“must be retained within a development site, including a root protection area and appropriate buffer zone.”

One can think of development sites of great areas where that might just be possible, but there are many others where it would effectively extinguish the possibility of development. So I feel that this amendment, although very well intentioned—I am so much in sympathy with what the noble Baroness seeks to do—just presses it a little too far, with language that does not allow any latitude at all for exceptional cases.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I have to question the description given by the noble Lord, Lord Hylton, of HS2 as affecting a

“small area of ancient woodland”,

given that the Woodland Trust says that 108 areas of ancient woodland are at risk of “loss or damage”. However, it will probably please your Lordships’ House to know that I will not restart the HS2 debate at this moment.

I will focus on Amendment 100, to which we in the Green Party would have attached one of our names, had there been space. We are talking about something very ancient and precious, and we can make comparisons with cathedrals and indeed with your Lordships’ House. I was on the site of what is supposed to be the Norwich western link, standing at the base of an oak tree that was a sapling when Queen Elizabeth I was on the throne. An ancient woodland containing trees like that is comparable to your Lordships’ House or a cathedral. Think about the protections we offer to those and all the money we are thinking about putting in to preserving this building; we are in a different place on that.

We often think of ancient woodland as being out in the countryside somewhere. I want to be a little parochial and point out that Sheffield has 80 ancient woodlands within its boundary. I want to think and talk about the benefits to human health and well-being of having these ancient woodlands—indeed, London has some of them, and, when I lived here, I used to walk in them as well. They have enormous human health benefits that we have to take account of.

Returning to the subject of walking through ancient woodland in Sheffield or the threatened woodland in Norwich, we are talking about not just trees here but crucial, utterly irreplaceable habitats for bats and insects. These woodlands would have a chance truly to flourish without air pollution and other factors. Lichens and mosses—crucial, complex organisms that are absolutely foundational to rich, healthy ecosystems—depend on those ancient trees to thrive and indeed survive. So I commend both these amendments to your Lordships’ House, and I encourage the noble Baroness to press Amendment 100 in particular to a vote.

[Baroness Jones of Whitchurch (Lab)]

My Lords, I rise to speak in favour Amendment 100, in the name of my noble friend Lady Young of Old Scone, and Amendment 101 in my name and those of the noble Lords, Lord Krebs and Lord Teverson, and the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett. We regard both these amendments as important.

As I said in Committee, the Bill is woefully lacking in any reference to a tree strategy and the need to protect our existing woodland stock as well as to increase the percentage of England under tree cover. The only such reference in the Bill is to felling street trees, and although this is an important issue, the crucial importance of preserving our ancient woodland and the need to deliver the protection and expansion of trees in woodlands in the future is not recognised.

As noble Lords have said, a comprehensive strategy is important not just to enhance biodiversity but in order to play a crucial role in carbon capture and sequestration. This has been emphasised by the Committee on Climate Change, which has pointed out that the UK tree-planting effort has “consistently fallen below” the target needed to achieve net zero by 2050.

Of course, we recognise that the Government have produced a tree action plan, but it is non-statutory and lacks the clarity and targets to deliver the necessary transformation of our landscapes and to tackle climate change. This is why we believe that a tree strategy with statutory and interim targets should be in the Bill. It should include measures to guarantee the preservation of ancient woodland, an emphasis on broad-leaf native woodland and greater powers to protect trees from disease and pests by encouraging domestic nurseries to produce more resilient saplings. It should also recognise the importance of smaller woodlands in creating biodiverse nature corridors and enhancing public enjoyment at a local level—a point made by my noble friend Lord Whitty.

Although we welcome the Government’s commitment to planting 30,000 hectares a year by the end of this Parliament, the Minister will know all too well that non-statutory tree-planting targets have come and gone in the past, as the earlier promise to plant 11 million trees demonstrates. So, I hope that, when he responds, the Minister can explain why a statutory tree strategy is missing from the Bill when there are already a number of strategies for other parts of nature development in it.

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[The Earl of Dundee (Con)]

My Lords, I support my noble friend Lord Randall’s amendments, particularly Amendment 121. This would enable global footprint targets to be part of regulations. That in turn can give us much more confidence that we really will manage to stick to these necessary dates and deadlines.

In Committee, my noble friend the Minister pointed out that the Clause 1 power might be used to set a global footprint target. That is certainly helpful. However, the Bill is unclear about timescales. Within its current scope, long-term targets have to be for at least 15 years. As my noble friend Lord Randall just observed, the latter focus already becomes anomalous if, for example, targets cannot apply for a period less than 15 years, such as that until 2030, which is exactly by when we are told as a nation that we should reduce the United Kingdom’s global footprint by three-quarters.

Does my noble friend the Minister agree that while the implementation of Amendment 121 guards against slippage, putting these targets into regulations would also give a strong message internationally that, in this matter, the United Kingdom is committed to leading good practice?

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the three noble Lords who have already spoken on this group. They have given us a comprehensive explanation of why we need all these amendments. I shall speak chiefly to Amendment 121 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Randall, also signed by the noble Baroness, Lady Boycott, and the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, on the global footprint timetable. It has already been clearly set out why this amendment needs to pass: we need drastic action now.

A large number of amendments in Committee addressed the broader issues here. There was the call to look at not just resource efficiency but cutting total resource use in Part 1. There was the call to move towards the Treasury managing our economy for the purposes of people and planet, not chasing after growth that we cannot have more of on a finite planet. Your Lordships have heard the Government’s cries about their desire to progress the Bill quickly, so many of these amendments have not been put. They have been boiled down to some very clear, simple essentials that need to happen. I offer support for all these amendments.

The questions that the noble Lord, Lord Randall, asked were very clear and important, but I will address a direct question to the Minister on Schedule 17. It is crucial that Schedule 17 covers the main commodities driving global deforestation, so can he confirm that it will cover beef and leather, cocoa, palm oil, pulp and paper, rubber and soy? They are not currently defined in the schedule, and there is concern that any limits to the approach would utterly undermine the intentions expressed in this provision and by the Government.

I also want briefly to address Amendment 107 on the rights of indigenous people. We know that many of the parts of the world that still remain relatively pristine rely heavily on indigenous people to protect them, and how often their rights to do so and to live their lives are threatened by mining companies associated with us—often large multinationals with close ties to the UK. When one considers that and our historic legacy, as well as the impact of colonialism on those communities, we have a particular responsibility to ensure, practically and morally, that they are being listened to.

[Lord Teverson (LD)]

My Lords, I start by congratulating the noble Lord, Lord Randall, on his speech and his due diligence on this issue, which is crucial in terms of deforestation. We have the frustration whereby we want extraterritoriality, which we do not normally have in the UK, but we can influence some of these matters only through supply chains and our own British corporates. The United States seems to get away with extraterritoriality in relation to more or less everything. We do not have that privilege.

As regards this approach, I also like the reference to recognising indigenous people. It is clear and obvious that it is so much more effective to keep forests rather than start to regrow them. That is the other side of the coin, as it were, to the previous debate and perhaps is even more important. That is why these Benches are very much in favour of the system proposed—although one of the big challenges that we have faced regarding environmental regulation and the Bill is enforcement and making sure that the regulations that we make can operate and are policed. We have the FSC, the Forest Stewardship Council, which works okay but all of us know of instances of duplicity in the system—not in the work of the FSC itself but among those copying and wrongly branding products. That challenge remains, but that does not mean that we should not move ahead in these areas.

I want also to congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Randall, on his pioneering work on the global footprint. We have mentioned a number of areas but the Dasgupta review, sponsored by the Treasury, again stressed that in terms of natural capital we are extracting far more than we are putting back into the planet. I suspect that the noble Lord is not expecting the Minister to accept the amendment but I hope that the Government will do further work in this area. I agree strongly with a point that the noble Lord made: if we can become the leader of standards in this area, it would be incredibly important.

Lastly, I come to the amendments of the noble Baroness, Lady Meacher, on urgency. That is the word I hear from her and she is absolutely right. We have so little time in so many of these areas and here, through these amendments—which I hope the Government and the Minister will accept—we have an opportunity to wind up that urgency and start to make right what we need to do soon and so urgently.

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[Lord Carrington (CB)]

My Lords, I declare my interests as set out in the register.

I also want to speak about this interesting clause, which I have been scratching my head about for some time. The need for some top-down planning was clearly identified by Henry Dimbleby in the recent national food strategy report. However, top-down planning on its own and on the scale envisaged is not practical, as there is always a need for local factors to be considered at the same time. While there is some merit in the concept of focusing public funding on the right thing in the right place, it is neither realistic nor desirable to micromanage what happens right down to parish level. As food producers and environmental guardians, farmers and land managers should be at the core of any approach to developing a framework. A framework for land use should be about joining up policy on the ground, not dictating what is done on the land in a very prescriptive way. Any land-use framework should be positive and enabling—allowing land managers to deliver more from their land, whether for the environment, food or other economic activity—rather than negative and restrictive.

The most interesting objective of the clause recognises the need to consider agriculture and food production. Farmers and landowners have often asked for a more strategic approach to land use, particularly now that land may be taken out of production for carbon-offsetting purposes, housing or whatever, so a clause along these lines helps to deal with the issue. However, this clause has much wider ambitions that could greatly restrict the progression of farming and the diversification of farm businesses, let alone other rural businesses. Zoning would almost certainly make it harder or more expensive to get planning permission for a new or different enterprise.

A land-use framework can never succeed in circumstances where there are going to be changes in technology, climate conditions, consumer demand and business viability, to name just a few considerations, all of which could happen in very short order. Furthermore, there are also likely to be major, currently unforeseen implications for land values and tax considerations that need much more research. I therefore cannot support the amendment.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, in following the noble Lord, Lord Carrington, I have just tossed out more or less everything that I was going to say. I feel the need to respond to what he has just said, which I think is founded on the idea that each patch of land, each farm, is a discrete entity that has no real relationship to the entities around it. As is most obvious when we think about the climate emergency, the fact is that the carbon emitted from or stored on that land has global implications. That is very obvious in relation to flooding. I will not open up that debate, but certain land uses in this country are associated with large amounts of water runoff, and that has literally life-or-death implications for the communities downstream.

The noble Lord also referred to food production. We have to think about the food security of the UK in a world in which food security will become an increasing issue in the coming decades.

We have to think about systems holistically, and indeed we have signed up to do just that. Like all the nations in the world, we are a signatory to the sustainable development goals—a mix of economic, social and environmental goals—although we are not currently on track to deliver any single one of them. The question is: the Government have signed up to these goals, but how will they deliver them? Making sure that land is used well—not in a way that harms other people—surely has to be a foundational measure.

Environment Bill

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Wednesday 15th September 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I rise briefly to offer the Green group’s support for this amendment—there not being enough space, given the cross-party and non-party signatures already on it. I particularly compliment the noble Baroness, Lady Boycott, on her comprehensive introduction, and the following two speakers on their excellent additions to it.

The noble Earl, Lord Caithness, made a point about processed food, particularly ultra-processed food, a definition which the Government unfortunately still have not accepted, despite it being widely accepted around the world in terms of nutrition. Ultra-processed food accounts for 68% of the calories in the British diet. That is so-called food that bears no relationship to what started out on the farm. We know what we need for public health and for the state of our natural environment: far more production of vegetables and fruit, ideally produced here in the UK, meaning real changes in our farming systems.

I note the reference by the noble Baroness, Lady Young of Old Scone, to the Climate Change Committee’s land use report. That said that we need to see a 20% reduction in food waste and a 20% reduction per-person in the consumption of beef, lamb, and dairy. Essentially, we need to see a massive reduction in factory farming, in methods of production that are causing enormous environmental damage, and we must stop food waste. Feeding perfectly good food to animals to produce a small amount of protein is food waste.

It was very disappointing that, in response to the Dimbleby report, we heard, though not in this place and perhaps not even within Parliament, some very dismissive comments from Ministers, yet we went right through the Agriculture Bill, the Trade Bill, and this Bill, being told: “Wait for the Dimbleby report, wait for the Dimbleby report.” That was supposed to be providing the direction. If the Government do not adopt that, we need to see this on the face of the Bill.

[Baroness Parminter (LD)]

My Lords, sadly, I was too slow to get my name on to this amendment, but I think that it has complete support around the House. I have just one point, which is that this is something that we must be focused on not only in the UK but globally. As the noble Earl, Lord Caithness, said, we must have farming that is absolutely hand in glove with nature. When the Select Committee on Environment and Climate Change looked at COP 15 and some of the essential issues that must be tackled, this whole issue of addressing the global food chain was absolutely critical. Therefore, we commend the noble Baroness for all her campaigning on this issue and hope that the Government take the food strategy seriously as all of us in this House know that they should.

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[Lord Whitty (Lab)]

My Lords, I added my name to my noble friend’s amendment. When he first proposed it to me I was not quite clear what the intention was, but it is quite clear what it requires. It gives us a metric —a figure—to display to the public what is a central matter of political dispute in this and many other countries, namely the claim that to achieve green growth and a reduction of greenhouse gases is in direct conflict with the ability to grow and become more prosperous. This country is one of the few countries that has managed to resolve that over the past 20-odd years. In most years we have grown the economy and reduced our greenhouse gases. That will be more difficult in the future and it is more difficult around the world.

All the amendment is asking is that the Government, the Treasury and the Bank of England in particular adopt some metric as an objective of economic policy and turn the ratio between growth and the reduction in greenhouse gases into a forward-looking metric that reduces our dependency on fossil fuels while assuring the public that we are still increasing prosperity. It is possible that the econometricians, statisticians and everybody else can work out a more complex or a simpler figure, but we need one figure that on a rolling basis measures the past and gives us a target and a tool for the future, so that we can counter a very insidious position where the climate pessimists say it cannot be done.

Of course, the polemicists in this argument on social media and more broadly not only emphasise that position in this country; it is making life difficult in many other countries. It defined Trump’s America and to a degree still hamstrings the American Government. It means that, however sophisticated their regimes, the oil producers still trot out the conflict as an excuse for not doing anything that will lead to a meaningful delivery of either the Kyoto or the Paris commitments. Of course, the conflict and the political argument are at their most acute in the poorest countries, where constraints on fossil fuel-based energy are seen as a barrier to raising the living standards of the poorest and most wretched on the earth.

That is why having a clear metric might help us in international negotiations as well. At present, the post-Paris commitments of each signatory are expressed in different terms. Most of them are absolute reductions in greenhouse gases, some are reductions in what they call energy intensity, and others are just lists of particular measures. It is quite difficult to determine the relativity between these different commitments and impossible to compare the level of their commitment with what are supposedly the Paris objectives.

If we started here and the Government committed to getting the Office for National Statistics and the other relevant bodies to address this issue and to come up with a single, clear measure—one that carries at least the broad range of political opinions in this country —we could then move on to convince the OECD and the rest of the world. We can start here. Whether in this Bill or in some other context, the Government really need to commit themselves to having a clear metric here, and I hope the Minister can give some encouragement to that view tonight.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I rise briefly, in a slightly curious position, to speak on Amendment 119 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Lea of Crondall, and signed by the noble Lord, Lord Whitty. I continue to support this amendment while disagreeing with most of what they just said.

I will start with the comments of the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, on prosperity and GDP growth. If we define prosperity as a good quality of life and a healthy life, GDP growth is profoundly not coupled to what I would call prosperity. In both these contexts I point noble Lords to an excellent, if now slightly old, book, Tim Jackson’s Prosperity Without Growth, which started out life as a government report. Professor Jackson continues to work with the APPG on Limits to Growth to produce excellent further reports on that.

However, I am sure noble Lords will be pleased to hear that I will not reprise the whole growth debate at this stage of the evening. What I will point out is that we have people coming from different sides saying that we need a decent measure. Further, on the comments of the noble Lord, Lord Lea of Crondall, the figures we have for our reduced carbon emissions exclude emissions produced offshore and used by us. As the noble Baroness, Lady Boycott, said earlier, we are not counting the emissions associated with the blueberries we consume from overseas. We need to have counting. This is one measure of having true accounting of the actual cost.

Finally, on GDP, it is appropriate in the Environment Bill to look at how faulty GDP is as a measure. If you cut down a forest, you count the cost of selling the timber in GDP figures but not the cost of the lost forest. That really is a demonstration of how utterly faulty GDP is as a measure.

[Lord Khan of Burnley (Lab)]

My Lords, I first thank the noble Lord, Lord Lea of Crondall, for his Amendment 119; I will speak very briefly. He talked about having an international system of climate parameters, a uniform approach and targets ahead of COP 26. I listened very carefully, as I always do, to my noble friend Lord Whitty on the importance of having a metric that measures performance, past and future. The noble Baroness, Lady Bennett of Manor Castle, put across a really interesting point about GDP growth, prosperity and making sure we do not lose that prosperity in economic figures. A lot of interesting points were made in this very important debate, and I hope to hear the answers from the Minister.

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[Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)]

My Lords, I rise to move Amendment 124, which is exploratory in character, on encouraging the use of reusable nappies. I am grateful for the support of the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, and I have been working with the Nappy Alliance to try to inject some momentum and common sense into a subject that affects every one of us at some point in our lives. Disposable nappies comprise around 8% of residual waste in England, costing local authorities £140 million a year and making the waste pretty awful for the bin brigade.

Rebecca Pow, the responsible Minister, was kind enough to write to me to confirm that we have wide powers in the Bill to do whatever might be needed in terms of labelling or standards. If we go down that road, I would share the desire of the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, for consistency in labelling products that go into the waste stream. Ideally, this should apply across the UK to make it easier for manufacturers of nappies to comply. I add that reusable nappies are much more convenient and easier to handle these days than the terry nappies and pins that I used with my four boys.

I think there is also a need for some seed corn funding. There is a big saving from using reusable nappies—£420 for three years of nappies, compared to £2,250 for disposables, according to the Money Advice Service—but it is a bit more work, especially in the early stages, and you have to find cash up front. A number of nappy libraries are helping with this, but we need a source of funding for mothers who cannot afford the outlay.

Society will also save. We spend at least £70 million a year on landfill for nappies and, in London alone, 47,000 tonnes of nappy waste is generated annually. Could we use the landfill tax or some other source of funding for green purposes to prime and promote a national scheme, as the Nappy Alliance would like?

Finally, the Minister explained at a very useful meeting that Defra is awaiting the imminent results of the independent environmental assessment being undertaken on the detailed costs. Can she tell me who is doing this work and when it will report? Will she undertake to write to me and the Nappy Alliance, as soon as the results are available, with a plan to support the use of reusable nappies in a way that is friendly to our hard-pressed parents, so is voluntary and easy? I beg to move.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I offer my support, as I attached my signature to the amendment in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe. It may come as a surprise to the House to see both of us on the same amendment, but that shows its breadth of support. Given the hour, some people may feel like they have started to dream; for the Minister, it is possibly a nightmare. But I am not going to speak at length, because we have canvassed on this, both in Committee and on an earlier amendment that appeared in my name on the labelling of single-use nappies.

As the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe, just outlined, there are real reasons in savings for families. The figures that she gave translate to a saving of £11 a week over the average time that a baby or toddler is in nappies. This is where we perhaps part company, because I will point out that that would almost make up for half the cut in universal credit that is approaching.

It is interesting that, overnight, we saw significant investment in a UK maker of reusable nappies. This is a chance for the Government to be promoting a good, positive, green industry—something they often talk about. There are huge environmental, social and economic benefits to this amendment. It is common sense and has support from across the House, so I hope we hear something positive from the Minister.

[Baroness Jones of Whitchurch (Lab)]

My Lords, I will not repeat what I said in our previous debates on this, but I very much support the noble Baroness’s amendment. We agree that the Government should take action to encourage reusable nappies, including, where necessary, incentives for the low paid to be able to access them in the first place. The sooner we use innovation to encourage alternatives to single-use nappies and that whole industry, the better. On that basis, as the late hour is descending on us, I look forward to hearing what the Minister says.

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Moved by

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle]

126: After Clause 136, insert the following new Clause—
“Ecocide
(1) It is an objective of Her Majesty’s Government to support the negotiation of an amendment to the Statute of the International Criminal Court, done at Rome on 17th July 1998, to establish a crime of ecocide.(2) In pursuance of subsection (1), a relevant Minister of the Crown must promote discussion of such an amendment, either independently or jointly with other sovereign states, within the Working Group on Amendments of the International Criminal Court within 12 months of this Act being passed.(3) In this section “ecocide” refers to unlawful or wanton acts committed with knowledge that there is a substantial likelihood of severe and either widespread or long-term damage to the environment being caused by those acts.”

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle]

My Lords, I thank the noble Baronesses, Lady Boycott, Lady Whitaker, and Lady Ritchie of Downpatrick, for offering their support to Amendment 126, on ecocide. A number of other Members of your Lordships’ House would have brought extra cross-party support to this amendment if there had been space.

I have been asked by the noble Baroness, Lady Chakrabarti, one of your Lordships’ House’s foremost advocates of human rights, to share, with your Lordships’ permission, a few words from her. She wished to say: “Criminal offences are not to be created lightly, and I have resisted so many, but the repercussions of ecocide go way beyond those of most criminal acts. The emergency demands this measure, as should our grandchildren.”

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[Lord Goldsmith of Richmond Park (Con)]

I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett of Manor Castle, and Stop Ecocide International for agreeing to a meeting following Committee stage of the Bill. I found the debate we had in Committee and the subsequent engagement hugely insightful. As the noble Baroness knows and as I have made clear in my contribution during that debate, I very strongly agree with the premise of her argument.

As she knows, ecocide is not a crime recognised under international law and there is currently no consensus on a legal definition. Before the ICC and the crimes it has jurisdiction over could be established by the Rome statute adopted in 1998, ecocide had to be removed in the drafting stages because of the lack of agreement among states parties to the court. The Rome statute provides some protections to the natural environment in armed conflict. It designates international attacks that knowingly and excessively cause widespread, long term, and severe damage to the natural environment as a war crime. But ecocide in the broader sense, in the manner in which the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, described it, as an internationally punishable crime, has not yet been recognised by the United Nations.

The UK’s current priority regarding the International Criminal Court, as I said in Committee, is to reform it so that it functions better and can deliver successful prosecutions of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes. I know noble Lords on all sides of the House share that ambition. As I understand it, if an amendment to the statute was adopted, it would only bind states parties which have ratified it. If not ratified, the court has no jurisdiction over those states. It is likely, and certainly possible, therefore, that the biggest culprits in relation to ecocide and egregious environmental damage would be exempt.

However, reform of the court is a long and complicated process. The independent expert review of the court made over 300 recommendations to improve the workings of the court, some of them fundamental. It will take time to implement these recommendations and that is a priority not just for the UK but many other states parties to the Rome statute. A significant amendment such as that proposed is currently unlikely to achieve the support of two-thirds of the states parties necessary to amend the Rome statute to make ecocide an international crime. As I said in Committee, pursuing it would require enormous heavy lifting on our part, with—at this stage—little prospect of success. There is a concern it could detract from the goal of improving the court’s effectiveness, which in any case would be a prerequisite for a meaningful application of ecocide.

Although I am afraid that I cannot commit here and now to promoting this campaign or concept internationally, I very much share the noble Baroness’s interest in this area, as she knows. I cannot take action as part of this Environment Bill but I am keen to continue discussions with the noble Baroness on how she and others believe the UK, through these international channels, can better lead in recognising and tackling egregious environmental crimes. In the meantime, I very much hope she will feel able to withdraw her amendment.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I thank all noble Lords who have taken part in this debate and I thank the Minister for his response. It is probably rare that we have seen such quality and intensity of debate on an amendment at this time of the evening, and I sincerely thank everyone who has contributed to that. I particularly thank the noble Baronesses, Lady Boycott and Lady Whitaker, who have been my stalwart supporters throughout this debate. It was wonderful to hear from the noble Baroness, Lady Whitaker, about her long family connection to this campaign.

That ties in with the points made by the noble Lord, Lord Thomas of Gresford, who outlined the long-term history of the development of this concept. I am not going fully to engage in the legal issues and the questions that he raised, given the hour, but I will point out that the definition of ecocide in subsection (3) of the amendment was developed after a long process involving a distinguished panel of jurists, of whom Philippe Sands—a name well-known to many Members of your Lordships’ House—was co-chair. The interesting approach of holding states responsible is something I will certainly look into further.

I thank the noble and learned Lord, Lord Thomas of Cwmgiedd, who also engaged on this issue in Committee. The point that he made—that reform of procedure can go hand in hand with legal reform—very much answers one of the points made by the Minister. The noble and learned Lord pointed out that there is significant momentum in continental Europe. I would also point out that there is significant momentum within the UK, in Scotland. Indeed, a briefing was held there in the last few days with wide parliamentary engagement, so I come back to the point about this Parliament really needing to catch up.

The point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, was significant. The Minister, in Committee and again tonight, repeated the suggestion that this would involve enormous heavy lifting and would require lots of resources from the UK Government in order to make progress. The amendment does not ask the Government to pursue a drive for the creation of the crime; it asks them to promote a continuation of the discussion. I do not believe the phrase “enormous heavy lifting” is an appropriate label for the promotion of discussion.

Before I conclude, I want to pick up on what the noble and learned Lord, Lord Thomas, said about the Law Commission. That issue was also raised in Committee and I do not think we have had an answer from the Minister in either of those discussions. There was a commitment to refer to the Law Commission. Can the Minister inform me now of progress on that, or at least commit to writing to me as progress is made on reference to the Law Commission?

[Lord Goldsmith of Richmond Park (Con)]

With the noble Baroness’s permission, I will make a commitment to the second of her suggestions. I will write to her and continue this discussion.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

I thank the Minister for his response. It is with regret, and a feeling that we really are delaying while the planet burns, that I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment 126 withdrawn.

Moved by

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle]

126A: After Clause 136, insert the following new Clause—
“Right of access to land(1) Within two years of the day on which this Act is passed, the Secretary of State must publish a draft Bill to provide for a statutory right to access land for recreational purposes and educational activities, including building of understanding of natural or cultural heritage, provided that the land is accessed responsibly in accordance with a code of practice, with landowners having the responsibility to take reasonable action to ensure the right can be exercised.(2) The Bill must provide that the right to access land must extend to rivers and other waterways.(3) The Bill must provide that the right to access land does not extend to land on which a building or other structure, plant or machinery, or a caravan or other structure stands, and the curtilage of such, a sports field or land planted with a crop.”

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

Yes, my Lords, me again. I have been begged to keep this brief, given the hour, and I am going to do my best, but this is also an important amendment. Looking back to the debate on day one of Committee on 21 June, I have not calculated how many hours of debate ago that was but “a lot” will probably suffice. We have had extensive debates about the need for people to be able to get out into the natural world, to spend time in it, to engage with it, to develop their understanding and love of it and to deliver positive benefits for it with their time and attention.

I shall just mention Amendment 8, creating targets for public access, in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Scott of Needham Market; Amendment 9, connecting people with nature, in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Lucas; and Amendment 56, making a change to the current provision in the Bill to say that the Government must take steps to connect people with nature, also proposed by the noble Baroness, Lady Scott of Needham Market. There was also Amendment 284 in my name, calling for a report on these issues. There were, I think, others, and I apologise for not making a complete list. I was surprised and a little disappointed to find that none of those amendments reappeared at Report, given the importance of the issue, and that the Bill already states that the Government may include steps to

“improve people’s enjoyment of the natural environment”

in its environmental improvement plans.

We all know that many NGOs, campaigners and members of the public have been engaged in this debate all the way through, in ways that might not always be visible to the public but certainly have impact in the House. It is important, as it was on Monday night, to give due weight and hearing to their efforts, however inconvenient the hour that our procedures have forced the debate into. I have shared with a number of noble Lords, and would be delighted to do so with anyone else I might have missed, an extensive briefing on this amendment from the Right to Roam campaign, which calls for an extension to the Countryside and Rights of Way Act in England, so that millions more people can have easy access to open space and the physical and mental benefits it has been proven to bring, as well as enabling them to bring benefits to nature from their presence.

The amendment that I present here is modest. It calls for the start of a debate in the form of a publication within two years of a draft Bill. I sincerely thank the Bill Office for assisting me in its preparation; its relatively late arrival at this stage is entirely my own fault. The draft Bill would provide for statutory right to access to land for recreational purposes and educational activities, including building understanding of our natural and cultural heritage, provided that the land is accessed responsibly in accordance with a code of practice, with landowners having responsibility to take reasonable action to ensure that the right can be exercised. That is an outline based on the Scottish legislation.

In looking back to the Committee debate, I have to thank the noble Viscount, Lord Trenchard, for doing some very useful research for me. He noted that the population density of England is 279 people per square kilometre, which is more than four times that of Scotland, at 67 people per square kilometre, and nearly twice that of Wales, at 151 people per square kilometre. The noble Viscount used that figure to suggest that we could not have the right to roam in England, but I would turn it around and suggest instead that those figures are a powerful argument for opening up as much of the countryside of England as possible to give those people space to breathe and roam. The argument is even stronger for England than it is for Scotland and Wales.

Just 1% of the population own half the land in England—a rather significant number of them in your Lordships’ House—with the other 99% having the right to roam on just 8% of the remainder. Open access land under the Countryside and Rights of Way Act is only mountains, moorland, downland, heaths and commons and, more recently, the English coastal path. There are also rights in Forestry Commission forests. However, by their nature, these are spaces largely remote from where people live. As many noble Lords agreed in Committee, the noble Lord, Lord Randall of Uxbridge, among them, we need far more public transport into these areas—but that is an issue for another day.

Looking back over the debate in Committee, I think that we extensively canvassed the benefits for the public of access to nature, so I shall not go over the same ground. However, I want to raise one additional point that was not really discussed in Committee. We know so little about the fast-changing natural world, subject to the pressure of exotic animals and diseases and, of course, our fast-changing climate.

There are significant benefits to the landscape, to the environment, to nature, of having many more people in that environment. Citizen science has a growing place in growing our understanding. The RSPB’s Big Garden Birdwatch is billed as the world’s largest wildlife survey—how much larger and more wide-ranging it could be with the right to roam. The British Trust for Ornithology monitors the population changes of 117 breeding bird species across the UK, thanks to the dedication of almost 3,000 volunteers who survey randomly selected 1 square kilometre spaces each spring, spaces to which they are given access.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Goldsmith of Richmond Park (Con)]

I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett of Manor Castle, for her amendment. Without going into the arguments, everything she said about the benefits of access to nature, I and colleagues fully support and agree with. The Countryside and Rights of Way Act 2000 allows the establishment, recording and appeal of rights of way to agreed standards and sets out people’s rights and responsibilities.

The refreshed Countryside Code helps the public enjoy the countryside in a safe and respectful way, and we are supporting and enhancing access to the countryside in a number of different ways, including laying legislation to streamline the process of recording and changing rights of way. We are completing the England coastal path and creating a new northern national trail. Our agricultural plans set out examples of the types of actions that we envisage paying for under schemes which include engagement with the environment. We are incentivising access via our new England woodland creation offer. There is already extensive access to rivers and other waterways which are managed by navigation authorities, with licences available for recreation and leisure use. The Government’s position remains that public access to nature is a fundamentally good thing. However, the Government’s view is also that access to waterways which are not managed by navigation authorities should be determined through voluntary agreements between interested parties.

I hope that what I have said demonstrates to the noble Baroness that the Government very much share her concerns and aspirations in relation to access to nature and that she will be willing to withdraw her amendment.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for his response and the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Whitchurch, for her positive and cheering contribution. I very much echo the point she made about how disappointing it is that the sustainable farming initiative pilots do not contain such provisions and that it would be nice to see progress on that. I also thank her for highlighting the way Covid has brought about a sea change in many people’s relationship with the natural world.

On the questions the noble Baroness raised about the prescriptive nature of the amendment, it is very much based on Scottish law, which is already in place and has worked through exactly what the code might look like. It has been very well worked through in Scotland—so the model is very much there.

On the Minister’s response, I am pleased to hear his acknowledgement of the benefits of having people out in the countryside. That is something I will certainly be taking up with him in future. I also point out that he raised the issue of rivers. It is perhaps not very well understood outside certain communities that 90% of our rivers are off limits to wild swimmers, paddle-boarders and kayakers. Of course, wild swimming is a very fast-growing, popular and healthy pastime, and this is something that people are increasingly discovering for themselves and are very disappointed by, and it is something that very much needs to be raised.

None the less, given the hour—I hope we will have a more extensive debate on this at a more reasonable hour very soon—I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment 126A withdrawn.

Environment Bill

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Report stage
Monday 13th September 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I rise to offer support to the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, and others, on this cross-party, broadly backed amendment and to encourage noble Lords to press it to a vote if we do not see progress.

We are in a situation rather like the “dieselgate” scandal, where we saw encouragement of a shift to diesel vehicles, with severe deleterious effects on human and environmental health. Those effects were multiplied by corruption and fraud in the car companies, but there was an underlying error in the decision being made. We need systems thinking to look holistically at the environmental impacts of laws, regulations and policies. The waste pyramid tells us that the first thing we should be doing is reducing the use of all materials—plastic is particularly pernicious, but all materials have an environmental cost—and then looking to reuse, with recycling a poor third choice.

It is important that the House offers strong support for this amendment in light of the article that appeared in the Sunday Telegraph yesterday. We were told—indeed, we seemed to be pressured by the Government—that too many amendments might embarrass Alok Sharma as chair of the COP 26 talks. Well, it is terribly important that we acknowledge—I hope the Minister will—that just as a puppy is not just for Christmas, the Environment Bill is not just for COP. A strong Environment Bill to show the world at COP is a positive side-effect, but what we are actually doing is creating the framework for the next decade and beyond in the UK. The Government’s focus must be on getting the strongest possible Environment Bill, as has clearly been the focus of this House.

[Baroness Boycott (CB)]

My Lords, my noble friend Lord Colville has today had to go to a family funeral, so he asked me to deliver his speech. I am very happy to do so, and I absolutely support this amendment. It is always a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett of Manor Castle, and I completely agree with her about the shocking revelations in the press yesterday.

My noble friend Lord Colville says that many of our single-use items, particularly drinks containers, are made of aluminium. Not only does the manufacture of aluminium create 1% of global carbon emissions but the mining of bauxite, from which aluminium is refined, leaves behind a toxic waste called red mud. Its high alkalinity is extremely corrosive, damaging soil and destroying life forms. Aluminium smelters generate an additional 150 million tonnes of red mud each year. We must work to reduce such emissions; I believe this amendment would do that.

On the first day of Report, the Minister said:

“Globally, we extract three times the amount of resources from nature as we did in 1970, and that figure is set to double again within a generation”.—[Official Report, 6/9/21; col. 706.]


The Bill has so many laudable aspects, but it still does not bear down hard enough on the problem of our excessive and wasteful use of the planet’s resources and our careless discarding of single-use items. The attention the Bill gives to recycling is crucial and very welcome, but I urge the Minister to be more ambitious.

Like many noble Lords, I welcome the power in Schedule 9 to charge for single-use plastic items, but the Government already have plans to confront much of that problem, through the existing ban on plastic stirrers and cotton buds and the launch of a consultation this autumn on banning plastic cutlery and plates. If these are successful, the power in Schedule 9 to charge for single-use plastics will hardly be needed, but it does not deal with the threat of the substitution of single-use plastics with aluminium, wood or other precious materials.

The extended power put forward in the amendment for a charge to cover plastics or any other single-use material would deal with the problem quickly and reduce our resource use dramatically. When asked to support the amendment in Committee, the Minister responded that it was not necessary and said:

“Items that are not captured by Clause 54 could be captured by other measures, such as EPR or resource efficiency.”—[Official Report, 30/6/21; col. 914.]


Resource efficiency can do much to make producers responsible for the reduction in the use of raw materials, but to implement a scheme for each category of single-use item will take an amazing amount of work to design and a great deal of time and difficulty to implement. Look at the excellent ecodesign that introduces resource efficiency into energy-related products; it has taken four years of consultation and co-operation with stakeholders to get to a final scheme. That is a long time when we are threatened with the facts.

I am concerned that, as the Government progresses through resource efficiency schemes for big product areas such as textiles, they are never going to get round to the efficiency of wooden stirrers or paper plates. So will the Minister explain why he believes the amendment would not deal with this problem much more quickly and efficiently?

Wildlife and Countryside Link, representing a wide range of environmental organisations from CPRE to Keep Britain Tidy, said in its response to the consultation that there needs to be

“a clear focus on reduction and waste prevention to meet the UK’s ambitious climate change targets.”

The EPR policy could change its focus to emphasise further reduction of single-use items, or the Government could just accept this amendment, which would quickly and effectively mitigate many of these concerns. I ask noble Lords for their support on the amendment, because I do not want the good work of the Bill to be undermined by unintended consequences.

That is my noble friend Lord Colville’s excellent speech, which I was very pleased to deliver. Before I sit down, I would like to add a couple of points myself about the involvement of the fossil fuel industry in the world of plastics, which I think is often missed. The raw materials used to make fossil fuels and plastics are one and the same, but demand for fossil fuels is now on the decline in many parts of the world, so we see these two industries coming closer together. In fact, in the face of decreasing profit margins and the increasing demand for renewable energy, fossil fuels are finding new ways to keep themselves afloat—and, unfortunately, they have found plastic production.

Plastics are the fossil fuel industry’s new plan B. Most plastic is made from fossil fuels: we extract oil or gas from land and the seabed and transport it to something that is known as a cracker. Crackers are plants that use huge amounts of heat and pressure to break fossil fuels into the molecules that become the building blocks of polymers. For instance, propane gets cracked into propylene, which is turned into polypropylene, and then you have a plastic bottle. In the past, the industries were fairly separate, but now they are trying to integrate. Both face challenges.

According to UNEP, more than 127 countries have introduced regulation, but way more is needed. Every day it seems we can learn a new thing about what bad stuff plastics do. I did not know until recently that plastic aids the transmission of antibiotic-resistant genes, or that traces of plastic are found in human wombs—so babies can be swimming in microplastics. No country has fully banned it to my knowledge. There are so many kinds of single-use plastic that it is like cutting one of Medusa’s snakes just for three more heads to pop up. But we need something more systemic, and the Bill puts us on the right foot. We need to halt subsidies for petrochemicals, internalise the cost of plastics through taxes and extended producer responsibility, and consider the climate and biodiversity aspects of the plastics lifecycle before we grant permits for the construction and operation of these plants. We need to pass this amendment, and I am very happy to support it.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Earl of Shrewsbury (Con)]

My Lords, I am very pleased to support Amendment 123, from the noble Lord, Lord Browne of Ladyton. I declare an interest, as on the record from previous debates on this Bill. I will not cover again all the points I made both at Second Reading and in Committee.

It is a fact that lead is a poison. I have an enthusiasm in supporting this amendment that comes entirely from my love of the shooting sports, in particular game shooting. Noble Lords will recall that I have probably been supporting all the shooting sports in this House since I came here 40 years ago, very often as a lone voice. Shooting is not exactly something that many of your Lordships are fondly in love with. I want everything I shoot to go into the food chain for human consumption. It is good, wholesome, low-calorie, low-cholesterol food that is both nutritious and delicious.

I am a realist and a very small minority of my shooting colleagues—I do not call them friends because they are not—could not give a fig whether they sell their game into the marketplace for human consumption. So far as they are concerned, they can dispose of it by other means. I find that absolutely despicable and disgusting. There is absolutely no place in my shooting world for people like that, who taint the vast majority of the game shooting enthusiasts of this country, who behave very responsibly indeed and desire, like me, to be able to ensure a growing market of consumers for the game that we produce. That is why I am standing here, pleading with your Lordships about lead.

This amendment will not affect target and clay pigeon shooters. We do not eat targets and clay pigeons. Clay pigeon shooters and target shooters shoot 60% of all the lead shot-cartridges produced in this country. Game shooters shoot 40%. Nine shooting bodies or bodies supporting the shooting sports, including what used to be the Game Conservancy Trust—the GWCT, which my noble friend Lord Caithness and I have a lot to do with—stated some while ago that they intended voluntarily to cease shooting with lead shot. That was done about a couple of years ago, in my memory. I believe that they are now backtracking, and this is another reason why I support this amendment very strongly. The amendment provides certainty for the shooters. It gives certainty to the supermarkets, which are going to stop producing food that has lead shot in it. The stated intention of these nine bodies was to give up lead in a five-year timeframe. There is your timeframe. There is nothing wrong in giving a timeframe. It gives support to the shooters. It gives support to everybody involved with the game-producing industry. We all know then what we are doing and by when we have to do it.

My shooting friends—and I had an invitation from one very nicely this morning in the post—are all saying now, “Will you kindly stop using lead on our estates? We would like you to go and use non-toxic shot, because we cannot sell the birds at the end of this coming season to the Game Dealers Association, because it has already stated that it will not take toxic-shot birds and there goes our market entirely.”

The supermarket chains, especially Waitrose, have for quite a while now had a strategy and process whereby they are stopping accepting lead-shot and toxic-shot game. They believe that the market is going to go much better for non-toxic-shot game. Waitrose mentioned to me that it can sell 1 million more units of game a year to the consumer. That is good for shooting, and that is why I am standing here saying this.

I believe that there is no earthly, legal or operational reason why Her Majesty’s Government cannot agree to this amendment, which covers only game shooting. It does not include clay pigeons shooting, which, as I mentioned, uses by far the largest amount of lead shot in the country. The Government can take on clay pigeon shooters on a different day and take them through a consultation. It will take them years to do it, but I would like to see game shooting legislated for now.

I urge my noble friend the Minister to accept these amendments or to accept Amendment 123, because it is sensible and easy.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I will speak first to Amendment 52, in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, to which I was pleased to attach my name. It also has the cross-party and non-party support of the noble Lord, Lord Randall, and the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay. I will also briefly address the other two amendments here.

Your Lordships’ House might not be surprised to know that my arguments around Amendment 123 might be slightly differently expressed, and I might have drafted the amendment slightly differently. None the less, the fact that we are still pumping lead out into our environment is disgraceful. We hear the phrase “world-leading” a great deal. As we have heard, Denmark banned lead shot for hunting 25 years ago. California did it last year. If you look around the world, it has taken an unconscionably long time but we have just seen Algeria become the last country in the world to stop selling leaded petrol. We have known for a long time the damage lead does. We cannot justify continuing to use it in this way. This might have been an amendment for which the term “no-brainer” was invented, when you think about the fact that this is damaging the brains of children in particular. As the noble Lord, Lord Browne, said, we have banned lead-shot game here in this House but have not acted outside the House. That really cannot be defended. It is untenable.

Amendment 53 looks at protecting nature from the toxic, disastrous chemicals that are pesticides, but I really want to focus on Amendment 52. We have been debating for some time and I want to come back to briefly highlight the powerful points made particularly by the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, and the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay. Many Members of your Lordships’ House, particularly those sitting opposite, will be able to picture the scene: an air-conditioned cab with air filtration; an operator equipped with a whole range of complex, high-tech protective equipment; and a child playing in a garden right beside where the person in all that protective equipment is applying chemicals.

The noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, said she sees the other side of this in her professional practice. People—sometimes young people, sometimes very young people—with cancers, with neurodegenerative diseases. Once the noble Baroness sees them, it is essentially too late. We cannot allow this to continue. This House has many times expressed its strong support for this amendment. I stress that these three amendments are not an either/or, pick-and-match lot. All these amendments should be in the Bill.

I very much hope that, given the direction of travel and where push pressure is coming from, the noble Lord will concede on Amendment 123. We have to vote. I urge the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, to put this to the vote. We have to get both Amendments 52 and 53 through. This is not an either/or option.

[Baroness Boycott (CB)]

It is a great pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett. I just want to say a few words about these chemicals and to talk about it from the point of view of the industry and cheap food.

In 1947, the manufacturers of DDT ran an advert in Time magazine showing smiling cartoon farm animals and a rosy-cheeked housewife who sang “DDT is good for me-e-e!”, along with the claim that DDT was the “benefactor of all humanity”. That same year, they had a British colonialist sprinkling DDT over a bowl of porridge and then eating it in a bid to persuade local people in east Africa that this chemical was harmless.

We can see, if we cut forward to today, that Silent Spring was written in 1962 and DDT became recognised as something that was harmful to animals, nature, biodiversity and, indeed, humans. Yet, today, we see a very different story. In 1990, we treated 45 million hectares with pesticides. By 2016, this had risen to 73 million hectares, although the actual area of crops had remained the same. However, we were putting many times more pesticides on to those same crops, on to a weakening soil, in our attempt to keep producing ever more cheap food to feed our population.

There are very familiar names in the industry—Bayer, Monsanto and Syngenta—and it is reckoned that they make about 35% of their total global revenue by selling these sorts of pesticides around the world. Farmers get trapped into that same cycle. It is something that we have to break.

This amendment is very important to me, because I feel a great distrust of the Government at the moment, for instance over the ban of neonicotinoids. They are now banned in America and across the whole of Europe; indeed, when we were still within the European Union, we banned them as well. However, we have now let them back in and they are allowed to be used on sugar beet. This feels to me like a small open door that could get bigger. I quote Dave Goulson, from the University of Sussex, who wrote a fantastic book about the decline of insects. Mentioning neonicotinoids, he says:

“The toxicity takes your breath away—just five maize seeds treated with neonicotinoids are enough to kill a grey partridge.”


No one can spray 17,000 tonnes of poison across a landscape without doing massive damage as it spreads. As the noble Lord, Lord Randall, so wisely said, we now know about DDT—and, actually, we know about this stuff too. It is no accident that it kills animals, insects and every single small thing around.

These amendments are absolutely imperative, right across so many parts of this Bill: biodiversity, habitats and human health. Also, there are other ways of doing it; there are intelligent, responsible uses of gene editing and many natural solutions to keep crops safe and ensure that we have good, healthy food that does not destroy either our planet or ourselves.

Environment Bill

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Monday 13th September 2021 Lords Chamber

[The Lord Bishop of Manchester]

My Lords, I draw attention to my interest as a Church Commissioner, as set out in the register, and I wish to support what the noble Baroness just said: 30 years is rather a short period of time. I am grateful for the way the Minister, in proposing Amendments 86 and 88, is showing us the possibility of some flexibility in the future, but may I just tempt him a little further? What he is proposing would allow a future Government, by regulation, to change that period of 30 years—one would hope that it might go up to 50, 60 or perhaps even 125—but if they did, there would be nothing to prevent a subsequent Government reducing it back to 30 again. If we are to have a direction of travel in how long a site needs to be protected for, it should be one-way, without the possibility of going back down again. That could create a sort of planning blight, whereby somebody, particularly towards the end of a government cycle, might feel that, rather than making some land available for development, they can wait and hope that the period will be knocked back down to 30 years by the incoming Administration. Would the Minister be willing to think again so that, whatever period we set, any future changes would have to increase it rather than potentially allowing it to decrease?

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I shall speak in favour of all the amendments in this group—even, in a very soft way, the government amendments. They address issues that I spoke on at considerable length in Committee, so I will, given the hour, be brief. It is a great pleasure to follow the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Manchester and all the speakers on this group. I think the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, really hit the nail on the head. If 30 years is all we can tie things up for, if it works, you are tying it up, one would assume, indefinitely, which 125 years serves as a figure for.

In Committee, I talked about 30 years being a blink of an eye in nature, and the noble Baroness, Lady Young of Old Scone, set out a very nice template for us thinking about different kinds of habitats and ecosystems. I will add to this my—perhaps now inevitable—point about soil, which is about the biodiversity of the soil and producing what you might describe as a mature soil, whether it is under any of those habitats. A meadow might look quite nice on the top, but the soil is not going to be anything like a long-term developed meadow for many years. These are ecosystems that take a long time to develop to get the real richness you would need for a proper, healthy soil.

I will just note that we are strongly behind Amendments 85 and 87, which my noble friend Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb signed, but I would also particularly compliment the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, on Amendment 84A. I would have signed it had I actually spotted it, but I am afraid I missed it. There has been much discussion in the media, in the public and in the environmental community about the utter inadequacy of the biodiversity metric. In this amendment, the noble Lord is going some way to finding a way forward to fix that, and I really do hope the Minister will take it on board.

[Lord Blencathra (Con)]

My Lords, I declare my interests as on the register. I want to comment briefly on two amendments. First, I welcome my noble friend’s Amendment 89; it is important to keep under review the amount of land available for the net gain register.

Secondly, I want to comment on Amendment 84A from the noble Lord, Lord Krebs. I say this to him: I do not think it is necessary. As he said, this is evolving. The metric as published by Natural England is not set in stone. It will be an evolving measure, and as further and better particulars come along, it will be changed and amended. An annual review by the Government is not needed for that to happen.

The other point I want to make is this: yes, of course, the metric could be made more complicated. Some on the Climate Change Committee condemn it, because it is just a biodiversity net gain metric. They want an environmental net gain metric, which would be an all-singing, all-dancing super one, but incredibly complicated to produce. No one is capable of doing it properly at the moment.

If we bring in lots of other factors, which would no doubt make this much better in biodiversity terms, we would be faced with an industry and builders that have not a clue how it would work. Net gain is terribly, terribly important. It will be one of the greatest improvements to planning and the environment we have ever seen in this country. But it is a completely new concept; it is innovative. For it to happen, we have to get developers on side, working with it. At the moment, they have not a clue how it works. They have a couple of years, I think, to get that right.

I am concerned that we keep this initially simple. The current metric, which is still doing a good job and can evolve and can change, will not be detrimental to biodiversity; it will be a big improvement to biodiversity. But I am certain that in a couple of years’ time or a year’s time, it may be tweaked again to improve it. As developers and Government and Natural England bed this down, I am certain it will become more sophisticated and more perfect from a purist environmental point of view.

So I say to the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, who is incredibly able and thoroughly knowledgeable in this matter—he is 10 times more knowledgeable than I am, though I am practical—that we have to start somewhere. There used to be an army acronym KISS: “Keep it simple, stupid.” We have to keep it simple to begin with, and we can make it a lot more complicated as we get used to it.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Earl of Caithness (Con)]

My Lords, I have three amendments in this group. They have a common theme because they are based on the fact that, very sadly, a lot of the good intentions of this Bill are going to fail. Although I support the Bill and support the drift of where we are going, they are going to fail because they are based on, and are building on, the existing system that is already a failure.

Let me give some examples. Since 2000, Defra has spent £10.3 billion or thereabouts on biodiversity. Agri-environment schemes have cost us £8.5 billion in the last 25 years. Roughly 28% of our land is designated for nature and biodiversity, and yet we have an appalling and increasingly bad record. Why? Because the current system is failing. Let me give just a couple of examples. Because of climate change we have gone for bioenergy and we have planted more maize. That has caused huge environmental problems and been very damaging for biodiversity. We are encouraging people to plant trees on what they call unproductive farmland, but that unproductive farmland is the haven for many of the red-list species, and we are damaging those. This Bill is going to build on those failures, and I believe we need to change tack. I know my noble friend will not accept that that is the right way to go but, nevertheless, I believe it is worth putting on the record that it is the right way to go.

We have to accept that there is more to improving biodiversity than just habitats. In the last amendment, my noble friend Lord Goldsmith said that habitats were very important and that we had to improve them. Yes, habitats are important, but they are not the only thing that is important. Equally important, as I have said many times, is winter feed, early spring feed and farming practices and management, in particular predator control. I give the example of the Allerton Project, which is entirely devoted to improving biodiversity and has hugely increased songbird numbers, but it cannot get waders and curlews back because of the lack of predatory control. We need to alter our stance on that.

I have three amendments: Amendment 92A refers to “nature-friendly farming”. These are the people who are managing the land. The noble Lord, Lord Oates, is right that the local authorities have a role, but the bulk of the land is in the hands of the farmers and we need the farmers on side. We need to encourage those that are nature-friendly-oriented. Farming and nature cannot be divided or separated; they have been separated for too long and here is a good chance in the Bill to put the farmers in the position they ought to be in.

Amendment 98 relates to wildlife conservation licences. I tweak the Bill in this respect, in that I propose the use of the word “status” instead of “survival”, as effectively a single individual of a species could be considered to be survival. Population can mean anything from an individual site colony to the total number of that species in the UK. Therefore, scale comes into any definition of detrimental to survival, as reducing the population at the local level may not actually have a bearing on the overall population due, for example, to infill from the current year’s young of the species.

My third amendment is Amendment 105. The noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Whitchurch, spoke on the last amendment in support of what I have said. She feared we would be going backwards if we do not get this right. The purpose of Amendment 105, which is a sunset clause, is to allow us to take a deep breath and stop us going backward if we are. My noble friend Lord Goldsmith said on the last amendment that there would be serious trouble if habitats in 2050 are not in the state we want them to be in. The purpose of this clause is to allow the Secretary of State to stand back, take a look and say “We were well intentioned, but we got it wrong. We need to change and go in a slightly different direction for the sake of biodiversity and the environment.”

We now have binding targets in the Bill but, as my noble friend Lord Benyon, who was in his place a moment ago, said on 25 May in this House:

“We are always wary of targets”.—[Official Report, 25/5/2021; col. 890.]


I am extremely wary of targets when it comes to biodiversity, because every target we have aimed at in the last 25 years has been missed. The purpose of Amendment 105 is therefore to give the Minister a chance to stand back, have a rational look and, if necessary, take a different direction.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Earl, Lord Caithness, whose passion for improving the Bill from the government Back Benches is evident even at this hour. I commend him for that. I declare my role as a vice-president of the LGA and the NALC.

I shall deal with Amendments 90, 91 and 94 together. Amendment 90 appears in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Kerslake, and is also signed by the noble Lord, Lord Oates, while Amendment 94 is also signed by the noble Lord, Lord Oates, and my noble friend Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb. They all deal with the fact that the people who know best about a local natural environment are local people. We confront again, as we do in so many different areas, the fact that the UK—and England in particular—is one of the most centralised polities on this planet. That has many negative effects for people, but it also has negative effects for nature.

On Amendment 90, as the noble Lord, Lord Oates, said, we keep giving local government responsibilities but, through a decade of austerity we have seen fewer resources in local communitiesw available to deal with those responsibilities. We have gone through a cycle where local authorities barely have enough funds to meet their statutory responsibilities—those dictated from here in Westminster. They do not really have enough funds for that, let alone to reflect local priorities and desire for action.

The amendment signed by my noble friend Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb is particularly telling. We can think of so many case studies; the noble Lord, Lord Oates, gave one. I was also struck thinking about the case of the River Lugg in Herefordshire last year, where we saw trees felled, the river bridged and a reprofiling of the riverbanks along a 1.5 kilometre stretch, to the shock and horror of local people. Investigations are still ongoing, so I will not go too far into this, but the country was alerted to this through local people using social media and through the local media outlets picking up this story. Of course, it was at local level that the knowledge arose, and perhaps at local level some action could have saved some biodiversity or nature there.

I was up in Kendal a few years ago in a village that was struck by flooding, and the vehicles driving along a particular road were pushing flood water into people’s homes. The local people were shaking with anger and frustration; if they had been allowed to close that road, they could have stopped those homes being flooded, but they were told they would face police action if they did so. That is the kind of emergency situation where we need to ensure that local people are able to act, whether it is a biodiversity emergency or a flooding emergency affecting people’s homes.

I really hope that we might see some progress on Amendments 90, 91 and 94. I also want to mention Amendment 92A, in the name of the noble Earl, Lord Caithness. The Nature Friendly Farming Network represents a really activist group of farmers; I have met quite a number of them. They are doing some very strong things at that nexus between acknowledging the need to produce food and looking out for nature. Here we have a very modest addition to the Bill that would acknowledge and put on the statute book recognition of, and support for, the important work of nature-friendly farming. I hope that we will hear from the Minister about that amendment.

[Baroness Parminter (LD)]

My Lords, my Amendment 91 in this group seeks to give some bite to the nature recovery strategies, which are a very welcome addition into this Bill by this Government. As they stand, however, local authorities will be producing them but they will be almost irrelevant in terms of the planning process, because they would not be a material consideration. My amendment therefore seeks to ensure that local authorities have to act in accordance with them rather than just take account of them.

I am grateful for the support for the amendment from Members from all Benches, and to the Minister and his team for discussing the matter with me. I am also grateful for government Amendment 93 that has been produced as a concession, but saddened that it is still just guidance. I suppose that I should not have really expected the Government to compel local authorities to do anything. It is also a necessary step, given that the pilots for the nature recovery strategies showed that local authorities said: “These won’t work unless we get more guidance,” so the Government had to do something. However, it is a step in the right direction, and it will help local authorities to ensure that nature recovery strategies are used properly in the planning system.

I am particularly grateful for the letter that the Minister sent to Peers, which said specifically just how important nature recovery strategies would be within the planning system as a tool for protecting the environment. That is an important statement, and I am grateful for it. Clearly, we have expectations for a planning Bill some way down the road; we are not sure quite how much of it will survive, if we are to believe the newspapers over the weekend. However, there will be a planning Bill, so without prejudicing what might come in future, I accept gratefully the concession that the Government have offered. We might have to return to this issue when we see what those planning changes are, at which point, we will be happy, I am sure, to take up the cudgels again.

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[The Earl of Kinnoull (CB)]

My Lords, a note to self is to employ the noble Baroness, Lady Young, as my speechwriter.

I shall speak to Amendment 103. Before I make my few remarks, I thank the Minister and his Bill team, who met me. We had a productive exchange of views. I also thank the noble Lord, Lord Colgrain, and the noble Earl, Lord Caithness, who have supported this amendment, along with the noble Baroness, Lady Young. I declare my farming interests, but also particularly my interest as a trustee of the Blair Charitable Trust, which not only has substantial landholdings in the north of Perthshire but runs land on behalf of a number of other substantial landholders, and therefore is one of the largest forestry concerns in Scotland. There are no grey squirrels in north Perthshire but my gosh there are a lot of deer, so I do know about that.

I also chair the Squirrel Accord, which is the coming together of 40 organisations across the whole of the United Kingdom to try to deal with the grey squirrel problem: its killing of broadleaf trees in Britain, preventing fresh broadleaf plantations in, for the example, the south of England being made today simply because the trees will be destroyed before they reached maturity. The Squirrel Accord includes all four Governments of our country and their nature agencies, the major voluntary bodies and the major private sector bodies. No one who has ever been asked to be a part of the accord has said no, and we are a number of years old.

As I said, the accord deals with the grey squirrel problem. Therefore, I am pretty familiar with that. The problem is simply that these animals will destroy the trees before they reach maturity. Therefore, all the planting that we need to do, for admirable climate change purposes, will simply not succeed if we do not put in place a good management system so that the trees can see themselves through to adulthood. As I mentioned in Committee, the Royal Forestry Society surveyed its membership and got 777 responses this year. The grey squirrel was noted as the number one threat to the planting of trees. I meet the Deer Initiative every now and then. It is similarly trying to promote a UK-wide way of handling this.

The Squirrel Accord has a good plan for how to manage everything. It is a plan that involves plenty of science, and the major science for fertility control, which is just one element of it, is being done at Defra’s own laboratories. It is now three years into a five-year project and going well. We have good science and good connections to deliver the product of that science in various ways into the countryside of Britain to deal with the problem. However, if there are refuges then we will get nowhere, because the responsible landowners and land managers will do everything and those who are not interested will do nothing. The purpose of the amendment is to try to cater for that and to make sure that the Government not only have the powers to handle it but will exercise those powers.

At this late hour I will not make many more points, but in the meeting I had with the Minister and his Bill team there was mention that the Government felt that they may have the powers. I, with my rather elderly wig on, felt that those powers probably needed to be newly minted, but it would be helpful to hear from the Minister whether he believes that he really does have those powers, and to hear comfort that those powers will be exercised so that there can be no giant refuges and so that all the work of the Squirrel Accord and the Deer Initiative, which I hope will be reinvigorated, and the work of those up and down the land who are trying to promote the ability to plant trees, particularly our native trees again, will not go to waste.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Earl, Lord Kinnoull, and indeed all the speakers in this group. On Amendment 103, I have to draw to noble Lords’ attention a study published about three weeks ago by the Woodland Trust and the National Trust of a trial that found that there are practical alternatives to plastic tree guards. I note that the Woodland Trust is planning to stop using plastic tree guards by the end of this year. Given how much we have debated plastics in other parts of the Bill and much discussion of the problem of microplastics, that is very much to be appreciated, while also offering support for the need to make sure we protect young trees.

I will also briefly comment on Amendment 104, so very ably and expansively introduced by the noble Baroness, Lady Young of Old Scone. I fear electronic sheep may be wandering through my dreams.

Environment Bill

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Report stage
Wednesday 8th September 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Grantchester, who has contributed so much on these issues to the House over many years. I want chiefly to reiterate a point that I made on Monday, when your Lordships’ House backed Amendment 2. There is no conflict between that amendment and this one, so ably introduced by the noble Earl and supported by all other speakers in this debate today.

The noble Baroness, Lady Young of Old Scone, pointed out that the 25-year environment plan mentions soil quality 19 times. In that debate on Monday, the Minister talked about how the sustainable farming initiative scheme includes practices such as the introduction of herbal leys, the use of grass-legume mixtures, cover crops and so on—as the noble Lord, Lord Grantchester, just referred to. The Minister talked also about how complicated it was to measure soil health but said that the Government were doing that work. So we have these suggestions here, there and everywhere, but what this amendment would do—I hope that we might hear some good news from the Minister when he stands up shortly—is join this all up. Joined-up government is one of those favourite phrases we hear very often. It is clear that your Lordships’ House believes, and it is clear from the science, that soils absolutely are the foundation. As the noble Earl said, we have a water strategy and an air strategy; we have to have a soil strategy, just as we have to make soils a priority. This is joined-up government; this is sensible, practical work to make sure that the Government are working towards one goal, which has to be healthy, high-quality soils.

[Baroness Bakewell of Hardington Mandeville (LD)]

My Lords, on Monday, we debated adding soil health and quality to Clause 1. Many noble Lords from all sides of the House spoke knowledgeably and passionately about the need to monitor and improve the quality of our soil. The noble Baroness, Lady Brown of Cambridge, gave an excellent summary of the attacks from all sides on our soil. In response, the Minister said that it was difficult to measure soil quality and indicated that the Government were working towards targets that could be measured with reliable metrics. He felt the amendment would pre-empt that work. However, the House did not agree with him.

The noble Earl, Lord Caithness, is also passionate about the quality of soil and has spoken extremely eloquently to his Amendment 18. The noble Lord, Lord Whitty, and the noble Baroness, Lady Boycott, have also spoken in favour and added their names to the amendment. If we are fully to appreciate the role of soil, its condition and how we as a nation might best help to improve its quality, we will need a soil management strategy for England. The noble Lord, Lord Randall of Uxbridge, although not in his place today, on Monday recommended this amendment to the House.

As noble Lords have previously said, there are many different types of soil. They contain billions of essential bacteria, but over the years, by the continued spraying of chemicals to control insect pests, prevent weed growth and promote the growth of crops, we have denuded the soil of its quality. Whether the soil is of grade A agricultural value, peat bogs, clay, sandy or containing lime, it is all suffering. The noble Lord, Lord Curry of Kirkharle, has given an excellent example of the strategy adopted in Ireland. It is time that we followed that example.

I fully support the noble Earl, Lord Caithness, in his desire to introduce a soil strategy into the Bill. The timeline set out in his amendment, of a 10-year strategy to be reviewed and renewed for another 10 years after that, is right. It would give adequate time for a proper action plan to be implemented for the different types of soil and the uses to which they are put. It would give time for the soil to recover and to be adequately measured, and for the Government, landowners and farmers to see whether their actions had been successful.

Given that everyone across the House fully supports the amendment, I hope that the Minister will feel able to accept it, despite what his briefing notes might say.

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Moved by

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle]

19: Clause 17, page 11, line 8, at end insert—
“(f) the principle that policies and decisions should take into account the interests of members of future generations.”

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I rise at the request of the noble Lord, Lord Bird, to move Amendment 19. He wishes me to send his sincere apologies that he is unable to be here today. I shall do my best to be a substitute, although I am not quite sure that my acting skills are up to it—but I shall do my best.

The amendment is very simple; it would add an extra principle to the list of principles to be considered, stating that

“policies and decisions should take into account the interests of members of future generations”.

The fact is that we know that the climate emergency and nature crisis are already here, but even more severe impacts are waiting in the wings for future generations. We are seeing floods and forest fires, and these impacts will grow in coming decades. Future generations are desperate for us to do something now so that they get a chance of a decent life.

In this Chamber we have all benefited from the vision, bravery and foresight of past generations, whether that is a parent or grandparent who fought in a number of 20th-century wars or those who founded the NHS or decriminalised homosexuality. Indeed, noble Lords may remember the noble Lord, Lord Bird, speaking very powerfully on his Wellbeing of Future Generations Bill at greater length on those issues. We are in a unique position now to change the course of history for our children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren and those not yet born, to make their lives better and safer and more secure, stable and prosperous. This amendment sets that out as a principle of government action. We need to acknowledge that responsibility and to listen to the young people who are saying, “What are you doing to our future now?”

We must have a commitment to long-term thinking and interrogating the consequences of our policy decisions—to look for better solutions to today’s problems that will leave the future better off. We all know—many Members of your Lordships’ House who have been former members of Governments within these walls have recognised—that decisions in the past have had unintended consequences. We have to start trying to solve the problems that we have created.

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[Lord Goldsmith of Richmond Park (Con)]

My Lords, I thank noble Lords for their contributions to this important debate. I know there is significant interest in this House in the environmental principles. Regarding Amendment 19, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Bird, and presented by the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, in a typically compelling and powerful speech, the contents of which I fully agreed with, I reassure noble Lords that the concept set out in the amendment is already covered by the duty on the Secretary of State, and I shall explain why. Currently, the Bill states that the Secretary of State must be satisfied that the environmental principles policy statement will contribute to the improvement of environmental protection and to sustainable development. I want to clarify for noble Lords that this legal reference to “sustainable development” encompasses and includes the importance of meeting the needs of future generations. That is what it means.

As I explained in Committee, these are internationally recognised principles and consistent with those agreed through the EU Trade and Cooperation Agreement. This amendment is therefore unnecessary, as the existing principles are fundamentally about passing the natural environment on in a better state to the next generation. However, adding it would nevertheless require government departments to consider an additional principle that overlaps with the existing objective but is not as commonly understood. The fear is that that would cause confusion, resulting in poor policy outcomes. I hope I have adequately addressed the issue raised by the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Bird, and I ask the noble Baroness to withdraw it in his name.

I turn now to Amendment 20, tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Parminter. First, I thank her for our discussions in the run up to Report. I understand the motivation behind the amendment, but the Government’s view remains that exempting some limited areas from the duty to have due regard provides vital flexibility in relation to finances, defence, and national security. I will take each of those exemptions in turn. Starting with the exemption on taxation, I understand the interest in removing this exemption, but Treasury Ministers want flexibility to alter the UK’s fiscal position and respond to the changing needs of, for example, the NHS, schools, the police and any number of other vital public services. Applying the environmental principles duty to taxation would be a constraint in cases where speed is required in altering the UK’s fiscal position, with limited environmental benefit. Nevertheless, the Government are committed to encouraging positive environmental outcomes through the tax system. An example of that in the Bill is our commitment to a new plastic packaging tax to encourage greater use of recycled plastic, which is estimated to achieve around a 40% increase in recycled plastic being used in 2022-23. The Treasury’s Green Book already mandates the consideration of natural capital, climate change and environmental impacts in spending. This applies to spending bids from departments, including at fiscal events.

Furthermore, the Government’s response to the Dasgupta review commits to delivering a “nature positive” future, ensuring that economic and financial decision-making, and the systems and institutions that underpin it, support the delivery of that future. I emphasise that the spending and allocation of resources exemption refers to central spending decisions only. In other words, once funds are distributed by the Treasury to other government departments, the principles will apply to how those funds are spent by departments. To be clear, even if we accepted this amendment, principles such as “the polluter pays” could not be applied to, for example, the allocation of overall departmental budgets. This is because allocating money between departments sits outside policy-making. In other words, this amendment would have no material impact in respect of the allocation of resources within government. To reiterate, however, the policy statement must still be considered at the level of individual policies that require spending, such as the design of new transport programmes or environmental subsidy schemes. This is where they can deliver real benefits.

Looking at the Armed Forces, defence and national security exemptions, as the noble Baroness, Lady Parminter, noted, they are also excluded from the duty. That is to provide maximum flexibility in respect of the nation’s protection and security. However, I shall address some of the concerns raised in Committee about the management of defence land. The primary function of the defence estate is to support our operations and maintain military capability. It provides homes for those who defend our country, offices for work, space for training, and conditions to prepare to meet the ever-changing threats that the UK faces. Defence land cannot be practically separated out: it is part of the MoD and touches on decisions across the Armed Forces, national security and defence.

The MoD’s concern is that if we were to impose a consideration of environmental principles on defence policies, or on MoD land, it could result in legal challenges which could slow critical policies or expose sensitive decisions to the public domain, threatening national security. However, the MoD already has statutory duties to protect the environment and the enormous amount of land that the MoD owns, and these are not altered by this exemption. The MoD is subject to all the environmental legislation that other landowners are required to adhere to: the habitats directive, the Countryside and Rights of Way Act, the Natural Environment and Rural Communities Act and others.

Under Clauses 98 and 99, the MoD will be subject to two strengthened duties: to take action to conserve and enhance biodiversity and then to report on the action it has taken. The MOD already reports publicly and regularly on its contribution to improving the environment and SSSI conditions, and showcases its conservation initiatives through the sanctuary awards. The MoD will fully comply with new reporting requirements in the Bill by building on its existing approach. Its SSSIs are managed through a partnership with Natural England, which jointly implements integrated rural management plans to improve and maintain them. The percentage of MoD SSSIs in a favourable condition in England is higher than the national average.

I recently met Minister Quin, who has responsibility for this area. Although I am not able to secure the amendment for this House, I am assured that the MoD takes its responsibilities to the environment seriously. I am confident in the wider arrangements in place to support environmental improvement. I hope, therefore, I have gone some way, at least, to reassure noble Lords and I beg them not to press their amendments.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

I thank all noble Lords who contributed to this short but very powerful debate and the Minister for his response. I particularly wish to thank the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Oxford for reminding us so powerfully of how human health and planet health are interrelated and how the sickness of our planet has real impacts on people’s well-being, particularly that of young people. It is certainly part of the epidemic of mental ill health, from which our society and the whole world are suffering. I also thank the right reverend Prelate for mentioning one of my favourite books, Kate Raworth’s Doughnut Economics. I commend it yet again, as I am sure I have before.

I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Parminter, for her support for Amendment 19 and the noble Lord, Lord Khan, for his suggestion to the Minister. Indeed, I would extend that suggestion to all Members of your Lordships’ House. I take part regularly in Learn with the Lords, a chance to go out, through the mechanisms of your Lordships’ House, to speak to young people. It is a great opportunity, and it would be wonderful if more people took that up, particularly to speak about environmental issues.

I want to make one comment on the Minister’s response to Amendment 19. He suggested that “sustainable development” within the principles covers this. When we think about our current planning law and the way in which the term “sustainable development” is used in that and proposals for changes to our planning law, there is cause for grave concern about suggesting what sustainable development in our current legal framework might or might not achieve.

None the less, we have a lot to do and much pressure on our time. However, before I finish, I want to commend to your Lordships’ House the fact that the noble Lord, Lord Bird, has—one might call it fate—the number one slot in the ballot for Private Members’ Bills. The greater expanse of his Wellbeing of Future Generations Bill covers the issues that this amendment sought to address. I commend that Bill, engagement with it and support for it to all Members of your Lordships’ House. In the meantime, on behalf of the noble Lord, Lord Bird, I beg leave to withdraw Amendment 19.

Amendment 19 withdrawn.

Environment Bill

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Wednesday 8th September 2021 Lords Chamber

I could not agree more with the government amendments. When I was a board member of the Marine Management Organisation, I was absolutely clear that these areas should be self-financing, in being able to reclaim costs, which I understand is part of the rationale behind the government amendments. Unfortunately, that was rejected during the passage of the Fisheries Act, but never mind. The amendment on nappies, from the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, is on the similar theme of consumer information and in an area that we have all experienced in life, but one in which the volume and effect is huge, as the noble Baroness illustrated in Committee. It is on the similar theme of making sure that consumers understand the impact of their purchasing decisions.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I speak to Amendment 125 in my name, kindly supported by the noble Baroness, Lady Boycott. As the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, noted—it is a pleasure to follow his contribution—these two amendments fit together well, because they are talking about consumers who desperately want to do the right thing, but we are simply not giving them the tools to make that possible, at the moment. Noble Lords may remember the background to this amendment, and it was just referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Teverson. In Committee, I moved a broad-ranging amendment addressed particularly at disposable nappies and an encouragement to replace them with reusable nappies. The Minister at that time kindly acknowledged how much larger this issue is than perhaps people think.

Since then, at this stage of the Bill, we have seen the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe, table an amendment that covers part of the same territory as mine and which seeks to promote reusables. I was delighted to attach my name to that and I am sure the House will be a little surprised, and perhaps pleased, to see the noble Baroness and me co-operate on this.

I want to look at the other side of this, which is the problem with the grave misuse and abuse of language that we see in the labelling of nappies now. Speaking as a former sub-editor, it particularly offends me. Proposed new subsection (2) of the amendment sets out the way in which phrases such as

“reusable … biodegradable … eco-friendly … environmentally friendly”

are put on nappies, because there are no legal limits to how those words can be used, and they are used misleadingly. As the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, said, we have a problem of sham competitiveness. The market is out of control and regulation has failed to control the market.

To be concrete about what this means, a study carried out by YouGov at the start of the year found that 7% of nappy users wrongly put their disposable nappies into the recycling. In London, 11% of disposable nappy users were putting their nappies into the recycling. Among younger people, aged 18 to 24, 15% were putting their disposable nappies into the recycling. What does that mean? In Buckinghamshire, to take one example, 13% of lorry loads of recycling contained disposable nappies. It was estimated that, in Leicestershire, up to 4,000 disposable nappies were being removed from the recycling every day. They spoil all the material with which they come into contact, and they have to be removed by hand once they reach the sorting facility, which is extremely unpleasant and unhygienic for the person having to work in that recycling facility.

Why is this happening? A survey from 2019 carried out by the North London Waste Authority found that more than one-third of people who were doing this said that there is a recycling logo on the packaging. That may indeed mean that there is recycled plastic in the wrapping or something like that. One-fifth said it was because of the use of the term “disposable”, which they thought meant that the nappies could go into the recycling. We have to focus on how people desperately want to do the right thing and put as much as they possibly can into the recycling. Behind this, we have an industry-driven and company-driven approach to push recycling rather than reducing and reusing, which are the top two elements of the waste pyramid. We have a huge problem here.

Like the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, I do not intend to push my amendment to a vote tonight, but I do think we have to see much faster, more effective action from the Government. I suspect I shall hear in the Minister’s response terms such as “discussion”, “consultation” and “talking to the industry”. The industry is the problem. The solution is the Government putting down a line and saying, “You cannot use these words in a way that costs all of us money”. A few people and companies are profiting, and the rest of us are paying in all kinds of ways—environmentally, financially, through our local government costs and in the encounters we have, unfortunately, with nappies in places where they simply should not be. It is late. This is a big issue that covers a small area. I really would like to hear some progress from the Minister.

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[Lord Goldsmith of Richmond Park (Con)]

I can confirm to the noble Lord that we will do everything we can to ensure a simple, understandable and clear system. I cannot tell him whether there will be a single system but clarity, simplicity and transparency are absolutely the driving considerations.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

The Minister said that the Government would seek to help businesses understand their obligations. I hope—perhaps he can reassure me—that the intention is to regulate the activities of businesses so that they do not continue to profit while the rest of us pay.

[Lord Goldsmith of Richmond Park (Con)]

The goal is to ensure that businesses understand their obligations under existing law and to avoid the problem of misleading labels around environmental performance. If the evidence points us towards regulation, then that is what we will do.

Environment Bill

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Report stage
Monday 6th September 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Boycott (CB)]

My Lords, I am very happy to support this amendment. As the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, said, I joined up a little too late.

Biodiversity is all too often seen as the poor relation of climate change and somehow less important. It is not. It is just as important and life threatening as any weather patterns, droughts or floods—and they are indeed all connected. So what is it? In essence, it is the variety of life on earth and all its interconnectedness. But it is also the product of millions of years of learning—of trial and error—by all the creatures, flora and fauna on earth to arrive at a system where this planet flourishes and where we can exist on it. Everything is in its place and everything is doing its bit—sometimes large, sometimes microscopic—and it keeps our planet in the healthy state that we want to preserve.

I have heard what we are doing now described as “burning the library of earth”. To take something really complex that we have made, let us think of an aeroplane going to New York, carrying 600 people. Out falls one rivet—not too bad. Out come two—maybe not a big deal. But suppose 10, 20 or 30 come out; at some point that aeroplane is going to come crashing down to earth—and that is what we are doing now with the complex world of our biodiversity. We do not know quite when we will pass the tipping point, but we are clearly very nearly there.

I have a few examples relating to the insect world, which is endlessly dismissed, but—as Einstein, apparently, famously said—the planet would survive without us, but it would not survive without insects. They are essentially the unseen rivers that keep the planet functioning, yet we have not managed to identify them all—and yet we are cutting down their environments. As I said, no one knows how close to the edge we are, but in China they are pollinating apples and pears by hand. In Bengal they are doing the same for squash plants. In Brazil it is passionfruit, and it is blueberries in Canada. Even the French beans in Kenya are now having to be mechanically pollinated because we have trashed the insects.

Clearly, many parts of the world—and, indeed, under the oceans; we have the temerity to think that we should destroy the ocean bed like we have destroyed the land above—have a huge value: trillions of dollars, or around double the world’s current GDP. In Europe alone it costs the 3% of GDP that we get from our natural services.

I thoroughly support the amendment. This is an emergency. That message needs to come from the Prime Minister and it needs to be made clear to everyone that we have only one planet and that we have to protect it. Biodiversity is extraordinary and amazing. It is up to all of us in this House to ensure that this becomes part of the Bill.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I support both these amendments: Amendment 1, so ably introduced by the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, and backed by the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Whitchurch, to which I am pleased to have attached my name; and Amendment 21 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Bird, and signed by the noble Baroness, Lady Boycott.

In introducing his amendment, the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, looked at what happened in the timeframe from when we last debated the Bill to today. I will take a different timeframe and go back to when the Bill was first introduced on 15 October 2019. A lot has happened since then. Obviously, we have had, and still have, a global pandemic, which is related to our biodiversity and climate crises, but in reaction to it we have seen enormous, massive and rapid change. We have seen the invention from scratch of highly effective new vaccines from a range of technologies. We have seen billions of doses of those vaccines already delivered. We have seen transformation on an almost daily scale of our entire way of life. The previously obscure word “lockdown” has become daily currency. International travel has almost stopped. “Zoom” has become a verb.

What has happened to the climate in those two years? Emissions fell in 2020, chiefly because of the pandemic, but a lot less than people expected. They then started to rise again. We have seen Extinction Rebellion out on our streets regularly and the climate strikers have become part of the national life of countries all around the world. But we have yet to see the scale of reaction that is needed to these emergencies, which are on the same scale as the pandemic. Just look at the contrast between those two scales of reaction and the fact that the Bill was written two years ago. In the age of shocks, with time moving so fast, that is an age. Amendment 1 would update the Bill to be fit for today, as it must be, and create the frame for it to be fit for the future.

I will briefly address Amendment 21. It is particularly important because we are starting to see the word “resilience” in news coverage, which was once an extremely rare occurrence. It is starting to rise up the news agenda. I speak as a former journalist. Amendment 21 seeks to address the risks, identify them and report on them.

I will focus in particular on proposed new subsection (2)(c), which would ensure that the views of 11 to 25 year-olds in the United Kingdom are continuously engaged in debating these risks. I reflect on that because yesterday I was in Sheffield, where I joined the Young Christian Climate Network, which is on a deliberately very slow pilgrimage from Truro to Glasgow, stopping in as many communities up and down the land as it possibly can to engage communities, particularly young people, on this issue. Climate strikers, young pilgrims and Extinction Rebellion are leading. The amendment would ensure that the Government and the Bill are at least in the right place to catch up.

[Baroness Jones of Whitchurch (Lab)]

My Lords, I will speak to Amendment 1, to which I added my name. I also thank the noble Lord, Lord Bird, for his helpful amendment. We agree that assessing long-term environmental risk should be an essential part of setting environmental targets and improvement plans.

I thank the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, very much for setting out why recognising our climate and biodiversity emergency is so important. He and other noble Lords set out the case with clarity, passion and commitment. As he said, this is indeed code red for humanity.

We had a number of excellent contributions in Committee which all strengthened the importance of having Amendment 1 underpin the Bill. It has of course become commonplace for government and civic society to acknowledge that we have a climate change emergency. The recent global evidence that the noble Baronesses, Lady Boycott and Lady Bennett, referred to reinforces this view. Quite frankly, it has made a mockery of the dwindling band of climate sceptics.

However, we still have some way to go to put the biodiversity crisis on an equal footing with the climate crisis, with comparable attention and resources. As the noble Baroness, Lady Boycott, said, biodiversity is seen as the poor relation, yet, as we have heard, the evidence of a biodiversity emergency is all around us. At a UK level, the RSPB’s State of Nature report showed that 41% of our species are declining and one in 10 threatened with extinction. We are one of the most nature-depleted countries in the world. At a global level, the WWF has documented the international failure to meet the UN biodiversity targets, with an average 68% of species decline across the world. We see the impact of this decline in our gardens, countryside and waterways. For many of us, it is personally heartbreaking to see nature suffering and declining in this way.

We now understand more than ever that nature is not just a “nice to have”; it underpins our very existence and regulates the earth’s climate. As the House of Commons Environmental Audit Committee’s report concludes:

“Biodiversity and well-functioning ecosystems are critical for human existence, economic prosperity, and a good quality of life.”


Of course, this echoes the previous conclusions of the much-quoted and seminal Dasgupta report.

That is why Amendment 1 is so important. A government declaration of a climate and biodiversity emergency would be more than symbolic. It would make it clear that the two issues are inextricably linked and that both require action on an urgent scale. In Committee, the Minister acknowledged these arguments. He said:

“We absolutely recognise the extent of the crisis”


that the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, and I had relayed. He went on to say:

“There is no doubt that the facts on the ground tell us that we are in crisis territory”,


but he also acknowledged that international action on climate change is well ahead of any comparable action on biodiversity. As he said:

“It remains the case … that of all international climate finance, only 2.5% to 3% is spent on nature-based solutions.”—[Official Report, 21/6/21; col. 37.]


This lies at the heart of the problem. A group of us were involved in debates on the Financial Services Bill earlier in the year. It was clear then that banking and businesses in the UK are slowly waking up to their climate change commitments, but I do not recall much mention of biodiversity in their strategies for the future. So far, it seems that biodiversity and nature-based solutions are seen as Defra issues, not government-wide issues. I do not doubt the Minister’s sincerity or commitment on this issue, but the evidence seems to show that the department is struggling to get other government departments to take this issue seriously. This is why it is important that the Government as a whole recognise the joint emergency of climate change and biodiversity, and why the Prime Minister needs to recognise the emergencies and put action on both issues at the heart of government policy for the future.

Nature will not wait. We are spiralling into levels of extinction that cannot be reversed. As the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, said, this is the right time to make this declaration. I therefore hope that noble Lords will heed our call and support our amendment if it is put to a vote.

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Moved by

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle]

2: Clause 1, page 2, line 4, at end insert—
“(e) soil health and quality.”Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment indicates that soil health and quality are a priority area for environmental improvement.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, Amendment 2 appears in my name and those of the noble Lords, Lord Whitty, Lord Curry of Kirkharle and Lord Randall of Uxbridge. I thank them all for their support, as well as others who would have offered their support had there been space under our procedures.

We have here a very simple amendment, but an improved amendment from Committee. As I listened to the discussion in Committee, it became obvious that we really needed to ensure that this amendment addresses both the health and quality of soil. I am simplifying slightly—I refer noble Lords to the discussion in Committee—but in a sense, in recent decades we have come to realise, in a way we had not before, that soils are complex ecosystems in their own right. The “health” element of this amendment very much addresses that biology aspect, whereas the “quality” element speaks more specifically to the chemical and physical composition of the soil. It is interesting that in our first debate today, the noble Lord, Lord Deben, highlighted the importance of soils when we are talking about biodiversity and climate. That is a useful introduction to this debate.

We debated soils at great length in Committee, so I will just briefly summarise some of the points raised. The UK loses more than 3 million tonnes of topsoil every year. Soil is degraded even while it remains in situ; almost 4 million hectares are at risk of compaction—the life and air squashed out of the soil, mostly by the passage of heavy farm machinery. Soil can also be contaminated through dangerous, damaging substances being swept or blown or landing on it—or still sometimes, sadly, being deliberately placed on it through error or fraud. We are also just beginning to understand micro- plastic pollution, something that cannot be escaped anywhere on this planet. Soils are stores of carbon too, of course. They are rich ecosystems and stores of life and biodiversity on a scale that we have barely begun to understand.

It is important to acknowledge that the Government, at least in some quarters, recognise the scale of this issue. The 25-year environment plan—supposedly the big, set-piece document outlining what the Government intend to do on many pressing issues—says that England’s soils must be sustainably managed by 2030. To drive home that point, that is little more than eight years away. In terms of farming practice, farmers are buying new machinery now that they might expect to use for many decades. In terms of the need urgently to plant trees, which is a soil health and quality issue as well as one in so many other areas, eight years is obviously not very long at all for them to reach any kind of size. Food manufacturers will have to think about their plans for the future and what crops might be available to them.

I credit the noble Earl, Lord Caithness, for highlighting in Committee how your Lordships’ House, after a long wrestle, got a significant reference to soil in the Agriculture Act. This is very much its sister Bill, so surely we have to do the same thing here to get the two fitting and working together. In the priority areas of this Bill we have air and water quality, then there is a gap where soil obviously belongs and where this amendment puts it.

I want to address a couple of the points the noble Lord, Lord Goldsmith of Richmond, made in Committee. One response was that

“the Bill gives us the power to set legally-binding long-term targets on any aspect of the natural environment”.

A Secretary of State could set a target at any time, but given that there are a scant eight years to reach the Government’s own aim of 2030, why wait? Why would a world-leading Government wait?

The second response from the noble Lord, Lord Goldsmith, was that there is not enough information and knowledge about soils to know what the targets could be. I acknowledge, as I did in Committee, that there is a dreadful shortage of information on and understanding of soils. This is a result of the failure to fund independent agricultural research extending over decades and the outsourcing of it to agrochemical companies that have advocated highly profitable—for them—practices which have had such a disastrous impact on soil health and quality. I suggest that the Minister then contradicted himself when he said:

“Developing targets is an iterative process”.


In other words, this is something that is developed, evolved and finessed over time. These targets can be set, improved, developed and worked through. What we need in this Bill is a statement that soil has to be there with air and water.

Without this amendment, we have a Bill that is a two-legged stool. Someone pointed out to me that they were once used in dairy farming because you could wobble by hanging on to the cow, but that is not quite a practical arrangement for a legal process. Stools need three legs. What this small, modest, but important amendment does is put that third leg on the stool. In our Committee debate, the noble Earl, Lord Devon, said that soil

“warrants its own independent priority status”

and added that

“we are in danger of giving it a permanently second-tier status”—[Official Report, 21/6/21; cols. 87-93.]

without the addition of this amendment. If we are going to be able to grow our food, cultivate and support our natural world and store the carbon that we must in the coming years, decades and centuries, this amendment has to be in this Bill.

Noble Lords will note that the noble Lord, Lord Curry of Kirkharle, who might be expected to be in his place and commenting on this amendment, having attached his name to it, is not here. The noble Lord asked me to send his personal apologies for being unable to be here and to share some of his thoughts. He said: “I have attached my name to this amendment because it is illogical not to include soil health and quality as a key environmental indicator. Soil is our most precious asset, and its status will determine whether or not we achieve net zero by 2050 and whether or not we can feed 10 billion people by 2050. Nothing can be more important than these two objectives. The Republic of Ireland has just committed €10 million to carrying out a nationwide soil testing programme to establish a baseline of soil health and quality. We have the opportunity to do the same through the ELMS if we specify the standard of testing required and create a national database. Why could we not take this unique opportunity to position ourselves as global leaders in this crucial area, particularly with COP 26 approaching?”

I have indicated informally and will now indicate formally that, unless I hear an acceptance from the Minister that the Government will put the final leg on the stool, I intend to push this amendment to a vote. I really feel we can do nothing else; we will be utterly failing the future if we do not do this. I beg to move.

[Lord Deben (Con)]

My Lords, the Climate Change Committee has made it very clear that the soil is a crucial part of our remediation policies to deal with climate change. I declare an interest because, in a small way, I am an organic farmer and I have a son who is particularly interested in and works with those who want to use soil for sequestration. Whatever one’s interests may be, it is quite clear that the importance of soil is universal; it is a world problem. We have reduced the fertility of our soil almost universally over the past 40 and 50 years. I often want to say that five a day is worth about what four a day might have been some time ago. I am not sure that is scientifically accurate, but it expresses what the difference is—not only is it the fertility of the soil, but the trace elements in the soil.

What is rather curiously called “conventional farming” suffers from the problem that is does not put back the richness of the soil in the same way that historic methods of farming have done. We have to recognise that we have to change, because we cannot go on doing this. If you come, as I do, from the east of England, you know that more and more conventional famers are recognising that the way we farm gives us very few more harvests because we are denuding the soil.

The first reason that soil is crucial is because it is getting far less useful—if we only want to look at it from a utilitarian point of view. The second reason is because we need it to be better able to sequester. That means we really have to bring the soil back to the kind of strength that it had before the war.

The third reason it is crucial is that there are particular soils with special issues. I draw my noble friend’s attention to the question of peatland, which is a remarkable and wonderful sequester of carbon. But if it is ruined or torn up, it becomes the opposite and it exhales carbon, so we have a double whammy. The fact is that the Government have not even embarked on a peatland policy that will reach the level the Climate Change Committee says is essential to meet net zero—to restore all our peatlands by 2045. If we do it at the speed which is, at the moment, being celebrated by Defra, we will not get there.

It is crucially important—some sort of animal has just landed on me and clearly wishes to sequester upon me—to note that, unless we act on soil, we have very little chance of reaching net zero, because the “net” bit of net zero is about sequestration. It is not just about planting trees, although that is crucially important; it is about the whole way we deal with soil, including how we deal with the bare period, which should be covered, and the sorts of things that we can do and which we have to make sure are part of ELMS when it comes to the detail. All those things are essential.

The noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, referred to a very interesting thing: of earth, air and water, earth is the first. Again, one comes back to the words of the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of York, who reminded us of the nature of the Lord’s Prayer.

It is very important that soil should be part of this. My reason for speaking is simply because we have made that very clear in the Climate Change Committee’s report—which has been accepted by the Government and is the basis of our commitment to net zero and the way in which we are going to get there. It would be a great pity if we cannot find a way of including soil. It may be that the way the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, wants to do it has some technical problem which I have not so far seen, and I am perfectly prepared to be led down some path which enables some other way of doing this. But if we do not include soil, we are again saying something. There is no such thing as being able to negative something without making a statement. Therefore, we either have to do what the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, would like us to do, or we have to find another way of making sure that soil is part of this.

I end by saying to my noble friend that there is a particular reason why Defra should be saying this: we have not heard enough from Defra about how we are going to improve the soil—we have not heard enough about the details. Therefore, we are not sure that Defra has really taken this on board. The Climate Change Committee is, I think, trying to say to Defra that this is central. For example, we have not yet banned horticultural peat. What on earth are we doing making it worse? We could do that immediately; the industry is ready for it, but we have not yet done it because we are still talking. Climate change gives us no time to talk about this—something that we should have done a long time ago. Please can we have this in the Bill, so that we know where we are and the Government can be held to it?

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Goldsmith of Richmond Park (Con)]

I thank the noble Lord for his intervention. We will talk in detail about the target shortly—perhaps even next—but my point is less about the individual fungi or bacteria; it is that you cannot deliver a reversal of our catastrophic biodiversity loss without tackling ecosystems and, as the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, make plain in her speech, soil is the basis of so much of our biodiversity and ecosystems, so it is logical that you cannot do one without the other—and likewise with net zero, for all the reasons that my noble friend Lord Deben pointed out.

So, as I have outlined, we are very much on the case. We are developing a metric and prioritising soil health in numerous ways, through this Bill but also other actions. The amendment would undoubtedly pre-empt the process of developing that metric and, for that reason, we cannot accept it—but, with the assurances I gave, I hope that the noble Baroness can be persuaded to withdraw her amendment.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I think this has been some of your Lordships’ House at its finest and I thank everyone who has contributed to this debate. It is extraordinarily striking that, from all corners of this House, we have seen overwhelming support for Amendment 2.

I do feel I must address the comments of the noble Lord, Lord Randall of Uxbridge, who signed the amendment and then expressed some concern about it. I do not believe that there is any form of conflict or competition between this amendment and Amendment 18 from the noble Earl, Lord Caithness. This amendment sets out that there must be a target; Amendment 18 sets out a process, scheme and operational activity. So they are not in competition. I strongly urge your Lordships’ House to support the noble Earl’s amendment. Indeed, I attempted to sign it, but, as with a number of others, it was already oversubscribed.

I should love to go through so many contributions—each has added something to the debate—and acknowledge them all, but I know that some of the people who are keen for the Bill to progress would be right on my case if I did that, so I will not. But I shall pick out just a couple of contributions, because I think they are particularly important. They are from two members of the Climate Change Committee: the noble Lord, Lord Deben, and the noble Baroness, Lady Brown of Cambridge. This is the expert view saying that the amendment needs to be in the Bill; that is the independent view, in all senses. The noble Baroness, Lady Brown, made a point that no one else has made in our long discussion of soils, about the way in which climate change is putting pressure on soils: drought, flood, fires and all the extra damage to what has already been done.

I also want to note the contribution of the noble Baroness, Lady Young of Old Scone. She has been a particularly fervent supporter of this amendment, and I thank her for that. I also thank her for counting the number of times that soil quality appears in the 25-year plan; I confess that I had not done that. That shows that the Government kind of see the issue but are just really not engaging with it in the Bill.

So I will address a couple of points that the Minister made. He talked a lot about what Defra is doing operationally and what it is setting out, but he did not really address my point that the 25-year plan says that we will have sustainable management of soils by 2030. How can we do that without having this long-term target to progress towards—without, indeed, having the noble Earl’s strategy? It was particularly telling that one of the other chief points of the Minister’s argument was, “Oh, well, we deal with these other things—biodiversity and water—and that will fix soils”. That is making soils a second-order issue, which is putting it in profoundly the wrong place. This amendment puts it in the right place: in the Bill. As we have discussed in so many other areas, whatever the department might be doing under one Secretary of State, there is no guarantee that it will continue under another Secretary of State. Issues must be put in the Bill.

I well understand the pressures in your Lordships’ House against calling votes; I understand the desire to progress the Bill. But, having listened very carefully to the Minister and having heard the very strong support for the amendment from all sides of your Lordships’ House, I must ask to test the opinion of the House.

Environment Bill

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Monday 6th September 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Krebs (CB)]

My Lords, I have added my name to the amendment in the names of the noble Lord, Lord Randall of Uxbridge, and the noble Baronesses, Lady Parminter and Lady Jones of Whitchurch. I join other noble Lords who have already spoken in warmly welcoming government Amendment 6, which accepts the spirit of the amendment we had put forward. To halt the decline in species by 2030 is a very stretching target and I congratulate the Government on their clear ambition.

For many species, reversing the declines and halting them will require dramatic changes in land use and in habitat restoration. It will involve responding to the vagaries of unpredictable events, such as extreme weather and disease that could easily set progress back. So it is, without doubt, a very stretching target. I will ask the Minister to clarify a few points about it—perhaps, even if he cannot now, he might be able to subsequently in writing. First, what will be the baseline from which the target of halting will be judged? Secondly, which species will be included in the target? Thirdly, how will a composite measure of halting declines be computed if, as seems likely, some species will continue to decline while others do not? Fourthly, who will carry out the independent monitoring to check whether the target has been met: will that be the role of the OEP? Last but not least, who will be accountable if the target is not met?

I now turn to the two other amendments in the group. The amendment to which my noble friend Lord Cameron of Dillington has just spoken seeks to go further by requiring the Government to reverse the declines. I support it, but, as my noble friend said, this should be a longer-term aim. If the near-miracle of halting declines by 2030 is achieved, I think, inevitably, as the noble Baroness, Lady Young of Old Scone, said, the measures put in place to halt declines will, in the longer run, result in reversal of the declines—for example, by habitat restoration or creation.

That brings me neatly to Amendment 9 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Young of Old Scone, to which I have added my name, along with those of my noble friend Lady Boycott and the noble Lord, Lord Randall of Uxbridge. As the noble Baroness, Lady Young, said, no one would dispute the fact that, if you wish to maintain or restore species abundance, you have to create, maintain or restore the habitats on which those species depend. Therefore, this amendment is, in effect, a necessary precursor to government Amendment 6. Achieving the objective of halting and eventually reversing species decline will depend entirely on our understanding of and restoration of the habitats on which those species depend.

Habitat restoration is in itself a subtle art. In Committee, I referred to the example of the large blue butterfly and the complexity of its habitat requirements that have led successfully to its recrudescence in the south-west of England. Habitat heterogeneity is often crucial. Ecologists agree that one of the important ways in which agricultural intensification has caused dramatic declines in wildlife is because it has replaced a patchwork of different habitats with uniform monocultures. The relationship between species abundance and habitat heterogeneity is complex and needs to be understood.

Finally, in relation to habitat restoration, the so-called Lawton principles, put forward by Sir John Lawton in his review, Making Space for Nature, emphasise that not only do habitats have to be improved—be bigger—but they also have to be better connected, so that fragments of high-quality habitat are connected and crucial individuals and species can move between them. Amendment 9 is part of the package for halting species decline, and I hope that the Minister will accept that it is an essential precursor and adjunct to Amendment 6.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I briefly offer my support for Amendment 7 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Whitchurch, to which I thought I had attached my name; it was an administrative failure on my part that I did not. I also support Amendment 9 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Young of Old Scone. Both amendments have strong cross-party support. It is a great pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Krebs. Indeed, his questions about how the Government plan to define and measure biodiversity are questions that we canvassed extensively in Committee. I do not believe—I would be happy to be corrected if I am wrong—that we have received any answers to them. It is essential for the understanding of this Bill that those things are defined and set out because, as we discussed in Committee, there are many different aspects of diversity, from genetic variance within a population to the number and range of species, and indeed the range of their habitats.

I will comment briefly on Amendment 6. Like other noble Lords, I welcome it, in that one always has to welcome progress and acknowledge the huge amount of work done by campaigning NGOs and campaign groups to get us this far. There is, however, a thing called “shifting baseline syndrome”. In the brilliant State of Nature reports, which are issued regularly by our NGOs, the baseline is often the 1970s. To quote one figure, more than 40% of species have declined since the 1970s. However, based on the figure from 50 years earlier than that there has been a massive decline. If you go further back, it becomes evident that we live in an incredibly impoverished landscape. In the UK we have lost 133 species since the 1500s. These include obviously charismatic species like the lynx and wolf, but also the apple bumblebee, Mitten’s beardless moss and the common tree frog, which fails to live up to its name.

I was reading, in preparation for this debate, a book called An Environmental History of Wildlife in England, by Tom Williamson. It speaks of 17th century England teeming with wildlife. The polecat and pine marten were present in every county. The great bustard was still a common sight on open land. We should be aiming to restore those kinds of wild landscapes, at least in part, and stopping decline does absolutely nothing to get us to that destination. That is where the habitats amendment, Amendment 9, is really important.

I was once lucky enough to visit in France one of 234 sites that are called—I apologise for my French, which I am told I speak with a broad Australian accent— réserves biologiques intégrales. They started in 1953 and that are quite small pockets of land that have essentially just been left untouched. I was lucky enough to visit one of these sites, and what amazed me was a depth of lichen on the trunks of the trees that you could touch; you felt that your hand sank into it and it went on for ever. That is a depth of richness of wildlife that we are so far away from now but need to start to head back to.

I strongly commend Amendments 7 and 9 to the House, but particularly Amendment 7. This is where I am afraid I will disagree with the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, in that I do not think that halting decline is an ambitious target. It is holding us in a state of extreme poverty of nature. We have to do better.

[The Earl of Caithness (Con)]

My Lords, this has been a very interesting debate to listen to. I congratulate my noble friend the Minister on bringing forward his amendment. I made up my mind to speak when I listened to the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Krebs. He put his finger on something very important but then moved off it. Which species are we going to keep? Who is going to decide which species will be protected? One thing that is absolutely certain is that the law of unintended consequences will continue: human beings will get involved in one area that will help some species but will be to the detriment of others. So I hope that my noble friend will tell us how exactly this part of the Bill is going to work.

The noble Lord, Lord Krebs, said that success relies entirely on habitat, but, thank goodness, he changed his mind a little later and went on to say that it is part of a package. Habitat alone will not solve the problem and halt the decline of biodiversity. We need proper farming practices, we need habitats, we need winter feed and spring feed, which farming practices have all but eliminated on agricultural land, and we need predator control. It is a hugely complicated and difficult area. To give a simple example, many of us feed birds in our garden and think that we are doing a great job for nature. We are benefiting some birds; blue tits have certainly increased. But, as a result, a lot of other birds have not increased, because blue tits are quite territorial and quite vicious towards other birds. In this mix, we have some species increase but also some species decline.

To move to a perhaps more rural aspect, one could look at the work that the Game and Wildlife Conservation Trust has done with the Allerton Project. It has been trying for years to bring back waders, but unsuccessfully. If my noble friend says that we must bring back waders and even the Allerton Project cannot do so, how will this succeed and what will be the price?

My noble friend the Minister is, I know, terribly keen on white-tailed eagles. They are one of his specialities and he mentioned them in Committee, but they are vicious birds and not terribly good breeders. They are vicious in that, in parts of Scotland that I know, they have driven out the golden eagle. They fight golden eagles and kill hen harriers and peregrines. That is the nature of white-tailed eagles. They are lovely birds to look at, but if you get too many of them you will destroy a whole abundance of species that have been living happily on the moor for hundreds and thousands of years. As they are not terribly good breeders, man will have to intervene to make certain that the numbers were maintained by bringing in hand-reared chicks.

Whatever we do, we are upsetting the balance of nature. Can my noble friend explain how he and the department, and subsequent Ministers, are going to handle this? To me, this is crucial. I thoroughly approve of not only halting the decline but turning it round, but we must be cognisant of the fact that some species will be far worse off. Who will make that decision? Will it be transparent, so that we can all decide whether those are actually the species we want to see decline and the other species increase?