Land Use in England Committee Report

Baroness Boycott Excerpts

Tuesday 25th July 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Boycott (CB)]

My Lords, I declare my interest as a vice-chair of Peers for the Planet. I thoroughly welcome the report from the noble Lord, Lord Cameron, and thoroughly support all his recommendations.

As a country, we have made a number of crucial commitments. One is to net zero, and another is to nature recovery and biodiversity gain. There is no way we can deliver on those two goals without a radical change in how we use our land because, as other noble Lords have pointed out, they are not the only challenges facing our land. As the noble Lord, Lord Rosser, has just said, there is the question of public access. As other noble Lords have said, there is the challenge of building enough houses, and there is also the challenge of growing enough food. However, given how we are going about this—lax building regulations, houses being tossed up in areas without adequate resources—it will not be possible to do all we need to do on our tiny, precious island. There are also the two big new demands of restoring biodiversity and nature and decarbonising the economy, along with, as we heard in last night’s debate, adapting to climate change, and all the other things we need to do.

You would not build a house without first having a floor plan; indeed, you would not try to redesign a house without a floor plan. You would not design a new town without thinking about where to put the amenities, and you would not design a transport system without a plan—although in the past we have. London is a great case in point, with no tubes going to the south of the city. Noble Lords may say, “Well, how do you retrofit on to an existing situation where we have towns and counties and roads and fields and everything is organised?” The point is that we have now reached a watershed, and it is pretty simple: we are faced with a climate emergency and a natural resources and biodiversity emergency. Unless, as the noble Lord, Lord Cameron, and others have said, we figure out how to use the land—how we eat from it, grow from it; how we use it in all its different ways—there is no way we can muddle our way through this. You cannot do it without a proper system. As much as many noble Lords have attested to the right of private landowners to do what they like, I do not believe that we will do it without very clear government guidance.

We must have a land use framework for England which will deliver integrated, collaborative and place-based decision-making, optimising the multifunctional benefits that our land can give us. At a national level, we need to join up land use policy-making across government departments, especially between land use planning, agriculture and the natural environment. This is a pressing concern for local leaders around the country who want to see a more strategic approach to allow better land use decision-making at local authority, catchment and landscape scales, which will support more proactive, integrated action to deliver net zero. The local nature recovery strategies are only a small part of this picture.

In addition, this will help individual landowners and farmers to make long-term plans, to help assess what their land is best for. As we speak, innovative farmers and landowners are trying to join up their land to create essential nature corridors in which wildlife can move freely. A framework would make this essential task, which is in everyone’s interest, including farmers, that much easier. However, already land is being purchased by private equity and business for particular purposes such as forestry and carbon sequestration, without any strategic or democratic assessment of whether that land could be better used for another purpose, such as agroecological farming, which could deliver multiple benefits—food, biodiversity, reduced greenhouse gases and green jobs, or enabling people to live and work right there in their communities. This would enable many more government targets to be achieved, joining up the delivery of many complementary goals for food, jobs, housing, nature and net zero. The most appropriate land would be used for a mix of uses that it is best suited to. It would also deliver process benefits, reducing conflicts over land use, which will save us time and money. We do not have much time and we are always being told that we have no money. Collaborative approaches would help to align and pool resources and share data, knowledge and skills. Finally, a framework could help to corral and align private finance—currently widely described in some quarters as a “wild west”—as well as philanthropic funds in support of transparent, democratic, fair and sustainable investments.

The ideas have been brilliantly set out by the noble Lord, Lord Cameron, but they are not new. The National Food Strategy, written by Henry Dimbleby along with a bunch of advisers, of whom I was one, states as recommendation 9 that the only way the UK will meet those targets—on net zero and nature recovery—is

“to change the way we use the land”.

He recommends developing

“a Rural Land Use Framework”,

with all the ministries being involved. The new regulations and payment systems, as has been noted by other noble Lords, are confusing at the best of times, so a clear land strategy would really help.

The wonderful Food, Farming and Countryside Commission, which I recommend to anyone who does not know its work, has recently been running two trials on how to make a land use framework work. Its conclusions are really heartening:

“The need for change is most often expressed around joining up the planning system for the built environment with other land use changes and enabling planners and other decision makers to take a more holistic approach to decision-making. If a Framework is given statutory weight, alongside those policies that it should help join up (such as Local Nature Recovery Strategies, Biodiversity Net Gain and the planning system), that would enable it to do this … Land use frameworks can facilitate the creation of a shared, long-term vision for an area—setting out what combination of housing, employment, transport, landscape, seascape, biodiversity, food production, natural beauty etc. future generations should enjoy”.


There is no other way to do it.

It is not unprecedented to have these. We have national targets for many areas of policy which are delivered locally. I look forward to hearing from the Minister about the progress the Government will make towards producing this vital strategy.