Queen’s Speech

Baroness Byford Excerpts

Tuesday 7th January 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Byford (Con)]

My Lords, I welcome the measures announced in the gracious Speech and look forward to debating some of the issues as the parliamentary Session proceeds. I shall concentrate on trade, climate change, food production and the environment. First, however, the withdrawal agreement Bill was given a resounding Second Reading in another place. I hope that the debates of scrutiny and revision in this House will work towards a positive new era. We must urgently engage in meaningful discussions. It has been implied that the EU is unwilling to co-operate, which I find surprising as it has a trade surplus with the UK of over £100 billion. It is surely in all our interests that progress is made in establishing new agreements.

Turning to climate change, the Met Office forecasts that our summers will become hotter, and droughts more likely; that rainfall, when it comes, will be of greater intensity. In Leicestershire, the average rainfall for the past eight years has been between 25 and 29 inches a year, but in 2019 the total was over 48 inches. We were so much more fortunate than other areas in the country where six inches of rain fell in two days and where families had to leave their homes and farmland was waterlogged. I welcome the Conservative manifesto pledge of £4 billion towards flood defences but I ask the Minister whether the current arrangements for flood management are adequate. I understand that responsibility falls partly between the Environment Agency, the local authorities and the drainage boards. Will this be reviewed? How is the finance allocated?

I turn to land management. How do we value the production of food against any other demands made upon the countryside, be that for renewable energy, growing trees, housing, infrastructure, biodiversity, wildlife, tourism or simply for the health benefits that being outside in the country brings? Some 70% of that land is farmed. We know that population growth will require more food and that more houses will need to be built, but somewhere a balance has to be struck. For my part—I declare our family farming interests as in the register—the first responsibility of any Government is to defend the country and the second is to feed their people. UK farmers produce healthy, affordable food. The Minister referred earlier to our high standards in animal welfare, crop growth and environmental protection. Those high standards of animal welfare, plus the valuable red tractor logo, and many other recognised assurance schemes, give confidence to consumers.

I welcome the commitment in the Conservative manifesto to buy British, especially through public procurement. In looking to future trade deals, we must ensure that the high standards I spoke of earlier are applied equally to imported food, and that UK producers can compete on an even basis—a fair deal for both. I understand that the Government propose to gather and share trade information to support UK businesses against unfair trade practices; this commitment is to be welcomed. Does the Minister have any additional information to share with the House today, or details of what is going to be established?

There are four Bills on my topic awaiting our deliberations: an agriculture Bill, a fisheries Bill, an environment Bill and an animal welfare Bill. I totally agree with the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, on the setting up of the new office for environmental protection: it must be independent, must be financed properly and must have teeth, for without that, it will fail. I hope that these Bills will give us the opportunity to rethink the ways in which we tackle six additional issues: waste, especially food waste; packaging; plastics; fly-tipping; recycling; and renewable energy projects.

We have an enormous amount of work before us. It will require purposeful discussions and the will to pull together to ensure that people throughout Britain can look to a better future. I believe we have a great responsibility; we must not fail them.

Parliamentary Buildings (Restoration and Renewal) Bill

Baroness Byford Excerpts

Committee: 1st sitting (Hansard - continued): House of Lords
Monday 22nd July 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Adonis]

My Lords, I agree with every word the noble Lord has just said.

What I would like to see in this Bill—as noble Lords know, I always try to push things to extremes—is a duty on the sponsor body to see that, once the restoration and renewal work is completed, there are facilities and arrangements in place for every schoolchild in the country, during the course of their secondary education, to visit the Houses of Parliament, have a tour and get the opportunity to see the work we do.

[Baroness Byford (Con)]

I have to take the noble Lord to task on engagement in schools north of the south—if you see what I mean. Not enough of us take part in the Lord Speaker’s outreach programme, but many do, and I assure the noble Lord that the majority of schools I go to are not private but state schools, and they engage through citizenship. They are often either GCSE-level or sixth-form level—I have been to a couple of primary schools as well—but they do come down. With this project we have a chance to enlarge on that, but I would hate to think that people following this debate would think that we do not engage already. On the whole—I cannot speak for others—I have been to state schools, certainly not private schools.

[Lord Adonis]

My Lords, I commend the noble Baroness on her work. I did not say that we do not engage at all; I said that we do not engage nearly enough. The overwhelming majority of state secondary school pupils across England do not have any engagement, will not have come here on a visit and will not have met their parliamentarians. We should take that as a criticism of us—this institution—because it is.

My noble friend Lord Blunkett is pushing the door further—which he does so brilliantly on these occasions —so that we at least recognise in the Bill that the public exist and that the promotion of public engagement should be a duty on the sponsor body. These amendments seem entirely uncontroversial, unless the noble Earl is going to argue that they are distracting to the work of the sponsor body. If he does, I hope that at the very least he will agree to consider that issue further. If they are distracting, we are admitting that engaging with the wider public is a distraction to the work of the very body and the restoration and renewal programme that should seek to serve this wider public interest.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Blunkett]

I am grateful to the noble Baroness; until I was nudged along, I did not know anything about this. I am enlightened by it, and it is all the more reason why we should have absolute clarity that we are going to tackle the issue. I will give noble Lords one example: there are steps currently that are completely unusable by certain members of staff and parliamentarians. The problem looks really difficult but if, without damaging the heritage, you put in a moving staircase that is accessible only by people with a particular card to activate it—this will be possible in the 20 years it will take before we come back into this place—you could do it. This is what I said at Second Reading. We are fighting the “mind-forg’d manacles” that William Blake referred to. We have to put these aside and use a bit of common sense. If noble Lords do not like the amendments, they should come back with something that meets the requirement. I say to the noble Baroness, Lady Scott, that I have every faith in the sponsor body as it stands at the moment, but, as I said earlier, people will not be there. I am trying to future-proof what we do. If we do not do it for people with disabilities, we are not doing it for ourselves. I beg to move.

[Baroness Byford]

My Lords, I want to follow the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, because I have added my name to his second amendment. In the Joint Committee, we had long discussions about the whole question of access, particularly, as the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, has said, about access within the building once one gets in. I want to support the noble Lord in his desire to get something written on to the Bill with regard to disability. We had long discussions in Committee about this. It is a matter not just of people getting into this building but, once they are in the building, of how they get around it. The figure quoted in one of the briefings we had is that currently only about 12% of this building is accessible to people with a disability. As the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, has indicated, there will be rooms in this building that will not be accessible after renewal and I am sure that is probably right. I think it falls on the sponsor body itself to decide what is an acceptable percentage: if it is 12% now, are we talking about 25% or 30% eventually?

The other thing that we had a long conversation about was how people come into the building in the first place. The Cromwell Green entrance is totally inadequate for our needs now. It sometimes takes people an hour to get in, and if it is raining it is pretty miserable. Access to the building needs to be looked at as well.

I will not pre-empt the contribution from the noble Lord, Lord Stunell, but it is not just those with physical disabilities who have difficulty accessing the building—those in wheelchairs or like the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, have difficulty in getting around. There are also people with hearing disabilities, but I will leave that issue to the noble Lord, Lord Stunell.

There are many ways in which this building could be made much more friendly and supportive of people so that we could use everyone’s skills that otherwise would not be included. I am very happy to have put my name to this amendment. I hope that my noble friend the Minister will be more supportive of this one than of some of the others. When I broke my ankle last year, as I reflected at Second Reading, that made me realise the true difficulty of getting around this building; I think there are something like 90 different stairs, and many of the lifts are not accessible. If I can go further, some of the ladies’ and gentlemen’s facilities are totally inadequate for those with disabilities. This is an opportunity to put those basic needs right.

My questions for the shadow sponsor body are: where are your priorities going to come in this? In view of where you are going, what way can you see of achieving that while recognising that some of the building will not, I suspect, be suitable for getting the sort of access that most of us would like to see? I am hoping that my noble friend will be more encouraging later. I am very pleased to support these amendments.

[Lord Berkeley]

My Lords, I spoke about some of these issues in response to an earlier amendment. All I will say is that the amendment asks for a report for the building to be fully accessible, which I support, but to achieve that and the things that my noble friend and the noble Baroness, Lady Byford, have mentioned—including lifts, toilets and other areas that are currently inaccessible—will involve some massive works in this building and they will be very expensive. They will also reduce the amount of space available for other things, but I am sure that they have to happen.

My Amendment 17A proposes that the same criteria that my noble friend has put in Amendment 17 in respect of this building when we come back are also applied to the temporary accommodation that we might have in the QEII or wherever.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Byford]

My Lords, my name is added to Amendment 12. In the Joint Committee, we said that it was easier to see what restoration was about, but the renewal part exercised quite a bit of our time. In other words: what sort of Parliament did we want and what sort of involvement with democracy did we want? We have talked about the outreach programme and the educational facilities, and I shall not anticipate my noble friend Lord Bethell in moving his amendments. I felt surprised at that stage that not enough thought had been given to renewal and its opportunities. I have no qualms about mentioning that again when the noble Baroness, Lady Scott, is in her place, because I know that she is well aware of the hopes that the shadow body has—but the Bill does not place enough emphasis on that.

The noble Lord, Lord Stunell, spoke about technology. In 10 or 20 years’ time, we will be able to communicate in a totally different way from the way we do now. We talked about the outreach programme run by the Lord Speaker, where individual Peers go out to schools and schools come here. With modern communications, that can be done virtually; there is enormous scope for us to relate to the general public in a totally different way. I will say no more on that because we had good discussions earlier—but I will say that it would be a shame to miss the opportunities in the Bill, and I support the amendments in this group.

[Lord Bethell]

My Lords, I also support the excellent amendments in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett. There are two amendments in my name in this group. They are practical, nitty-gritty measures, but I hope that they will not be brushed off for that reason, because they are important. The noble Lord, Lord Stunell, put it very well in his comments: engagement on R&R will not happen until the options are fully understood and one gets the feeling that one is making informed choices.

It is imperative that those options are clear from the outset, and we do not know what the options on educational facilities and participatory democracy are at the moment. I am hopeful for the Wallace/Adonis café—I look forward to drinking my latte there—but that anecdote has become a metaphor for our vision. There is simply no information or a clear, thoughtful prognosis on what could be done with the building. There is talk of glass ceilings over the courtyards and someone tells me that we can clear out the ground floor, but I have no practical knowledge of whether these things are at all possible. My amendments would apply to the Bill after Clause 4, but they address Clause 2(2)(b), which commands the sponsor body to,

“make strategic decisions relating to the carrying out of the Parliamentary building works”.

To do that, it is absolutely imperative that the body has, at least in outline, an idea of what could be done to further the educational facilities and participatory democracy.

We are talking about intellectual leadership here. I know that the Bill is largely about the administrative structures of the bodies involved, but other considerations are also important. We talked about culture and hard-baking public consultation into the way in which this project conducts its business. I have found that, in major infrastructure projects, the intellectual leadership is often—and quite rightly—with the engineers and project managers, whose thoughts are dominated by the practical considerations of budgets, timetables, M&E, air conditioning and the physical practicalities of getting the job done. Here, we are talking about something that is softer but still important. If we leave the intellectual leadership of this project to the people who govern the practicalities, these important considerations will not be baked into the project at an early stage.

Noble Lords will be familiar with me urging for major investment in public consultation. However, to carry out that consultation, you have to understand a little about what kinds of practical options there are for enhancing the educational facilities and access to the House. That is why it is worth while investing in the budget for the right professional services to put together a clear report on the options in these two areas. I strongly recommend that they be written into the Bill.

Rural Communities

Baroness Byford Excerpts

Thursday 15th July 2010 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Byford]

My Lords, I join others in thanking my noble friend Lord Greaves for gaining this important short debate. I remind noble Lords of my family farming interests, although we have no upland connections at all, and of our membership of the NFU, the CLA and the National Trust.

In preparing for this debate, I reread the Natural England 2009 publication which my noble friend Lord Greaves highlighted and the recent Commission for Rural Communities report of June 2010. I also went back to the EFRA Select Committee report on the potential of England’s rural economy. Certain themes emerge in common. First, as the noble Baroness stated, no one size fits all. These rural areas are very diverse and the needs of one will not necessarily be reflected in others. Taking up the noble Baroness’s point about planning, I was particularly taken with page 8 of the EFRA Select Committee report, which posed the recommendation that Defra carries out a review of the planning decisions by the national parks authorities, assessing whether they reflect the correct balance between protecting the natural environment and ensuring that communities located within national parks are sustainable and will survive long term.

Other noble Lords have touched on things that are generally accepted but, in an age dominated by urban majorities, it is perhaps worth repeating the message so that it gets home. There are extra costs when living in rural areas: it costs more to provide services there; housing is more expensive and out of reach of some of the youngsters who want to enter farming or take up other rural careers; the provision of broadband is inadequate and in some places inaccessible; post offices have closed; jobcentres are difficult to visit; and village shops and pubs have also closed. Yet the rural local government areas receive a significantly lower level per capita of public investment than their urban equivalents. Sparsity has not been taken into account and I hope that my noble friend will be able to tell us more about the Government’s plans for that.

I read with interest the report of the Commission for Rural Communities, published in 2010. At page 50, the hill farming key facts give a stark warning about the future viability of farms in those areas. They state that approximately half of upland farmers are in debt and that, of those who borrow, 11 per cent report that it is becoming much more difficult to obtain external finance. Furthermore, 21 per cent expect their businesses not to go beyond the next five years. That highlights the need for urgency in tackling the problems that we face.

If world populations continue to expand as predicted, we will need to produce more food rather than less. Hill farming has an important contribution to make and one should not forget that less favoured areas in England make up 17 per cent of the total farmed area in England. While some farmers are able to make a viable return, many cannot as they are subject to disadvantages resulting from farming in areas of natural handicap.

As others have suggested, the agri-environmental payment schemes are crucial to their future. I understand that a revision of the less-favoured-area designations across the EU is now ongoing, with the objective of establishing more consistent EU-wide physical criteria for these areas. Defra’s new upland entry-level stewardship scheme is to set a minimum stocking density on moorland, reflecting the importance of grazing animals and the need to avoid undergrazing. My goodness, if we had had this debate a few years ago, we would have said exactly the opposite. I also understand that the EU Commission has suggested that scheme payments should be made annually, not half yearly as they currently are. I would like the Minister to comment on that because, if it is so, it will hugely affect some of our upland farmers who rely on a half-yearly payment. The total income of some of them is just about £6,000, which is minimal.

I have three questions for the Minister. First, will the Treasury’s contribution to the £3.9 billion England rural development programme be cut, and, if so, by how much? What has happened to the underspend of £420 million, reported in June 2009, for Defra’s RDP schemes? Secondly, does the Minister know how many tenant farmers with fewer than five years to run on their tenancy have failed to obtain their landlord’s countersignature on an application for an upland entry-level scheme and what is the aggregate loss of funding as a result? Thirdly, is Defra monitoring the expansion of the densely growing bracken? It is a huge problem in Wales and other areas, and unless we keep livestock on the land we risk it getting totally out of hand.

The Natural England report published in 2009, Vital Uplands—A 2060 Vision for England’s Uplands, states that our uplands are a national asset, prized by many people as places of inspiration and enjoyment as well as a source of vital benefits such as food and clean water. It later states that our healthy upland environment, with its outstanding wealth of habitats and cultural landscapes, is crucial to everyone’s well-being. It is indeed. But agriculture and food production are equally key. Surely the primary purpose of uplands will remain food production—a source of high-quality meat and breeding stock for lowland producers. The one set of farmers relies on the other, and the chain between them is an important link that should not be broken. It is worrying that there has been destocking of livestock in some areas. For example, the raising of livestock units on Dartmoor fell from 46,000 to 9,000 between 1996 and 2006. If that is repeated elsewhere, that is worrying.

How will the Government resolve the many demands placed upon them in our uplands areas? Will environment schemes continue, and how will they be regarded to include the public good? Other noble Lords have spoken about the need for a rural voice and the work of the rural advocate. Will the Government create a cross-government public service agreement if the CRC is to be dissolved, rather than the existing departmental strategic objectives, because some of us would consider the former better than the latter? Again, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, and I look forward to hearing the response from my noble friend.