King’s Speech

Baroness Harris of Richmond Excerpts

Thursday 18th July 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Harris of Richmond (LD) [V]]

My Lords, I too send my best wishes to the new Government and their Front Bench. I wish them well in the future. I also congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Fuller, on his dynamic maiden speech.

I will speak about the Yorkshire Dales’ environment, primarily our national park, which I am fortunate enough to have on my doorstep in Richmond. The landscape and environment there attract hundreds of thousands of visitors every year but are also home to many small communities and hamlets, as well as dozens of farmers who work and maintain that unique area of our country.

It is that farming environment about which I will concentrate my remarks. I am indebted to Jane Le Cocq of the Yorkshire Dales National Park Authority, the senior farm conservation adviser, for her help and briefing notes, as well as to our excellent House of Lords Library for its notes on environmental land management and changes to the sustainable farming incentive and Countryside Stewardship schemes, as well as the NFU briefings and those from Zero Hour, the campaign for climate and nature, on the Climate and Nature Bill.

The farm team of the Yorkshire Dales National Park —the YDNP—has developed a holistic approach and guidance to farm business, water quality and biodiversity over the past 25 years. It works with around a thousand farms within the national park boundary, and helps and supports more than a hundred farmers to apply for stand-alone capital grants. It does this by improving farmyard infrastructure in slurry handling, field drainage and water holding features et cetera. It helps farmers to understand and apply for various agri-environmental schemes, such as the new environmental land management scheme, ELMS. Upland farmers do not have many options when it comes to land management, but they are interested in low-input grassland management and breeding water habitat management, as well as looking at other key environmental benefits specifically aimed at improving soil, water and air quality. I am sure that this is a good thing for all our national parks.

Reducing pollutants from farming, which affects our rivers, is essential. Your Lordships will know what those are, so I do not need to rehearse them here. However, as noted by the Environment Agency, the pressures and impacts on water quality caused by these pollutants affect a whole range of activities, including growth of algae in water, loss of biodiversity, silting of fish spawning grounds and drainage to fisheries, tourism and recreation—not to mention risk to human health through drinking water, and bather and water sports, as we have seen recently.

It is all the more important, then, that the catchment sensitive farming, or CSF, initiative operated in the Yorkshire Dales National Park area shows evidence of a lower use of pesticides—it was 25% lower than in 2006-07—and sediment reductions that average between 12% and 36%, which have led to invertebrate improvement in water and phosphate reductions of between 7% and 23%. The CSF initiative works collaboratively with both internal and external partners for wildlife conservation, trees and woodlands, the historic environment and development management, the external partners being of course the National Trust, Natural England, the Environment Agency, the Millennium Trust, the Rivers Trust and Defra.

Since the inception of ELMS, which replaced the basic payment scheme, farmers can be paid for actions that support food production, as your Lordships know, and improve farm productivity and resilience while also promoting and improving the environment. Most dales farmers should be able to enter the sustainable farming incentive scheme—the SFI scheme—or the Countryside Stewardship scheme, which aims to protect and enhance the natural environment, such as our spectacular hay meadows restoration, which is so desperately needed since the intensification of farming has made many of them disappear.

I understand that, from this summer, money will be provided for our dry-stone walling maintenance, species-rich grassland maintenance, haymaking supplement and significant payments for rivers, streams and flood plains, barn maintenance and agroforestry. It will not be before time as, according to the group Friends of the Dales, there has been a significant loss of species and habitats in recent years, with the dales’ moorland biodiversity damaged through heather burning, excessive drainage and the persecution of birds of prey.

However, the transition between one type of payment to another is taking time, and farmers need to know whether our new Government intend to carry on with their predecessors’ intent, which was not to fully implement the changeover until 2027.

Will the Government offer simplification of what has been an overcomplex application for farmers to navigate? In December 2023, the House of Commons Environmental Audit Committee was critical of the implementation of the scheme so far, and found that

“it is a step in the right direction, but more clarity and certainty is required in relation to what farmers need to do, the amount of funding available, and how ELMs will support the Government’s goals for food security and environmental protection”.

Will the Minister say how the scheme is being implemented and whether this Government will give a firm commitment to our farmers that they will simplify and speed up the payments in order to help them provide the food we need, the environment we wish to enjoy and the habitat to enable all wildlife to flourish?

Finally, a new concern is the Government’s stated aim to build thousands more much needed houses in the country. I hope this this will not impact adversely on our natural countryside, and definitely not on the sparsely populated upper dales. The Yorkshire dales are exquisitely special. They must remain so.