Biological Diversity

Baroness Hilton of Eggardon Excerpts

Monday 20th June 2011 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Hilton of Eggardon]

My Lords, I have to declare an interest as a trustee of the Pond Conservation Trust. Freshwater is one of the most extensively exploited and vulnerable parts of the environment. That vulnerability has been further exposed by the drought that we have experienced this spring. Moreover, the harsh spell of weather that we had before Christmas, with record low temperatures, led to many frozen ponds and streams, and so further jeopardised the wildlife that is dependent on freshwater.

In the past 20 years, huge investment has gone into attempts to improve the quality of our rivers, but there has been little improvement in the biological condition of those rivers. About one-third of the monitored length of our rivers is not in a good biological condition due to such things as industrial pollution and fertiliser run-off from farmland. Over the next 20 years, a further £20 million will be spent to protect freshwater ecosystems through agri-environment schemes, investments in the infrastructure of the water industry and in conservation grants. However, ponds, a major reservoir of freshwater diversity, continue to decline in quality.

The Government’s White Paper on the natural environment, published this month, says,

“They are often overlooked but small water bodies such as ponds and ditches play a critical role in supporting ecosystems … Ponds alone support 70% of freshwater biodiversity and more endangered species than lakes, rivers, streams or ditches”.

Inevitably, government schemes to protect the environment will tend to be large-scale, such as the landscape-scale works recommended in the Lawton review, but ponds are essentially small-scale and local. The Pond Conservation Trust has since 2008, in company with local people and various partners, helped to create 1,600 new ponds, 420 of which are specifically for biodiversity action plan species. This project has also helped to change attitudes and has been used as an example of good practice by NGOs and by the Government.

However, work such as this cannot depend on local efforts alone, but needs to be underpinned by appropriate science and government policy. I want to ask the Minister two questions. Is he satisfied that the freshwater science base of this country is sufficient to provide the evidence needed by policy-makers to protect and ensure freshwater biodiversity? It is not just the species that depend on water directly—such as frogs, toads, newts, dragonflies and various plants and invertebrates—but also birds and bats, mammals such as voles and otters, and reptiles such as grass snakes. Secondly, as new schemes are introduced, are effective monitoring systems in place to determine which schemes are successful and cost-effective?