Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill

Baroness McIntosh of Pickering Excerpts

Report stage
Wednesday 13th September 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness McIntosh of Pickering (Con)]

My Lords, I follow the noble Baroness in backing British farming, particularly today with the NFU hospitality earlier. On that note, farmers feel beleaguered, and I think that it is fair to say that upland farmers, where most livestock production takes place, are suffering at this time for the reasons the noble Baroness said. I welcome the words from my noble friend the Minister in presenting the government amendments. She recognises that farmers need help, particularly with slurry treatment and storage, and looking to innovation and new technology, which is very welcome indeed. I think that less welcome will be the 4,000 additional farm inspections, which I am sure will spook a number of farmers.

I take this opportunity to support the noble Baroness, Lady Willis of Summertown, on her Amendment 247. I shall listen very carefully to what my noble friend the Minister says in her response. It is absolutely right—and goes to the heart of the earlier amendment on SUDS—that we look more to natural flood defences. I repeat my interest as co-chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Water Group, and also as a chair of the experts who looked into a report commissioned by CIWEM, the Chartered Institution of Water and Environmental Management. I do not know how else to paraphrase this other than to say that I hope that taking lumps out of waste and using it as a resource to add value is something that the Government will take up in due course. In this whole debate, that will contribute to reducing the impact of sewage.

On the Dutch case, I do not know if it is generally known that in Holland and parts of the UK, such as East Anglia, nitrates appear more naturally in the soil. So if you are contributing to the soil through either farming or sewage, you are increasing the levels of sewage, nutrients and pollution in certain parts of the country. That is something that the Government must be aware of; they should seek to try to limit the damage caused in those ways.

I must ask my noble friend the Minister and others who are committed, as we all are, to the target of 300,000 houses a year why developers are fixated on three-bedroom, four-bedroom and five-bedroom houses. Inevitably, they will contribute three, four or five times more to the wastewater going into our water courses—sometimes with pollution. Why are we not looking to reduce that and, particularly in rural areas, satisfy the need for one-bedroom or two-bedroom houses to help first-time buyers and young people into the property market, as well as older people, including former farmers wishing to come off the land and live in a village or market town?

I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Willis of Summertown, on arguing her amendment so persuasively. I also support my noble friend the Duke of Wellington, with whom I worked in the European Parliament in a previous life, who spoke so powerfully to his amendments —but, as he is aware, they are not the entire solution.

I urge the Government to take their amendments away and work at them in more detail. That is for one simple reason, about which I will end on a note of caution. My noble friend the Duke of Wellington referred to the OEP’s previous letters, but on 12 September it reported on and identified possible failings to comply with existing environmental law in relation to the regulatory oversight of untreated sewage discharges. That relates to Defra, the Environment Agency and Ofwat. I urge my noble friend the Minister to pause the government amendments and not, potentially, break existing environmental law in the way that the Government are preparing to do with the amendments she has put before us.

[Lord Anderson of Ipswich (CB)]

My Lords, the Minister said, in introducing the amendments, that they were carefully targeted and specific. With great respect to her, she could scarcely have chosen less appropriate adjectives for the Henry VIII clause that she seeks to introduce through Amendment 247YY. It is astonishingly broad, even by modern standards, as my noble and learned friend Lord Hope said. To give the House a flavour, it allows the Secretary of State to make any provision that they consider “appropriate” about the operation of any relevant enactment connected to the effects of nutrients and water that could affect a habitat’s site. Relevant enactments include all Acts of Parliament, including the future one we are debating today.

I will add a few other points on that clause to those made by my noble and learned friend. The Delegated Powers Committee, under the chairmanship of the noble Lord, Lord McLoughlin, has stated that such broad Henry VIII powers must always be fully justified—all the more so, one might think, when they are introduced at the last moment without any public consultation or parliamentary scrutiny. The committee also said that inadequate justification for such exceptionally wide powers had been given and recommended, in terms, that this clause should not form part of the Bill.

The position has not improved since then. The explainer circulated on Monday had nothing to say about the clause at all, although I and others raised it with Ministers last week. In fairness, the Minister said that she had written to the committee today, but the letter did not appear on its website when I checked 10 minutes ago, and I have no reason to suppose that the committee has changed its mind.

We cannot get into the habit of passing clauses such as this one without the clearest and most compelling reasons for them. This clause may have been conceived as a fail-safe in hastily prepared legislation, but its effect is to abdicate the influence of Parliament altogether over substantial and important areas of policy. Why would we sign up to that? The Minister undertook that these delegated powers would be used sparingly, and I do not doubt her good intentions. However, with respect to her, no such undertaking can have any value when the clause will expire not in this Parliament or the next, but in the Parliament after that, on 31 March 2030. I see every reason to follow the recommendation of the Delegated Powers Committee and to vote against the addition of the amendment.

There is a practical, as well as a constitutional, reason why I propose to vote against the amendment. If those who wish to oppose the main amendment—Amendment 247YYA—are successful, they will also need to exclude this clause because, if we do not, the powers that it grants will be quite broad enough to allow the Government simply to reintroduce the substantive measures by secondary legislation, or indeed to do anything else that they might wish to do in this general area, without Parliament having the power to amend it or, in practice, to block it. As I said, that is true not only of this Government but of the next Government and the one after that.

I was relieved to hear that my noble and learned friend Lord Hope will not press his probing amendment, because, as he said, it is inadequate to meet the problems identified by the Delegated Powers Committee. Like him, I am not content with Amendment 247YY and, if it is put to a Division, I will vote to exclude it.