Crime: Wildlife Crime

Baroness Miller of Chilthorne Domer Excerpts

Thursday 31st January 2013 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Baroness Miller of Chilthorne Domer]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what progress they have made in tackling wildlife crime.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Lord De Mauley)]

My Lords, the Government are committed to the fight against wildlife crime. We have made real progress in recent years, including providing funding for the National Wildlife Crime Unit and introducing civil sanction powers for Natural England to deal with certain illegal activities. Internationally, among other things, we have helped fund Interpol projects, building enforcement capacity to conserve tigers, elephants and rhinos in the countries where they live in the wild.

[Baroness Miller of Chilthorne Domer]

I thank my noble friend for his Answer. I am sure he is therefore aware of the comments of the CITES Secretary-General, John Scanlon, about the huge increase in poaching of wildlife, especially in Africa, which he feels is going to help fund the insurgencies there. Domestically, in Britain, does my noble friend agree that poaching birds’ eggs, for example, is stealing our children’s inheritance as much as stealing the Crown jewels? What guidance will he give to the new police commissioners to make sure that they realise the seriousness of wildlife crime?

[Lord De Mauley]

My Lords, first, I am aware that John Scanlon recognises the increasing involvement of organised crime in illegal wildlife trade. He has welcomed the UN Security Council’s call for an investigation into the alleged involvement of the Lord’s Resistance Army in the poaching of African elephants and the smuggling of ivory. Police and crime commissioners will hold their chief constables to account for the totality of their policing, which includes the chief constable working in collaboration with other police forces and agencies to address national issues that impact on their communities. As I have said, we believe that there is often a link between organised wildlife crime and other organised crimes, such as drugs and arms trafficking. We therefore expect the police to take wildlife crime seriously where it is a priority for their communities; co-operation with the NWCU will be key to this.

EUC Report: EU Freshwater Policy

Baroness Miller of Chilthorne Domer Excerpts

Wednesday 5th December 2012 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Miller of Chilthorne Domer]

My Lords, I was a member of Sub-Committee D for two terms and very much enjoyed my time on it. During the first term we looked at the water framework directive and its introduction; during the second term we did a quick follow-up inquiry. So I am particularly grateful to have the opportunity today to listen to the introduction by the noble Lord, Lord Carter of Coles. I am also grateful to other members of the committee who will contribute today, and for the opportunity to make a few brief points myself.

This debate on water issues should be the first of many that we will have. As the noble Lord, Lord Carter, said, the recent floods and the drought that we had earlier in the year are an indication of how severe things are likely to get with the more extreme weather that climate change is predicted to bring. Even before that, water policy has been seen as more and more crucial over the past 20 years. I believe that it was President Gorbachev who founded Water for Life and Peace because he saw it as one of the areas that would give rise to conflict in the 21st century. There is no doubt that we cannot afford to be complacent in any way about water from any point of view of security, whether actual security or food security, and so on.

Today I will limit myself to talking about priority substances, governance in terms of the water framework directive, and measurement of successful quality improvement of water bodies. First, I will talk about the priority substances explained on pages 13 and 14 of the report. A great many were listed by the water framework directive the first time around. There was an indicative list of main pollutants, of which some of the most worrying were those that possessed carcinogenic or mutagenic properties, or properties that can affect the reproductive and hormonal functions of creatures, including ourselves, of course. Then there are the persistent hydrocarbons and bio-accumulable organic toxic substances, which are all worrying, and that list is now to be added to.

The fact is that since we talked about this the first time, I do not think that we have got anywhere near tackling the substances on the current list. They have been placed in the “too difficult” box, or are too expensive to tackle. As the noble Lord, Lord Carter of Coles, has said, the estimate at the moment is that they will cost £27 billion to clean up. However, we have known for more than a decade, for example, that the endocrine disruptors are affecting the ability of dog whelks to breed. Before anyone thinks, “Well, who cares about dog whelks?”, the same effect is likely to spread to fish. Then there is the news today, which is very topical given this debate, of the much lower sperm counts in France. Maybe we are busy wiping ourselves out as a species, through our water. In any case, it is a form of pollution that must be tackled as a priority.

Paragraph 48 of the report suggests that we need “more knowledge” before tackling existing and new pharmaceuticals. However, given the science that we are already beginning to see and examples such as those I have just mentioned, we cannot afford to wait for another decade before we take action. Effluent-containing substances, such as endocrine disruptors and other things that could affect the ability of the whole gamut of animals to breed, will require waste water treatment when such things are flushed. As long as we persist in flushing such drugs out of our body, down the lavatory and into the rivers, we are going to have a very dangerous problem.

The report does not mention—at least I did not spot it—nano-substances. This is another very worrying development. The development of nanosilver is under way as an effective way of cleaning clothes in a virtually water-free way, but will those substances end up in our waste water, too? I think that the report is right to mention the worries, but it does not put over urgently enough the need to deal with them.

As the report says, governance is a key issue; linking communities back into their rivers and catchment is the way to affect behaviour change in our use of water and valuing of ecosystems. Some very good work has been done by the Wildlife Trust, for example, giving examples of how our water use can lower river levels until they cease to be viable ecosystems.

In paragraph 200, however, the report is plainly wrong, when it says that,

“novel governance approaches are despite, rather than because of, EU policy”.

Actually, it was quite the opposite. The original water framework directive really encouraged public involvement under Article 14, which was quite a long article—I shall not read it all out now. It was basically about public information and consultation and it said:

“Member States shall encourage the active involvement of all interested parties in the implementation of this Directive”.

It went on to specify a number of ways in which that would happen. Here in the UK, the attempt the first time round was, with a few notable exceptions, pretty poor.

I should declare an interest at this moment, because my husband was chairman of the Wessex Regional Flood Defence Committee and chaired one of the pilot catchment areas. We had debates on record in this Chamber; the noble Baroness, Lady Young of Old Scone, took part in them when she was at the Environment Agency. The agency was at that time unwilling to involve the public as much as the spirit of the water framework directive encouraged. Water companies were caught up in issues such as pricing and what comes out of the tap rather than whole-cycle costings. So at the time we wasted the opportunity for the public to be involved, and it is not because Europe got it wrong but because we did not interpret the water framework directive correctly.

There is also a problem of size. The designated size of the river basins means that the public will never relate to those, and I accept that the Government do not expect them to. Catchment areas or even subsets of those are what communities relate to. The smaller the geographical unit, the more likely you are to get real public involvement.

The recommendation in paragraph 201 is right in saying that one key is local authority energy and engagement with the water framework directive, and it goes on to suggest that some sort of duty could be put on water companies and local authorities to co-operate with each other. That is a constructive and helpful suggestion, because we need to kick-start that co-operation to get a far more engaged basis for this sort of work. The best results to date of catchment management plans have been exactly as a result of this approach, where local authorities have really got stuck in with their water companies and changed the way in which many things happen.

Finally, on measurement of water body status, I am very pleased that the report concentrates on the fact that status categories are too blunt. Paragraph 180 talks about “mapping of ecosystem services” informing choices of,

“technological solutions to be applied”,

moving away from the,

“‘one size fits all’ approach”.

The evidence from the Westcountry Rivers Trust is that,

“water quality objectives at present are only quasi-ecological”,

and are based on,

“point source pollution but not diffuse acute pollution”.

The trust mentions,

“biotic indices for macro-invertebrates”.

The point is that the initial water framework directive was a first attempt, and most member states had, and still have, big problems, as the noble Lord pointed out, with measuring water body quality in an outcome-related fashion. Nevertheless, refining measurements should be an absolutely key priority for us in the UK for this next phase, which ties in with governance.

I expect that your Lordships remember how the public imagination was caught by fish returning to the Thames as a sign that it was getting much cleaner. Fishermen and birdwatchers, who observe the top of the river food chain, have a good idea of the health of the river. Of course, the absence of creatures at the top of the chain might be due to other causes, as was the case with otters. However, the presence of creatures at the top of the food chain in numbers that you might expect, whether they are kingfishers, cormorants, otters, water voles, salmon or trout, means that things are likely to be healthy at the bottom of the chain, too. The Environment Agency’s website has a map you can interrogate on local river quality—and that is a very good start. It shows chemical quality and nutrient quality, but biological quality usually seems to be left blank. Is that because the mapping has not been done, which is what the report hints at?

I congratulate the committee again on a very helpful report, which will push us in the right direction.

Trees: British Ash Tree

Baroness Miller of Chilthorne Domer Excerpts

Monday 5th November 2012 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Miller of Chilthorne Domer]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Earl on securing this debate. He and other noble Lords who have spoken have brought a lot of expertise to bear on this issue, so I shall just stick to a couple of points. First, this is not just a European issue; it is a global issue. I can go back as far as June 1987 to the New York Times headline that says “Unstoppable disease killing New York ash trees”. It goes on to say:

“Scientists first noticed it in the 1930s and believe that ‘ash dieback’ has progressively spread throughout the northeastern states and parts of eastern Canada”.

So it has gradually been circling the globe. Of course, we do not know exactly when it got to Europe, but we know that it is spreading here. We are not sure how it is borne, whether as noble Lords have said it is blown or carried by birds or imported in saplings. The fact is that the global movement of people and animals, as my noble friend Lady Parminter graphically put it, has created something that is really out of control. That does not mean to say that we should not try to do something about it—but in the long term we need to look to the seed banks. The noble Earl mentioned that in his introduction. I would like to agree with him very strongly on that, because there will no doubt be ash trees that are resistant and there will no doubt be the opportunity to breed from them. That is the long-term programme that we need to pursue, not just for ash trees but for oak trees and pine trees and all our woodland. We need to collect the seed from those resistant trees and breed trees for the future.

With other noble Lords, I join in looking forward to a revival of the Forestry Commission’s research programme, which was rather cut back over recent years. This should be a major part of what we do, together with the seed banks at Kew and the Natural History Museum, with all the expertise that sits in those two places. If there is one thing that we know, it is that native trees over centuries and millennia built up resistance to local pests, diseases and fungal infections. With the global movement, completely different ones, to which they have no natural resistance, have entered the country. That is what we need to deal with. In the long term, it can be dealt with only by developing these resistant strains. So while I welcome the suggestions that other noble Lords have made about controlling the disease if we can in the short term, we must look to the long term.

Water: National Grid

Baroness Miller of Chilthorne Domer Excerpts

Wednesday 28th March 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Taylor of Holbeach]

No, I cannot accept the noble Lord’s premise. The Government owe it to all consumers to make sure that the water is of the highest standards and there can be no derogation from that obligation. The noble Lord is quite right that infrastructure costs money, but the water companies can be incentivised to provide just that.

[Baroness Miller of Chilthorne Domer]

My Lords, what importance do the Government give to some of the work being undertaken at, for example, the University of Leeds on the development of water-free washing machines and at other institutions on water-free lavatories? Is not the effort on finding ways of using much less water worthy of a great deal of investment?

[Lord Taylor of Holbeach]

My noble friend makes a very good point, indicating that water efficiency is one of the key strategies which it is in all our interests to pursue, particularly at this time when drought threatens a good deal of the country. That and water capture and storage are strategies which individuals and businesses can undertake for themselves.

Water Industry (Financial Assistance) Bill

Baroness Miller of Chilthorne Domer Excerpts

Tuesday 27th March 2012 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Miller of Chilthorne Domer]

My Lords, this is a slightly confusing situation when a money Bill has to be presented by a Defra Minister. I hope that that device, if I may call it that, or the process that this is going through, will not be one that our Government have to resort to very often. I do not want to detain the House at all. I want to give up the time that I would have used to my noble friend Lord Taylor of Goss Moor, who has worked on this issue for many years. Simply, I would say that having lived in the south-west myself for so many years, I am extremely happy to see this coming forward. I am also looking forward very much to hearing the contribution of the noble Earl, Lord Selborne, who worked so hard on this issue with the commission that he chaired.

I have one question. Presumably the infrastructure that was mentioned as being eligible for grant, loan or guarantee is hard rather than soft engineering or very different solutions such as fitting all houses with waterless lavatories, if that were an option in future. I would be grateful if the Minister would comment on that.

Food: Waste

Baroness Miller of Chilthorne Domer Excerpts

Tuesday 20th March 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Taylor of Holbeach]

The noble Lord is right: anaerobic digestion is a very good process for converting food waste. I was trying to emphasise that the most important aspect of food waste is to eliminate it at source, if you can. However, where food waste arises, AD is a very effective method. Indeed, we have an AD strategy plan, which includes a £10 million loan fund to set up new capacity. WRAP offered the first loan of £800,000 to a Wiltshire-based company, Malaby Biogas, in January 2012. Other actions to promote innovation in the AD sector, particularly on a small scale, are very much part of our strategy.

[Baroness Miller of Chilthorne Domer]

My Lords, for those of us lucky enough to have gardens or allotments, the incentive to compost is obviously much greater, but what incentive does the Minister offer to households without either of those to separate out their food waste?

[Lord Taylor of Holbeach]

This is part and parcel of the CLG process of looking for weekly collections. In partnership with local authorities, we in Defra hope to encourage food waste as a separate waste stream. Certainly that has been our policy, and many of the local authorities that are putting in bids to the CLG are doing so on the basis of a separate food waste collection.

EU: Sow Stalls Ban

Baroness Miller of Chilthorne Domer Excerpts

Thursday 19th January 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Taylor of Holbeach]

As I mentioned before, we have already sought information on this matter. We are knocking at the door, and the Commission has already learnt lessons from the cage ban on laying hens. We have sought early information that it is asking all member states how close they are to compliance. To date, we do not have that information, but we are determined to press on this issue. We are hoping to have on the agenda of the February Agriculture Council a discussion topic on this item.

[Baroness Miller of Chilthorne Domer]

The “happy pigs are tasty pigs” message is a very forceful one but UK government procurement policy over the past decade since the sow stall method was changed here has not really been got over, either in government procurement or by UK supermarkets to their customers. What do this Government intend to do about procurement policy on UK pork and bacon?

[Lord Taylor of Holbeach]

As my noble friend will know, the framework of public procurement is complex and it is not easy to lay down criteria that are not covered by directives. However, following the sow stall ban, it will be possible to ensure that that is the case. At the Oxford farming conference recently it was said that 70 per cent of pig meat imported into this country would be illegal if produced here under our regime.

Agriculture: Animal Feed

Baroness Miller of Chilthorne Domer Excerpts

Tuesday 6th December 2011 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Miller of Chilthorne Domer]

I, too, would like to thank my noble friend Lady Jenkin of Kennington for this debate tonight and also for her brilliant analysis of why we must change our attitude to food waste. I further thank her for introducing me to Tristram Stuart and his book, which she has generously lent me, Waste: Uncovering the Global Food Scandal, which I felt could have been subtitled “a philosophy for life”. I feel passionately that it is immoral to waste the planet’s resources; he gives the facts and figures behind that immorality and shows that there is a different way forward.

My noble friend Lady Jenkin mentioned the examples from Japan showing how it is technologically possible to separate out food waste streams and create an entirely safe way of feeding food pellets—perhaps the term “swill” is not helpful anymore—to non-ruminants with no risk at all, to create a better, more premium product. That is an entirely desirable vision which is actually realisable. It is all about having the confidence to regulate the food streams in that way and giving industry the confidence that the regulators can do it. I think that consumer confidence will then follow. People go off quite happily to Japan and other places that are doing this and eat pork, so it is not as though this is an impossible vision to realise.

In my contribution tonight, I mostly want to talk about the environmental damage that will occur if we do not change our attitude. First, I want to pick up something that my noble friend Lady Byford mentioned—the question of GM soya. I will be very sorry if this debate about food waste was in any way hijacked—I am certainly not suggesting that my noble friend was doing this—by those who want to promote the increased use of soya feed, whether or not it is GM. We cannot import GM soya into the EU at the moment, but this should not be seen as a marketing opportunity for GM feed producers to push their product, just because the non-GM soya has got so expensive. This is all about replacing the soya, and that is what I want to concentrate on: why we should be replacing it.

The ban on feeding food waste to livestock necessarily meant that Europe has had to increase imports of commercial livestock feeds, including soy meal, of which roughly 40 million tonnes are imported to Europe annually. The amount of land needed to produce soy for the European market since the ban on meat and bone meal in 1996 is roughly equal to the area of deforestation in the Brazilian rainforests since that date. That might be coincidence, but it is a very good example of this destruction. It is for this reason that the United Nations called on the EU to reconsider the overcautious legislation, concluding that encouraging the recycling of food waste into livestock feed could,

“contribute substantially to the feed supply, and by the same token release pressure on land”—

thereby reducing,

“biodiversity erosion, pollution and greenhouse gas emissions”.

Poultry feed accounts for more than half of all soya used in the UK livestock sector and much of this could be replaced by using food wastes, including processed animal proteins.

As well as land use causing deforestation, another knock-on effect is that of local farmers in Latin America who are evicted from their landholdings to make way for the large ranches and soya plantations. Last month, at the All-Party Group on Agro-Ecology, of which I must declare an interest as a co-chairman, we heard from the national co-ordinator of the Landless Workers Movement in Brazil about the effect on families who not only lose their land but can no longer grow food for their communities.

In Paraguay, 2.5 million hectares of soil were planted in 2006-07. Friends of the Earth found that every year in Paraguay alone 9,000 rural families were evicted because of soya production. Therefore, those families are not producing food for themselves and their communities. I have seen for myself the importance of corn, rice and beans in the Latin American diet. That food production is being displaced by soya production and the effect is that families are no longer able to afford a basic nutrition basket.

It is certainly not just me who has made that link. Defra has made the link between what happens when we import so much soya feed and what happens on the ground in Latin America. Recently, the Environment Secretary, Caroline Spelman, announced that Britain would contribute £10 million to help to protect the Cerrado in Brazil. She said:

“The Cerrado is rich in biodiversity and yet, alarmingly, it has almost halved in size, because of wild fires and the demand for agricultural products”.

Because of time I will not go on with what she said, but she made a very good analysis of the problem. She spoke about the loss and in conclusion she said:

“We won’t succeed in tackling climate change unless we deal with deforestation”.

We really must wean ourselves off this extreme need for soya.

I should like to look at the points of resistance that allow us to throw away so much; that is, the FSA, the NFU, the supermarkets and the food processing industry. The FSA is tasked to be rigorous in its risk assessment but, in its recent analysis, it said that the risks to human health of feeding PAP to pigs and chickens was negligible. That does not suggest a high risk or even a medium risk; it is a negligible risk. It is probably the sort of equivalent risk to something that is very common and highly regulated—the spreading of sewage on farmland. The FSA’s conclusion was that the risks were negligible. But its board also did not look at the benefits in environmental terms of stopping some of the issues that I have mentioned, such as deforestation. That might be because it is not in its remit but in our globalised world where everything is linked, it is hard to think that it should not have had a view on that.

I am sorry to say that I found the NFU brief for this debate rather shocking. Most of its reasons for why this was not a good idea were not mentioned tonight. They included staff in supermarkets being less well informed and not understanding the importance of properly segregating the products. Furthermore, the NFU believes that pet pig owners might pose a problem. Finally, in this regard, it states:

“Should the focus become more about using pigs to dispose of waste, the level of ammonia and nitrogen excreted from pigs could increase”.

I think that the NFU has been missing the point. I would ask it to go back and look at some of the examples that the noble Baroness quoted of things that are happening abroad and think about whether it could not help the pig industry here by taking a bit more of a positive attitude.

Finally, WRAP, the supermarkets and the processors have made some very good steps with the Courtauld commitment. Phase 2, which is happening now, is all about achieving the more sustainable use of resources. Pretty much all our major supermarkets and processors are signed up that. Part of that commitment must be to address this issue and to make progress on it. So my question for the Minister is this: does he think the Government could help with the very unhelpful regulation on the one-roof policy, which means that if something is produced under the same geographical roof of an establishment that also deals with meat products, that is always going to be a huge hindrance? Is this not more about working towards a total separation plan and making sure that it is regulated and enforced? That is the way forward.

In conclusion, this is all about education in schools and getting our children to realise the effect of wasting anything. Some great examples can be found in the Food for Life Partnership in schools and by the Royal Horticultural Society. Earlier today a parliamentary delegation went down to Wisley to see some of its work with school children, who completely got the thing about, “If you have put all that effort into growing food, do not waste it”.

Defra: Research and Development

Baroness Miller of Chilthorne Domer Excerpts

Thursday 20th October 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Taylor of Holbeach]

I thank the noble Lord for that question. I come from a horticultural background so am very much acquainted with the enormous potential for import substitution in these markets. I would like to think that the progress that is being made in yield increases from dairy cows is the sort of thing that we can see sustainably projected across the whole of agriculture. However, we need to be aware that it affects the number of viable herds in this country. That is one of the consequences of this investment in this area. However, the noble Lord is correct that giving farmers the knowledge to achieve these challenges is the most important thing.

[Baroness Miller of Chilthorne Domer]

My Lords, Defra has to make some policy decisions shortly about grass-fed dairy herds as opposed to the environmental and welfare benefits of having intensive indoor dairies. It called for tender bids for research in this area, which resulted in,

“none of the bids fully meeting the Department’s thorough evidence requirements”.—[Official Report, Commons, 3/10/11; col. 1399W.]

In that case, will Defra call for bids to be retendered or will it make policy in a vacuum?

[Lord Taylor of Holbeach]

It is certainly not my intention to make policy in a vacuum. All policy decisions in Defra on the science front are based on evidence. That, indeed, is a principle which we apply to decision-making in general. I would like to reassure my noble friend on that point.

Agriculture: Animal Feed

Baroness Miller of Chilthorne Domer Excerpts

Thursday 8th September 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Henley]

My Lords, we will continue to discuss these matters with the supermarkets and others. Obviously, where it is appropriate, food waste can go to feed animals—already some food waste can do so, when it has been appropriately separated from meat and other such products. However, as I made clear earlier, any loosening of what is happening will depend on scientific evidence and consideration of these matters. I also think that it is important, as the noble Lord makes clear, that we take opinion along with us on this matter.

[Baroness Miller of Chilthorne Domer]

My Lords, would the Minister accept that traditionally fed pigs are very popular with the public in terms of the flavour of pork, and so on? They certainly were until the change in their food. Feeding pigs largely on soya has an unintended consequence, in that all the imports of soya are leading to the further destruction of the rainforests. We really must make clear that using our food waste as best we can to feed to pigs has important consequences much further away in the world.

[Lord Henley]

My noble friend is right to point to further consequences of feeding animals in this way, in terms of producing the amount of soya used. Again, I stress to her, we should not make any changes unless the scientific evidence assures us that that is right and proper.