Queen’s Speech

Baroness Young of Old Scone Excerpts

Wednesday 11th May 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Young of Old Scone (Lab)]

My Lords, I add my commendation for the splendid maiden speech of the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Guildford. He was quite right in pointing out that local inequalities can be some of the most damaging things. I ran healthcare in north Kensington and Notting Hill, and I remember trying to explain the role of a health visitor in visiting new mums to the Health Minister, whose daughter lived in Notting Hill and had been outraged by the fact that she had to expect a health visitor visit, because that was something that the nanny took care of. I had to explain to him that if you were a single-parent drug addict, unemployed and living in a squat in north Kensington, you might well value the services health visitors.

A key part of the levelling-up agenda is the proposed changes in the planning system. It has already been said that the devil will be in the detail, particularly regarding what the new approach to environmental assessment will look like and whether it really will improve outcomes for the natural environment—I hope it will.

The disappointment is that the Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill fails to focus on a key issue, which is the increasing pressure on land use from competing demands from all sorts of directions—housing, infra- structure, food security, biodiversity recovery, climate change and carbon sequestration, biofuels, access, recreation and management of flood risk. All those things are now increasingly pressing on the same areas of land. The University of Cambridge sustainability initiative’s calculation, that if we were to meet all these land pressures we would need a third more land, constantly needs to be brought to the fore. I very much welcome the establishment of the land use Select Committee in your Lordships’ House, so ably led by the noble Lord, Lord Cameron of Dillington, but regret that the forthcoming legislation as signalled in the Queen’s Speech will not tackle this pressing issue.

Some of the changes that we see proposed for the planning system, such as introducing naked bribes for local communities to accept housing development and giving residents more say over changing street names, are probably less important than resolving these real pressures on land, which are fundamental to economic development, to climate change, to biodiversity and indeed to jobs. Can the Minister assure the House that the Government will actively consider the need for a strategic approach to land use, along the lines of those already existing in Wales and Scotland, to be brought in for England?

The second issue I want to focus on relates to transport. We have another HS2 Bill—the High Speed Rail (Crewe - Manchester) Bill—which feels a bit like Groundhog Day. The last few HS2 Bills have meant another set of ancient woodlands being damaged or destroyed. Successive stages of HS2 do not seem to learn from the failings of the previous stages in this respect. I declare my interest as chairman of the Woodland Trust. I am sure that the Minister will recall the helpful interventions that she made the last time that we had an HS2 Bill, which resulted in a requirement laid on HS2 Ltd to report annually on its impact on ancient woodland. Alas, we got the first annual report a few weeks ago and it is pretty inadequate. It is a sort of propaganda statement of intentions about ancient woodland and some of the rather feeble mitigation factors that HS2 has introduced, rather than a proper analysis of the real impact that each stage of HS2 has had on ancient woodland. May I ask the Minister to review the report to make sure that the next one is better in assessing real impact? Can she tell us how the Government will insist that HS2 Ltd learns lessons from its previous stages and commits to implementing the lessons learned in this next stage before we see the Bill come to this House?

Perhaps I could ask the Minister also to note that it is not just the impacts of HS2 on ancient woodland that need to be handled more effectively. Increasingly, we are seeing new energy distribution networks and new energy sources, such as hydrogen pipelines and CO₂ collection networks, coming up the agenda. The first stages of these proposals are already showing huge impacts on ancient woodland.

Turning to the Government’s broader legislative programme, we will have a Brexit freedoms Bill to make it easier to amend or remove outdated EU laws that might otherwise take “several years” to change under the “current rules”. I am concerned on two counts here. Many noble Lords will recall how hard we had to fight to ensure that important environmental legislation was safely brought across as EU retained law. Noble Lords will also recall how unwilling the Government were during the passage of the Environment Act to preserve adherence to the central principles of environmental legislation which European legislation enshrines.

I am sure that noble Lords will therefore share my distrust of the impact that this Brexit freedoms Bill could have on environmental legislation, especially since it means that such legislation can be swept away without proper parliamentary scrutiny in the interests of speed. One can understand why the Government are interested in speed; being as unpopular as they are, they desperately need something to be able to wave as a gain from Brexit before the next election. But I remind the Government that all the polls are telling us that the UK public—especially young people, who are important voters for the future—and British business want strong and clear environmental legislation that persists and is not changed regularly. That is what EU retained environmental legislation provides.

Can the Minister tell us which EU retained laws, beyond those listed in the Benefits of Brexit paper published in January, the Government propose to change? Does the Minister not agree that it is slightly bizarre that the Government complain in the more detailed exposition of the Bill we have in the paperwork from No. 10 that much of the law they envisage sweeping away was

“imposed and changed with minimal parliamentary scrutiny in the past”,

yet they are themselves planning to make sweeping changes, again without consultation or parliamentary scrutiny? Consultation and parliamentary scrutiny are important in these issues or they are not. Could the Government please make up their mind? I believe that proper consultation and parliamentary scrutiny are important and that these important laws should be subject to them.

Perhaps the most glaring gap in the proposed legislative programme is in respect of climate change and biodiversity decline. Only six months after COP 26, when we led the world to recognise what crisis measures it needed to meet the twin crises of climate change and biodiversity decline, we are not ourselves tackling these two challenges in our very next legislative programme. I have just one example. The Government are rightly concerned about the impact of the rising cost of living, yet the legislative programme has nothing on home energy conservation measures, which would immediately help households save money on fuel bills and ensure warm homes as well as reducing carbon, creating jobs and enhancing our energy security. Why not? Should the levelling-up strategy have a mission on net zero and biodiversity gain? Should the levelling-up strategy recognise the economic boost and green jobs that action on climate change and biodiversity delivers? The noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe, rightly listed the challenges of inflation and insecurity that we are currently facing, but these must not wipe out our concentration on the existing existential challenges of climate change and biodiversity decline, which will not go away.