Biodiversity and Conservation

Earl of Caithness Excerpts

Thursday 13th March 2025 Grand Committee

[The Earl of Caithness (Con)]

My Lords, bracken is a plant that deserves admiration. It is thought to be largely unchanged since the time of the dinosaurs and it has been found on every continent except, to date, Antarctica. It is found across the UK, from a garden to an almost inaccessible hillside.

Bracken supports specialist flora and fauna and is welcome as part of a mosaic of vegetation types. However, it can out-compete other vegetation due to several biological adaptations. If there is no effective management, this can result in dense monoculture stands with the loss of sensitive and diverse species—which, in comparison to the mosaic, are biological deserts. The Lake District is an example of an area which is suffering from this, but it is far from alone.

Currently, there is no reliable estimate of the area of bracken in the UK and of whether, and by how much, it is increasing. Farmers and land managers were able to use Asulox, which was an effective control method, especially as it was possible to apply it from a helicopter. With its withdrawal from the UK market, they believe the plant is spreading at a rate of up to 5% each year, and the many problems associated with bracken are mounting.

Bracken can block access for walkers. It reduces the amount of land available for livestock grazing and nature, especially for red-listed species such as curlew, lapwing and raptors. It provides a habitat for sheep ticks and tick-borne diseases, such as Lyme disease, which are increasingly impacting on people, livestock and wildlife. Bracken is highly toxic and there are strong links to certain types of human and mammalian cancers. The toxic exudates from bracken risk polluting water and drinking water supplies. Bracken is a source of fuel for damaging wildfires, and in the right conditions burns at a high temperature with a long flame length, producing a highly irritating deep yellow smoke with carcinogenic and cyanide properties. Limestone pavements, a priority habitat, can be damaged, as can any underground archaeology or structure, as Historic England warns us.

Successive Governments failed to grasp the problems of this pernicious weed because Asulox was available. Now an opportunity presents itself to assess all the problems scientifically and holistically. Farmers and land managers will be only too willing to help with the delivery of an approach that keeps bracken in check, and this will help achieve the Government’s goal in the 25-year environment plan of

“creating or restoring 500,000 hectares of wildlife-rich habitat outside the protected site network”.

However, farmers and land managers need to be given the necessary information, tools and support.

The proposed UK strategic bracken framework is welcome so far as it goes, but it risks looking at the problem only from the nature conservation angle, which is not good enough. As bracken is a hugely and surprisingly complicated subject, a cross-sector approach to its future management is essential. Only the Government will enable that. Therefore, will the Minister convene a conference of all interested groups so that the many issues can be addressed and placed in context, and an effective way forward identified?

I thank my noble friend for arranging this debate: it is hugely important. We will lose a lot of expertise on this particular subject when the hereditary Peers go, but I just ask the Government, when they consider anything to do with the environment, to please base it on sound science rather than emotion.