Environment Bill

Debate between Earl of Devon and Baroness Boycott

Committee stage
Monday 12th July 2021 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Devon (CB)]

My Lords, I sought to add my name to the amendments of the noble Duke, the Duke of Montrose, but I did so a little late so it does not appear in the current Marshalled List. However, I echo wholeheartedly the sentiments he so expertly expressed and the vital importance when setting these habitat regulations—and indeed all the various worthy strategies we have been debating in the Bill—of supporting sustainable rural development.

I mentioned previously in Committee the danger of the Bill unwittingly inflicting environmental tyranny upon our landscape. If we are not very careful, we will forget that the rural environment that we all know and love and seek to preserve is a place of work for many and was created and sustained by that very same rural enterprise that we are in danger of sweeping away. The only way that our rural landscape will survive and meet the environmental challenges of this era is if it remains a viable and sustainable workplace, supporting farming and a host of diverse rural enterprises.

I know that there is a great enthusiasm among your Lordships for rewilding and large-scale—landscape-scale—interventions in the countryside. However, the Knepp estate is simply not easily replicable, in the same way that not every abandoned mine can become an Eden Project. If we do not conserve small local rural enterprise and local business and employment, our countryside will become a suburban plaything of super-rich environmentalists, supported by a second-home-owning elite able to remote access their white-collar jobs from the comfort of their converted barn while enjoying the view. Local land management will be supported by well-meaning charitable handouts, but we will create a rural life in which there are no local jobs and no affordable homes necessary for a vibrant and diverse local community.

I will also address Amendments 255, 256 and 257AA in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Krebs. I had not intended to, but given that he gave a shout-out to the Exe estuary Ramsar site and that that sits within the Powderham estate, I thought that I ought to offer a comment, particularly with respect to Amendment 257AA and the need for consultation. I would hate for the protections on the River Exe estuary to be in any way weakened. It is a remarkable landscape and it has been created and established that way over many centuries. It is currently managed by the Exe Estuary Management Partnership, which is a remarkable amalgam of vested interests, from the RSPB to local parish councils, and from Exeter City Council to boat clubs, rowing clubs, sailing clubs and shellfishers. It works incredibly well. Can the Minister in his reply say whether the consultation requirements that are proposed would include consultation with local enterprises such as the Exe Estuary Management Partnership, which is so important to the proper management of these very sensitive ecosystems?

[Baroness Boycott (CB)]

My Lords, I support Amendment 257AA in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, and the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett of Manor Castle. As the noble Baroness said, this is a very neat amendment which wraps up an awful lot of things that the Government need to pay attention to.

Further on the thought expressed by the noble Duke, the Duke of Montrose, that we could trust the Government, I draw the attention of the House and Minister to a project which seems to fly in the face of all the aims of noble Lords in this House and indeed of all these amendments. That is the £3.5 billion theme park called the London Resort, which is on the Swanscombe peninsula on the Thames estuary. The concept for this site, which is spread across 535 acres in Kent, is of a union jack-designed dome, a Disneyesque castle lit up by fireworks, and a Paramount Pictures entryway. It will be the first European development of its kind. It is inspired by Hollywood blockbusters and will have swords, sorcery, dragons and legends. There will even be a jungle where the ancient ruins of a long-extinct Mesoamerican civilisation will sprout out of the ground—which seems ironic. This is in partnership with EDF Energy—always a good one for a bit of greenwash—plus the BBC, ITV, Hollywood and all the rest of it. That is all online. It is aiming to be an attraction claiming to have net-zero emissions—which I personally do not believe. However, it will be built on a recently named SSSI.

Environment Bill

Debate between Earl of Devon and Baroness Boycott

Committee stage
Wednesday 7th July 2021 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Devon (CB)]

My Lords, it is always a great pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb, and to address these amendments, which are focused on the highly valuable local nature recovery strategies.

I am very supportive of the addition suggested by the noble Earl, Lord Caithness, of “nature-friendly farming” to new subsection (2A) of the Natural Environment and Rural Communities Act. As I explained in an earlier debate, I am concerned that this House should temper somewhat the risk of environmental tyranny inherent in the Bill and ensure that we remind ourselves and local authorities that the core purpose of land management across these islands over many hundreds of years has been the production of healthy and nutritious food. I wonder whether the noble Baroness, Lady Boycott, who will follow me, might agree with that.

I am also strongly supportive of the efforts of the noble Lords, Lord Teverson and Lord Lucas, to ensure that local nature partnerships and our diversity of local community members should have real input into local nature recovery strategies. These amendments go to a point that has been debated previously in Committee over the role of local communities and local land managers within the setting of local environmental targets. I was pleased when the Minister accepted the crucial importance of that. If local nature recovery strategies are to be a success, they must be developed in consultation with those who manage the land—those whose living derives from the land—as well as those who enjoy the land for their health and well-being. Local nature recovery strategies should not be determined by central edict from Westminster or by well-funded special interest lobby groups with no local mandate.

I too offer my strong support to Amendment 293 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Young of Old Scone, and I applaud her tireless efforts to introduce a land-use strategy for our agricultural land. She indeed raised this during the passage of the then Agriculture Bill, at which time it seemed very sensible but maybe not essential. However, now that we are layering on top of ELMS so many other competing and potentially confusing land-use imperatives, it has become clear that we need to consider afresh what we really want of our land and to prioritise those imperatives accordingly.

I am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Young, for the Cambridge University statistics, which counter the Minister’s earlier and surprisingly off-the-cuff assertion that we have sufficient marginal land to do all that is needed. I am not sure that is strictly true. We are a very small and heavily populated island with an incredibly long-established culture of intensive and successful land use. As I alluded to earlier in reference to biodiversity net gain, what we are asking of this green and pleasant land is arguably far more than it can deliver. Between housing, renewables, biodiversity, leisure and food production we are in very real danger of exhausting our much-beloved countryside. We need to find a means of developing a joined-up and dependable land-use strategy, informed by local communities and land managers, that delivers on our national priorities.

Finally, the Knepp estate has come up often in these debates and I should comment on it. I have always been hugely impressed by its achievements. However, I have always understood that the reason the Knepp estate chose to rewild was that it was relatively low-grade agricultural land that was not agriculturally productive and that it wished to do something remarkable with it: to recover nature and to provide public access and education. By putting a housing development approximate to Knepp, is Horsham Council not delivering directly on that ambition, converting low-grade adjoining farmland to housing and providing comparatively ready access to remarkable biodiversity for the benefit of the community’s health and well-being? As an additional bonus, Knepp can be paid to provide ecosystem services to that community, so it would seem potentially like a win-win situation.

[Baroness Boycott (CB)]

It is a great pleasure to follow the noble Earl, Lord Devon. I have just been camping at Knepp for three nights—Friday, Saturday and Sunday—so I walked the land extensively, went on guided tours and saw the work being done. He is not correct when he says that a housing estate next door will in fact be of some kind of educational benefit. The whole point of Knepp is that a wildlife corridor was going to be created where this new housing development is that would take the birds, as well as some other animals, to the sea.

I support the amendment in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Young of Old Scone, because we need a rethink of how we look at land and what we do. We need to start using things imaginatively such as the middles of towns for people to live in. I live outside Taunton, the town centre of which has completely fallen apart in the last couple of decades. There are empty shops and closed-up buildings; there is no life in that town. Instead, you have miles and miles of small boxes outside the town that are extremely environmentally non-sustainable. They are miles from the schools and the town centre and the place has become a doughnut—it has that sort of hollowed-out feeling.

Unless we start to reimagine how we want to live, of course we will go on having the problems that we have all talked about, and 3,500 houses will continue to be put on the Knepp site. Storks have just been brought back and there are now about 120 storks flying around. We had lunch on Sunday under three trees where there were storks’ nests. It is completely magical. Those creatures will go if they suddenly find that they are under houses. The noble Earl, Lord Devon, is right: the Burrells decided to rewild Knepp because their land was not productive. They were losing £150,000 a year in 2000 and felt that they could not go on drowning the site in chemicals and trying to make weak soil support high-yield crops, so it was logical to rewild that site. However, they have no ambition to rewild the whole of England. They know that Knepp is a site of special interest and should be seen in that way—as an educational tool. It is buzzing with researchers from all over the world who are studying everything, including how a pig’s trotter makes a little pool that enables a particular flower to feed, which in turn has brought back the turtle dove. They have found all those connections that had been completely lost.

Of course we need good food, good farming and grade 1 land, so I hugely support the noble Earl, Lord Caithness, when he says that agro-ecology and agro-friendly farming have to be the way forward. I have recently been to the Groundswell conference, which is about min-till or no-till, whereby one makes just slices through the earth and does not disrupt the magic of our soil. Just as many crops are being grown without the inputs. We can do it.

I come back to the amendment of the noble Baroness, Lady Parminter, to which I have put my name. What really matters in this is that if we do not give local authorities the ability to stand on their own two feet and enforce rules on people, we take away their agency. If one looks at causes such as the transition towns or Incredible Edible Todmorden, these are absolutely miraculous and wonderful community initiatives that have brought life, health, friendship and masses of plants in all sorts of forms back into the middle of towns. It destroys one’s belief in the system if one constantly fails, if the housing development goes up against all local opposition and if, over and again, one’s voice is turned down. We are going to need all those local people with vested interests in their local community if we are really going to make a difference. It is therefore blindingly obvious that local authorities need the teeth of this amendment to fight off any imposed housing quotas. We have to put nature first in the planning system. It is not tangential and we do not have an option.