Land Use in England Committee Report

Earl of Leicester Excerpts

Tuesday 25th July 2023 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Leicester (Con)]

My Lords, I do not want to appear too self-congratulatory as I refer your Lordships to my interests as set out in the register, as a landowner and farmer in north Norfolk. On our holding, to quote from the summary of Making the Most Out of England’s Land, we have achieved

“place-based multifunctionality—the concept that simultaneous multiple benefits can be achieved in the same location”.

Examples include food production with carbon sequestration, with biodiversity, with renewable energy production; biodiversity, wetlands, access, tourism, landscape and commerce; and old and new housing and new office space, with the latter powered by renewable energies, with forestry and carbon sequestration. These are all examples of land sharing. That, of course, is only an example of multifunctionality at a localised scale, but it is mirrored up and down the country in the private and charitable sectors.

I briefly pay tribute to my fellow committee members, some of whom are in the Chamber, and one who is not—the noble Lord, Lord Curry. My noble friend Lady Rock, who is sitting in front of me, said she wanted tenant farmers to be able to carry out actions on their farms without the permission of their landlords. I remember the noble Lord, Lord Curry, saying during a committee meeting that it would not occur to him not to ask permission from his landlord to do something that might deviate from the original plan.

I believe it was the noble Baroness, Lady Young, who asked for this Select Committee on land use to be held, but sadly she is not here. I pay tribute to her and to my noble friend Lord Cameron of Dillington, whose pedigree confirmed him as an excellent choice to chair the committee. He worked as an elected officer for the Country Land and Business Association between 1991 and 1997, and as its president for the last two of those years. From 1997 he was a member of the UK Government’s Round Table on Sustainable Development, and he chaired the Countryside Agency for five years until 2004. I will stop at 2004, lest I embarrass him. He is also a practitioner, of course, managing his own estate in Somerset, which I believe he has now handed over to one of his children. He was an excellent chair.

I pay tribute to Simon Keal, our clerk. I understand that we do not like to point in this House, so I will do a broad sweep of the hand to a smiling Simon in the corner. He and his team did a fantastic job. I also pay tribute to Alister Scott, who is professor of geography and planning at Northumbria University, and finally to the 106 people who submitted written evidence and the 52 we interviewed face to face or on Teams.

I turn to a couple of aspects of the report and, where necessary, the Government’s response to it. I make no apology for referring to rural matters, as that is where my knowledge lies. According to our report, agriculture takes place on 63.1% of England’s land. Some of that follows the land sparing route and is very intensive. How sustainable that is in the long term is questionable. Encouragingly, an increasing number of farmers are embracing renewable agricultural techniques.

There are two things that our report does not recognise, and I blame myself for them both. My noble friend Lord Devon pointed out that we did not refer to the importance of wetlands in our report. They are the quickest sequestrator of carbon. The other one to mention is the multiple benefits that renewable farming brings, such as reduced chemical inputs, longer rotations, the mix of livestock back into arable operations leading to improved biodiversity and—this is the point we neglected to highlight—improved carbon sequestration. It is not just trees that sequester carbon; cover crops and leguminous herbal and grass lays can provide a green cover on the soil for up to 12 months.

Allied to rediscovering ancient wisdom from the agricultural revolution of the late 18th century, it is essential that agriculture also embraces technological advances. We recently passed the Genetic Technology (Precision Breeding) Act, which could give us drought-resistant seeds, for example, leading to resilience against climate change, higher yields and possibly the need for less arable land. Precision agriculture using robotic machinery in the fields, with cameras that can identify weeds within crops and either zap or spray just those single weeds, will lead to huge reductions in chemical usage and damage to the land with huge benefits to biodiversity and the bottom line.

It was encouraging to see in paragraph 22 of the Government’s response their acknowledgement of the importance of making open sources of data more accessible and usable for land managers. That can only improve management decisions. We also heard evidence of vertical growing of salad crops using technology, often in urban areas closer to market.

I turn briefly to access to green spaces and the countryside, which we all know has numerous mental health and wellness benefits. I add a note of caution: this should be handled with a great deal of thought, because unfettered access to the countryside by humans, dogs and cats in a suburban environment has a deleterious effect on biodiversity. I have just come back from Iceland, a country of only 360,000 people, where the correlation between very few people and a plethora of flora and fauna could not be more obvious. I note that the noble Lord, Lord Rosser, in his argument about freer access to the countryside, did not even mention biodiversity.

Finally, on tree-planting, it was good to see the Government highlighting, in paragraph 15 of their response, the importance of encouraging good woodland management. That is something that has not happened a great deal in Britain—our reputation for managing woodland is not as good as that of the continent—but it improves biodiversity such as by cutting in butterfly glades. A 30% thinning of a wood every seven to 10 years lets in more light and speeds up growth of trees in a multi-canopied woodland, which increases carbon sequestration and, importantly, carbon storage in the wood itself.

To conclude, I again thank everyone who took part. I am happy with some of the Government’s reaction to our report, but I have concerns that siloed thinking is still prevalent, with Defra very much taking the lead, almost to the exclusion of other government departments. Making the Most out of England’s Land is a great report and a great start, and I am excited about what the future can bring thanks to this body of work.