Environment Bill

Debate between Earl of Lytton and Baroness Pitkeathley

Committee stage
Monday 12th July 2021 Lords Chamber

[The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Baroness Pitkeathley) (Lab)]

The noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe, is not speaking on this group, so I call the noble Earl, Lord Lytton.

[The Earl of Lytton (CB) [V]]

My Lords, I declare an interest as a property owner with tourism interests within the Exmoor National Park, going back very many years, and I have professionally had an involvement with several other UK national parks.

I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Whitchurch, for giving me advance warning when she tabled this amendment and for giving us an opportunity to have this debate. At an earlier point in our Committee, I had, through my own fault, a rather awkwardly grouped pair of amendments—Amendments 290 and 291—on an enlargement of national park purposes, which were not actually moved in that group. Although they have got a bit lost in the system, I am glad that I have some opportunity to make a few of the points here. In any event, I would rather raise them in the context of Amendment 251A.

I have enormous sympathy with this amendment. For many people, the immediate reaction might be to ask why any adjacent authority would not have regard to national park purposes. But, recalling my own experiences, I can appreciate that this might not be so. The noble Baroness, Lady Jones, referred to the A27 at Arundel. Of course, as a Sussex resident, I am quite familiar with the long-running saga of how to deal with the discontinuity on parts of the A27. But, as the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh of Pickering, mentioned, this is a two-way affair. National park authorities do not, after all, have full jurisdiction over all areas of local government authority and other aspects. It follows that they must at the very least, for their part, be able to co-operate with those bodies that exercise jurisdiction in the areas they do not control, including highways, police, infrastructure, building control, fire and rescue, services and communications, and those sorts of things.

In the past, I have attended meetings on site within national parks to discuss, in one case, the improvement of an admittedly dangerous farm track exiting on to an unrestricted A-class road. The meeting had been triggered by an incident at that location which could easily have been fatal for a motorcycle rider. But, as it turned out, this matter seemed to be of little concern in national park policy terms. The improvement required would have involved the removal of some length of hedgerow to improve sight lines. Of course, that could have been replicated on the back of the visibility splays, as opposed to immediately adjacent to the current road, but that was not acceptable to the national park authority, despite the obvious problems for farm movements and the safety of highway users. As far as I know, the dangerous exit remains some 20 years later. But I find it very difficult to understand that conservation issues should be unable to take account of public safety or the orderly exercise of farming activities. In another instance, a national park authority apparently permitted substantial works for the installation of a bulk LPG tank for commercial purposes but did not realise that, without an adequate lay-by in addition, the necessary tanker delivering fuel would totally block a narrow unclassified road serving a lot of properties and would do so for periods of up to half an hour at a time.

The issue of breadth of policy and analysis is not helped when narrow thinking occurs, and local government in all its forms, including national park authorities, is not proof against this. I could quote many other examples of the sort of thing I have already mentioned. I think that the potential flashpoints—if I can call them that—are likely to expand, as our most recent cohort of national parks have incorporated more urban areas within their boundaries.