Queen’s Speech

Earl of Selborne Excerpts

Tuesday 10th June 2014 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Selborne (Con)]

Like the noble Lord, Lord Soley, I would like to focus my remarks on the environment. The purpose of the Bill promised in the gracious Speech which will impose a charge of 5p for a single-use non-biodegradable plastic bag is presumably to do more than reduce the pollution caused by those ubiquitous bags. The Bill is a not very subtle nudge to make us change our behaviour and become more aware of how we can reduce adverse impacts on the environment, which will in turn damage our economy. I would welcome the Bill with more enthusiasm if I could be sure that the Government themselves were pursuing a coherent, overarching strategy to achieve what they said they would in the 2011 environment White Paper. As your Lordships will remember, that set out an agenda for this Parliament with the brave aim of being the first generation to improve our natural environment.

There are in fact a number of areas where in recent decades we have indeed improved our environment. Pollution control, which is the primary purpose of the charge on plastic bags, is in many ways something of a success story. We no longer have pea-soupers or a stinking Thames and, as my noble friend Lord Patten reminded us today, the otter has made a comeback in many of our rivers. However, as we increase our consumption, so we increase the danger of harmful impacts on ecosystems and ecosystem services. In the United Kingdom we have converted or modified most of our semi-natural vegetation to arable and grassland use. Major increases in fertiliser use, particularly nitrogen and phosphorous, adversely affect aquatic ecosystems through run-off. As my noble friend Lord Plumb reminded us, United Kingdom agriculture has also delivered a largely successful programme, initiated after the Second World War, to improve our food security, but the price has been increased leakages into soil, air and water.

Other sectors including energy, industry, housing and transport, some of which could also be described as success stories, have also had major impacts on ecosystems and the delivery of ecosystem services. Examples of such impacts are the deposition of atmospheric nitrogen and sulphur, the loss of habitats through construction and disruption of flood regimes in river basins and coastal wetlands. We take ecosystem services too often for granted yet we depend on them to produce our food, to regulate water supplies and climate, to break down waste products and much else. Nutrient cycling, the purification of air, soils and water, groundwater recharge and flood control are all critical to our economy and our well-being, yet these services are consistently undervalued in economic terms. If we want reminding of just how damaging extreme events can be, think of the impact of what happened in Thailand in 2011, when in one year flooding reduced its GDP by 11%.

The Natural Capital Committee was set up to advise the Government on how to deliver the aspirations of the 2011 environment White Paper. We had signed up at the Earth Summit in 1992, and subsequently elsewhere, to heroic targets—for example, on protecting our biodiversity—but had, frankly, no prospect of achieving those targets and no coherent policy either. The committee has now produced two helpful reports, the second in March this year, and its message to the Government is that we must plan long-term, by which it means at least 25 years. The second report states that integrating the environment into the economy is hampered by the almost complete absence of proper accounting for natural assets—what is not measured is usually ignored. The committee is leading in developing metrics and risk registers, identifying the necessary capital maintenance and ensuring that project and investment appraisals in both the public and private sectors properly take natural capital into account.

I wish the committee every success, but it has to change the way that investment decisions have been made for generations. Take, for example, the proposed Thames Water tideway scheme, which has been contemplated since the 1990s and which is to resolve the problem of contamination of the Thames tideway from sewerage overflows by a new tunnel that will cost £4.2 billion at 2011 prices. The driver for this is the urban waste water directive from the European Union and the threat of some highly expensive infraction proceedings. Yet this project, so long in gestation, does nothing to promote water recycling, flood alleviation, green infrastructure or sustainable urban drainage systems. It is, frankly, the Victorian solution of Bazalgette repeated, and it puts the problem firmly into the hands of one organisation, Thames Tideway Tunnel Ltd, and the cost on those in the Thames Water catchment, whether near the tideway or miles away in Gloucestershire, Berkshire or wherever. It is probably too late to stop this scheme but I am sure that it would never be started now, when we are learning at last how to value our natural capital.

By the end of this Parliament in March next year, we should be able to judge whether the committee’s advice to the Government on the need for long-term planning has been accepted. If we are to make biodiversity offsetting work, one of the more innovative proposals that have been considered by Defra and put out to consultation, it can be done only with the help of a detailed national long-term plan. By definition you will never be able to offset ancient woodland, for example, but you might be able to offset other habitats—meadows, perhaps, or wetlands.

When Sir John Lawton produced his 2010 report Making Space for Nature, he attributed the continuing decline of many species to the size of protected sites, which tend to be too small to prevent random fluctuations driving local populations to extinction. His solution was to create more, bigger, better managed and joined-up sites in a landscape-level approach to wildlife conservation. Such an approach would be possible only by involving partnerships working together on well designed schemes, funded appropriately by agri-environmental and woodland grant schemes.

Such schemes must be underpinned by sound ecological research and supported by good-quality data, with their effectiveness measured by a suitable monitoring system. Realistically, funding on this scale can come only from a reformed common agricultural policy that allows national Governments to allocate maximum resources to environmental programmes. That brings us back to the need to achieve greater subsidiarity and for the Prime Minister to be supported in this essential endeavour.