Environment: 25-year Plan

Earl of Selborne Excerpts

Monday 29th January 2018 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Selborne (Con)]

My Lords, I refer to my farming and environmental interests set out in the register. Like other speakers, I welcome this 25-year plan but, like the noble Lord, Lord Cameron, I speculate about whether we can be confident of a successful outcome in 25 years’ time.

I want to my limit my remarks to the concept of natural capital accounting, which is central to this plan. We have to recognise that to deliver on protecting our natural capital and enhancing our ecosystems, we must first have an agreed understanding in the public and private sectors of just what we mean by natural capital, how we monitor it and how one restates one’s accounts to take it into account. We need agreement on how national, regional and local priorities, however local, for restoring and enhancing ecosystem services can be determined. They have to conform clearly to the overall strategy, as set out in this paper. There also has to be recognition that no implementation plan can succeed unless there is widespread ownership of the plan involving the managers of the natural resource in question as well as others with an interest in the outcome.

The concept of developing policy objectives informed by natural capital got a major boost under the last Labour Government when they commissioned the United Kingdom national ecosystem assessment. It was published at the beginning of the coalition Government in 2011. It provided a comprehensive overview of the state of the natural environment in this country and offered a new way of estimating our national wealth. The underestimation of the value of natural processes such as water filtration or air purification can be appreciated if you try to calculate the cost of providing these ecosystem services would by industrial means.

Since that report, there have been many helpful studies on how we should take account of the full value of ecosystem services in our decision-making, not least from the Natural Capital Committee. But as the committee itself stated in its advice to the Government on the draft 25-year plan last September, as already mentioned,

“there are significant gaps in current knowledge and a lack of joined up approaches to data collection, measurement and monitoring of the UK’s natural assets … many different agencies are responsible for the collection of data (e.g. the Forestry Commission, Environment Agency, Met Office, Natural England, and Joint Nature Conservation Commission). This leads to both gaps and duplication in the data collected and inconsistencies in approaches to analysis”.

If the 25-year plan is to benefit from using natural capital accounting and monitoring, there simply must be a concerted attempt by Defra to align all these. Defra’s job here is to knock heads together.

If the plan is to deliver in 25 years’ time, there needs to be a robust evidence base, as has just been stated. We are still awaiting definitive guidance from the Office for National Statistics on the development of national natural capital accounts, without which you cannot measure overall progress on natural capital improvement. Much of our natural capital is, inevitably, owned and managed by the private sector, so the plan will need to mobilise sustained private sector initiatives.

We have already heard much about agriculture—not surprisingly as it is the sector that manages 70% of our land, and so is clearly a highly important industry in delivery of the plan. But even the largest farms will invariably benefit from following the guidance of the Lawton report of 2010, which suggested that working in larger blocks, with neighbours, to deliver enhanced ecosystem services at a parish or landscape scale is going to be much more effective. Providing bigger, better and more joined-up habitats will deliver better results for biodiversity enhancement. As the water companies and farmers have demonstrated, as referred to in the report, you simply cannot contemplate flood control and water purification without operating at this scale and larger.

The recent development of farm clusters, a number of which have now been set up, has the great virtue of being run by farmers or land managers. The members know what it is feasible to deliver in terms of environmental enhancement and, with suitable encouragement, can select and deliver agreed local improvements to ecosystem services. I say “agreed”, because it is no good the farmers just charging off and saying, “This is what we want to deliver”. One should say in parenthesis that delivering food or timber is an ecosystem service and very desirable, but clearly we want to move on to other services.

Getting a considerable number of land managers to consult their neighbours and the relevant agencies, and to agree among themselves what programmes can be delivered, will take a bit of organising. In other words, a part-time, paid convenor is required for each cluster. Therefore, I strongly recommend to Defra that the funding of such convenors would prove a highly effective way of ensuring delivery of many of the land-based objectives in its 25-year plan.