United Nations Biodiversity Conference

Debate between Lord Benyon and Lord Goldsmith of Richmond Park

Tuesday 13th April 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Goldsmith of Richmond Park (Con) [V]]

It is absolutely right that to speak with authority internationally, the UK needs to get its own house in order. That is not the case at the moment. Our biodiversity has been in decline; our environment is denuded. However, we have put in place a number of ambitious steps to try to turn that trajectory: the first Environment Bill for 20 years, with a whole host of ambitious measures; the green recovery challenge fund; getting NGOs restoring nature and tackling climate change in communities up and down the country; a £640 million Nature for Climate Fund; big and ambitious tree-planting targets; peatland restoration targets; and, above all, a commitment to switch the old land use subsidy system so that instead of incentivising destruction, it incentivises good environmental stewardship. The tools and the commitment are there, but we have some way to go.

[Lord Benyon (Con) [V]]

My Lords, the ground-breaking UN report, The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity, said that we need to reflect on both

“the value of nature, and on the nature of value.”

The loss of species and the decline in the ability of natural systems to provide for humanity’s needs is not just an environmental catastrophe—it is an economic one as well. As has been said, the two COPs happening this year have complementary ambitions. Will my noble friend the Minister encourage the UK position to reflect the fact that Governments alone cannot solve this problem? We have to engage, empower and deploy the power of markets and the private sector, on a global scale, to make the difference that is needed.

[Lord Goldsmith of Richmond Park (Con) [V]]

That is absolutely right. A big part of our campaign as president of COP is to encourage donor countries to step up with more finance for nature. We are showing leadership ourselves, having doubled our international climate finance to £11.6 billion. We are committing to spend about a third of that on nature-based solutions and we want others to do something similar. Even if we succeed, however, that will not be anything like enough finance for nature; we will need more. That means mobilising private finance on an unprecedented scale and ensuring high-integrity carbon markets; we need a breakthrough around the Article 6 negotiations. Above all, we need to mainstream nature through the way we do business and align, for example, the big multilateral development banks not just with Paris commitments but with nature as well.

Trophy Hunting

Debate between Lord Benyon and Lord Goldsmith of Richmond Park

Wednesday 15th May 2019 Westminster Hall

[Zac Goldsmith]

My right hon. Friend is right that there is no conservation value in that whatever. Colleagues will raise that issue in more detail, but I will touch on it shortly.

My fear is that the existence of some small-scale examples of better practice is driving our policy generally on trophy hunting, without recourse to the wider evidence, which suggests that the real story of trophy hunting is a lot less rosy than those advocates would have us believe. Indeed, on almost every level there is reason to doubt the arguments in favour of trophy hunting.

When it comes to the claim that sustainable hunting supports local people, a report prepared for—not written by—the International Union for Conservation of Nature, which is the global authority on nature, said that hunting

“serves individual interests, but not those of conservation, governments or local communities.”

According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation and the International Council for Game and Wildlife Conservation, around 97% of hunting revenues stay within the hunting industry. Incidentally, just 0.03% of African GDP derives from hunting, when the prospects for expanding tourism are clearly far greater, and likely far more profitable for local communities. Another report written for the IUCN noted that 40% of the big game hunting zones in Zambia, and 72% in Tanzania, are now classified as depleted because the big game has simply been hunted out of those areas.

[Richard Benyon (Newbury) (Con)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that one of the greatest threats to some of those species is the growth of populations in continents such as Africa? Will he applaud work done by non-governmental organisations, such as one I have seen for myself at Amboseli, where IFAW has put people in place to co-ordinate the interface between wildlife and human beings, which has caused threats particularly to species such as lions? It is really important that that is where resources go.

[Zac Goldsmith]

I could not agree more strongly. The best conservation projects harness the power of people at the grassroots—people who then directly benefit from an emerging economy in conservation. There are so many examples—not enough to buck the trends that I mentioned at the beginning, but some really inspiring ones that I could spend hours relaying. However, I will not do that, as I am going to allow another intervention.

Children Act 1989 (Amendment) (Female Genital Mutilation) Bill [Lords]

Debate between Lord Benyon and Lord Goldsmith of Richmond Park

3rd reading: House of Commons & Report stage: House of Commons
Monday 11th March 2019 Commons Chamber

[Zac Goldsmith]

I strongly agree with my hon. Friend on that. Indeed, I am going to take this opportunity to quote from what was said in response to the conviction by the National Police Chiefs Council lead on FGM, Commander Ivan Balhatchet:

“Female genital mutilation is a barbaric and violent crime—a violation of human rights—often with lifelong consequences, committed by the people children should be able to trust the most.”

He continued:

“Today’s sentencing will act as a deterrent and a warning that our society will not accept this child abuse, but prosecutions alone will not solve this problem.”

[Richard Benyon (Newbury) (Con)]

Does my hon. Friend’s work on the all-party group and with campaigners reveal a reluctance on this among groups of people to whom children are presented, for whatever reason? We are all familiar in our constituencies with what happens when a child is discovered to have bruising or possible signs of maltreatment. Following cases such as that of Victoria Climbié, there is almost a lurch in the other direction to immediately assume that there is a child abuse problem, but perhaps that has not happened enough in respect of FGM. Is he confident that legislation such as this is going to make it increasingly easy for those cases to be presented as child abuse?

[Zac Goldsmith]

I thank my right hon. Friend for his intervention. I cannot give him a scientific answer, but I can tell him that the evidence the all-party group received from those people who have been through FGM absolutely concurs with what he has just said: there are parts of the establishment and social services, and people within the education system, who are very nervous indeed about pointing the finger on FGM. There is a concern about trampling on cultural sensitivities. The view of the people we talked to, like my view and, I suspect, that of many in the House today, is that those sensitivities should be pushed to one side. This is a very direct form of child abuse; child abuse is child abuse, and it is our responsibility as adults and the authorities to stamp it out at every opportunity. That message has been unambiguous, in all the evidence we have taken from those people who have been through FGM.

Blue Belt Programme: South Sandwich Islands

Debate between Lord Benyon and Lord Goldsmith of Richmond Park

Wednesday 12th December 2018 Westminster Hall

[Zac Goldsmith (Richmond Park) (Con)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered the Government’s blue belt programme and the South Sandwich islands.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Henry. Oceans cover about 71% of the earth’s surface, and around 90% of the earth’s biosphere. They contain about a quarter of a million different known species—and likely vastly more, given that so little of our oceans has been properly explored or understood. Today, I will speak about the tragedy of what is happening to our oceans and about what we need to do to protect them.

There was a time when our oceans were absolutely brimming with life. In 1497, the explorer John Cabot complained that his ship’s progress had been hampered by the sheer volume of cod off the coast of Newfoundland. He wrote a message to his sponsor, King Henry VII, in which he said that his men

“took so many fish that this kingdom will no longer have need of Iceland, from which country there is an immense trade in the fish”.

As we now know, industrial fishing quickly put an end to that. In 1968, the registered catch was 800,000 tonnes; by 1994, the catch was just 1,700 tonnes. In Victorian England, one could have seen large pods of orcas and blue whales off the coast of Cornwall. Professor Callum Roberts has reminded us that in 1836, a shoal of sardines extended, in a single compact body, from Fowey to Land’s End—a distance of around 100 miles. He notes that today, people pay serious money to travel thousands of miles to witness such scenes.

Today, we face an unprecedented loss of species in our oceans, comparable to the mass extinctions of past millennia. A year ago, the Zoological Society of London and the World Wide Fund for Nature issued a report stating that there is only half the amount of wildlife in the sea today as there was in 1970, just a few years before I was born. Between 70% and 80% of the world’s marine fish stocks have either been fully exploited, overexploited, depleted or are recovering from depletion. Of the 17 largest fisheries in the world, 15 are now so heavily depleted that future catches cannot be guaranteed.

A scientific paper published in Nature reports that we have lost 90% of the world’s big predatory fish, such as tunas and sharks. Only 5% of coral reefs are considered pristine. Despite serving as breeding grounds for 85% of commercial fish, a third of the world’s mangroves have been destroyed since 1990. That annihilation is happening across the world, and is not only an unforgivable biodiversity tragedy, but a human tragedy.

About 200 million people depend directly on the fishing industry for their livelihoods. For more than 1 billion people, fish is the primary source of protein. If the fishing industry collapses, the effects will be disastrous, especially for the world’s poorest people. One has only to look at what happened in Somalia a couple of decades ago: years of overfishing—mostly by vast foreign fleets—decimated the coastal economy when fish stocks ran out. Legal fishing gave way to piracy, and millions were plunged into poverty, with criminality taking over.

There are numerous causes of this loss and numerous things that we need to do to put things right, but the biggest—and the focus of the debate—is simply protection. Marine protected areas represent a broad spectrum, with everything from absolute no-take zones to areas open only to sustainable fishing. We know that they work because we can literally measure the results of protection.

When commercial fishing in the Atlantic ocean and North sea had to be stopped during world war two, there was an immediate spike in fish populations. In New Zealand’s Leigh marine reserve, common predatory fish are now six times more abundant in the reserve than outside, while in its Tāwharanui marine reserve, there are 60% more species in the reserve than out. Spain has suffered massively from overfishing, but catches close to the Tabarca marine reserve were 85% higher than elsewhere after just six years of protection. The list goes on, all around the world.

There is a level of agreement about the scale of the problem, but the response—an international commitment to protect 10% of the world’s oceans by 2020—is far below what is needed. To make matters much worse, we are nowhere near achieving that. The British Government get it: we have committed to pushing for the protection of 30% of the world’s oceans by 2030, and despite being a relatively small nation we are in a good position to take the lead. We are, after all, custodians of the fifth largest marine estate in the world, thanks to our extensive overseas territories, which contain, incidentally, over 94% of the UK’s unique biodiversity. They are scattered across the world and home to countless rare and threatened species.

[Richard Benyon (Newbury) (Con)]

In the context of our overseas territories, Blue Belt is an incredibly ambitious policy. Does my hon. Friend agree that we will be judged on its success only in terms of how we support different marine protections around different archipelagos and islands? Ascension Island is a key one: people are waiting to see whether the Government are willing to pledge the means to ensure that the marine protection area there is a success, so that we can have confidence in what we are doing globally.

[Zac Goldsmith]

I thank my right hon. Friend very much for his intervention, and I agree with him 100%. I put on the record my thanks to him and my right hon. Friend the Member for West Dorset (Sir Oliver Letwin), who led the campaign in Parliament and can take a lot of credit for the Government’s current position.

European Union (Withdrawal) Bill

Debate between Lord Benyon and Lord Goldsmith of Richmond Park

Committee: 2nd sitting: House of Commons
Wednesday 15th November 2017 Commons Chamber

[Zac Goldsmith]

I shall move on, because I will otherwise fail to address the key issues that I wish to address. Before I first gave way, I was talking about the discussions between Government Members, the Secretary of State, the Secretary of State’s advisers and the Greener UK representatives. Those discussions were meaningful—in some cases they lasted a long time—and they led to a broad agreement on a solution. I am delighted to say that that is the solution the Secretary of State has presented in the past few days.

The Committee has heard most of the details already, but my right hon. Friend has committed not only to creating a strong, independent body with teeth that can hold the Government and their successor Governments to account on the environment, but a policy statement—the policy statement we have already been debating—that will set out and define those key environmental principles.

There is a hierarchy of national policy statements. They are not all the same, and some have sharper teeth than others. My right hon. Friend the Member for Newbury knows more about that than I do, and I invite him to intervene.

[Richard Benyon]

My hon. Friend is making a powerful speech. The marine policy statement that came as part of the Marine and Coastal Access Act 2009—the right hon. Member for Leeds Central will feel extremely proprietorial about this—is a good example of how Government can set policy, and of the tortuous discussions about how Government can adhere to that policy. It is a good model to take forward as part of this policy statement.

[Zac Goldsmith]

My right hon. Friend has a closer experience of this issue than I do.

The solution presented by my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State reflects a consensus reached between parliamentary colleagues and between his Department and the main representatives of Greener UK, who by and large have publicly welcomed the policy. I invite Members to look through the Twitter accounts of some of this country’s leading environmental campaigners and lawyers to see that, generally speaking, there is a high level of enthusiasm for the Secretary of State’s promises.

I agree very strongly with the sentiments behind many of the amendments that have been tabled, and to which hon. Members have already spoken. I am delighted the amendments were tabled, because they have had the effect of sharpening and focusing minds. I found them useful in my discussions with the Secretary of State, but I hope it will at least be acknowledged, particularly by Opposition Members, as it has been by the key pressure groups, that the amendments have already done their job.

My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State is not in his place at the moment but, if he is listening, I put on record my very sincere thanks to him for stepping up and giving nature the voice that it so badly needs.

Environmental Protection and Green Growth

Debate between Lord Benyon and Lord Goldsmith of Richmond Park

Wednesday 26th October 2011 Commons Chamber

[Richard Benyon]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend. Let me say with absolute clarity that we want to reverse the decline of biodiversity in this country, not just because we value nature in its esoteric sense, but because we value it in its economic sense as well. My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State and I are working with organisations like the RSPB and many others to try to ensure that the strategies we have brought forward are effective and workable. The indicators suggest that, with the right commitment, we can achieve this.

[Zac Goldsmith]

rose—

--- Later in debate ---

[Richard Benyon]

I urge the hon. Gentleman, whom I respect on this subject, to look at exactly what the Chancellor is doing. He should look at the £3 billion that the Treasury has invested in the green investment bank and at the commitment we have made on a whole range of other issues. I can assure him that if he did, his concerns would be allayed.

[Zac Goldsmith]

Learning how to value ecosystems is a prerequisite for tackling the loss of biodiversity and the environmental crisis generally. I am not often accused by colleagues of sycophancy, but I do want to say that the work in the natural environment White Paper puts us ahead of almost any other country in the world. It is work that should be absolutely commended and celebrated across the board.

[Richard Benyon]

I am very grateful to my hon. Friend, and I hope that Labour Members were listening to what he said.

Fisheries

Debate between Lord Benyon and Lord Goldsmith of Richmond Park

Thursday 2nd December 2010 Westminster Hall

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Richard Benyon)]

It is a great pleasure to serve under your chairmanship today, Mr Owen. I pay tribute to the hon. Member for Banff and Buchan (Dr Whiteford) for securing this debate. She spoke for everyone here when she said that this debate should take place on the Floor of the House in future so that we can give this subject the forum it deserves.

This is an important time for the industry, and I want to put the fishermen themselves at the heart of our considerations. I pay tribute to those who have lost their life or been injured in this dangerous profession. Fishermen work off a dangerous platform in a dangerous place, and too many pay the price for that. Bereaved families and many other parts of the fishing industry are wonderfully supported by organisations such as the Seamen’s Mission and the Royal National Mission to Deep Sea Fishermen. I echo other hon. Members in paying tribute to them and to organisations such as the RNLI and the coastguard for their bravery and courage and for serving our marine environment so well.

We tend to approach this debate with a sense of groundhog day, as we trawl through the same old arguments. There is a general ennui or depression about the way in which we manage the system, but there are glimmers of hope here and there. What I have detected in my time, both as spokesman for my party when in opposition and as Minister, is that there are some reasons to be cheerful, I intend to put all my effort behind those chinks of light to make them wider and clearer as we progress in the months ahead.

We face a very difficult time; let us not pretend otherwise. If I am asked to present in a sentence my vision for this industry and for the marine environment, I would say that we take an ecosystems-based approach, which was referred to in the GLOBE document. Such an approach has sustainability at its heart—sustainability of the marine environment and the ecosystems that we need and value and from which we get so many services, and sustainability for the industry, and the communities that it supports. Members from all parts of the House have spoken movingly about communities in their constituencies which are dependent not just on the, sadly, too few jobs, but the families, the processing industry and all its supporting infrastructure.

When I visited the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for South East Cornwall (Sheryll Murray)—it was the first place that I visited when I was appointed as shadow spokesman—I saw an industry that was surviving. It has had its moments and difficulties, but it has the support of a fish market, merchants, chandlers and many others. If one of them were to go, how viable would be the remainder? That is something that I frequently find as I go round the coast of Britain.

As we embark on the next few weeks, with the December Council and CFP reform, I have to say that I am supported well in this difficult job by some very able officials, who have so much more experience than I of this sometimes Kafkaesque process. There is a great sense of unity across the devolved Governments. If people want an example of cross-party co-operation, they need look no further. We have a Minister from a Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition Government working with a Minister from the Scottish National party in Scotland, a Sinn Fein Minister in Northern Ireland, and a Labour Minister in Wales. I am determined that we should approach this round with a sense of unity, because it is only by working together and being on the same page that we can achieve what we need to achieve. I am grateful to all of them and to their respective officials for their support.

I will rattle through some of points that were made and try to respond to them in the time remaining. The hon. Member for Banff and Buchan led the way in calling for regionalisation and an end to the top-down management of our fisheries and the common fisheries policy. She finds a ready and supportive audience in me. Earlier this week, I was at the Agriculture and Fisheries Council. In a discussion between all the Ministers and the commissioner, everyone who spoke mentioned the need for regionalisation and an end to the current centralised system. In the same way, people often talk positively about long-term management plans, but the proof of what is said lies in what is done, particularly with the current reform process. I sense that among some of our European partners there is, to quote Hilaire Belloc, a desperate desire to

“always keep a-hold of Nurse

For fear of finding something worse.”

I do not think that anything can be worse than what we have now. We must have a decentralised system, and that is what I will be leading on in the reform process.

The hon. Lady represents the two important ports of Peterhead and Fraserburgh, and my two visits to her constituency have proved to me the importance of the fishing industry there. I value the clear way in which I was briefed about her fishing interests, and she was right—as were other hon. Members—to point out the affront of discards. Discards are first and foremost an affront to fishermen, and they are increasingly an affront to the public and the consumer. I was recently interviewed at Billingsgate market by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, whom I congratulate on leading an important campaign to raise awareness of this issue. His questions surprised me, as he seemed to think that I would somehow be a Minister in a suit who would try to defend the status quo. He was surprised that I out-outraged him with my hyperbole and my opposition to discards.

We must look at where we can succeed. Some schemes have been mentioned today; the hon. Lady mentioned catch quotas, and others have spoken about Project 50%. My hon. Friend the Member for Totnes (Dr Wollaston) raised that issue, and on three occasions, I have heard the commissioner quote it as a shining example of what can be achieved. I intend to build on those important points.

[Zac Goldsmith]

How realistic is it to say that we will move to a system of catch quotas? I have no doubt that the Government are committed to dealing with that problem, but realistically, how likely is it that we will see a change in policy?

[Richard Benyon]

I forget the figures for the English fleet, but in Scotland, there are 17 vessels in a catch quota system. That represents about 20% of that fleet—perhaps not; I cannot remember the exact figure. At the moment, that system is a trial. We tried to persuade the Commission—and we will continue to try—that we must move beyond a trial. We want to get every vessel possible into a catch quota system because, for reasons that I will mention, that is the solution. Fishermen are incentivised to do something that gives them more fish, ends discards and is a bottom-up approach. It makes fishermen part of the solution, and instead of being the battered person at the end of the line being hit by a stick, they are given a carrot to find a solution. I will go on to talk about mackerel, which was mentioned by the hon. Member for Banff and Buchan and others.

My hon. Friend the Member for Argyll and Bute (Mr Reid) echoed the point about decentralisation and I know the importance of nephrops to his constituency and the difficulties that are faced there. He rightly mentioned the difficulties of displacement. When we create a management regime that results in less activity in one area, there is a displacement effect. Too often, we have seen the malign effect of displacement round our coastline, and he is right to raise that issue. However, he sensibly discussed the world in which we live. I would love to debate how we got to this point, but that would be a waste both of my time and of the House’s. We should put all our energy into working with a system that we think we might be able to change. For the first time in my adult life and in the experience of people who have been in the House for many fisheries debates, we find the door open to a level of reform that we must try to achieve. I recognise that that is important.

The hon. Member for Aberdeen North (Mr Doran) is an able chairman of the all-party group, which benefits from his knowledge of, and passion for, the subject. He rightly pointed out the importance of the processing industry. We must remember the jobs at stake and the importance to our food security of keeping the infrastructure that we require on land to support the jobs that we are discussing and get the product to market that our fishermen bring ashore. I think that he is rather depressed about the prospects for CFP reform. That probably comes from years of experience, but I hope that we can work with him.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Lord Benyon and Lord Goldsmith of Richmond Park

Thursday 4th November 2010 Commons Chamber

[Richard Benyon]

I can assure the hon. Gentleman that we will use any means possible to resolve the issue, which has wider implications. Iceland is going through a process of accession to the Europe Union, and it seems a strange way to behave to tear up the rule book before joining the club. We are using a variety of mechanisms to try to put pressure on Iceland to operate in a sustainable way and protect a sustainable stock.

[Zac Goldsmith (Richmond Park) (Con)]

Does the Minister share the concerns of a number of farming organisations—in particular smaller farming organisations, such as the Small Farms Association and the Family Farmers Association—that plans to build a mega-dairy in Nocton will fatally undermine the viability of a great number of small and family farms?

Biodiversity

Debate between Lord Benyon and Lord Goldsmith of Richmond Park

Thursday 16th September 2010 Westminster Hall

[Richard Benyon]

As before, the hon. Gentleman has got it exactly right. Elsewhere in Parliament, Members are debating the strategic defence and security review. Part of that review involves how we will fund the type of operations being carried out in the seas off the horn of Africa. It is precisely because fisheries in those seas and agricultural systems in the region have been degraded, as well as the fact that the governance that supports a civilised society has been allowed to collapse in that region, that we now have to spend millions of pounds every year as part of an international campaign to counter that issue of piracy.

[Zac Goldsmith]

On that point, has the Minister been able to discuss the environmental causes of poverty with the Secretary of State for International Development? Given that the international development budget is one of the few that will be largely unaffected by the cuts—at least we think that is the case—it seems to me that there is huge potential to transform completely the way in which, historically, that money has been spent. We should start focusing it on tackling real environmental sources of poverty—for example, restoring forests to boost the water table and to stop women having to walk 5 miles to get water, or restoring fisheries to revitalise fishing communities, and so on. If the Secretary of State for International Development was to put much greater emphasis on the environmental causes of poverty, I believe that we might see some real progress in tackling these huge issues.

[Richard Benyon]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for making that point. My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs regularly meets the Secretary of State for International Development, but last week she met him and the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change. They were talking about sustainability and they are going to New York next week to talk about the millennium development goals. We cannot achieve those goals unless we have sustainability at the heart of our actions.

My hon. Friend points out, quite rightly, that one can achieve quick wins in international development: we can have a gift from the people of Britain of a pump that is put on some giant structure that perhaps pumps thousands of gallons of water every day into some irrigation system. However, we could have a much more sustainable solution, which provides a better deal for the British taxpayer as well as for that environment, by protecting the ecosystem that provides the water in the first place. I know that I am preaching to the choir here, but that point must be understood across Government and that is why sustainability must be at the heart of our actions.

The hon. Member for Brent North also touched on the issue of coastal erosion. He talked about coastal erosion in the gulf of Mexico, but I saw coastal erosion nearer to home last week, or the week before—the weeks are merging into one at the moment. I went to Norfolk and Suffolk and saw for myself what is a quite—I use my words carefully—frightening prospect for communities living in that area. During the last 50 years, the collective class of politicians has been party to a slight con of the people in certain coastal areas of Britain, in arguing that this concept of “holding the line” is achievable amid the modern pressures of our economy. The idea that we can ring large parts of our coast with constructions of steel and concrete for ever more—that is just not going to happen. Therefore, we must certainly develop innovative financial solutions to hold the line where we can, but we must also look at some of the sustainable solutions that the hon. Gentleman was discussing, such as salt flats, mudflats and other constructions that work. There is wonderful work going on and I am really impressed by the people that I meet in the Environment Agency and in the Department who completely get the necessity of taking that route.

The hon. Gentleman also talked about measuring cost, which was also touched on by the hon. Member for Ogmore, who speaks from their party’s Front Bench, in relation to eco-tourism. To a brutally simplistic economist advising a Japanese whaling company, the value of a whale would be calculated in terms of the value of the product as against the cost of harvesting that animal in whatever part of the seas it is found, and the cost of the fuel for the ship. However, if we compare that with the value of that animal as a global eco-tourism resource, we see that there is no viability in whaling at all. Whaling can survive only with huge investments from Governments to support the few jobs that remain in the industry. That was brought home to me very clearly when I went to the International Whaling Commission in Agadir. The number of species, including whales, and the scale of the fish stocks that we manage to maintain in our oceans are also indicators of the general state of the seas. Therefore, the issues that the hon. Gentlemen covered are incredibly important.

My hon. Friend the Member for North Swindon (Justin Tomlinson) put a local perspective on the importance of engaging local people, which is vital. In our structural reform plan, our business plan for the Department, we said that we will work with the Department for Communities and Local Government to protect green areas of particular importance to local communities. As we develop housing, we must understand that we can build an enormous number of benefits into new housing schemes—sustainable drainage systems, green open spaces or a conservation credit system—to replace the biodiversity lost due to the creation of those communities. Ultimately, though, it is the constituents and the people who live in our communities whose well-being it is in all our interests to maintain. Therefore, the right environment is vital, and he is right to raise the issue.

The hon. Member for Bishop Auckland (Helen Goodman) made a powerful plea in support of plants as an important part of biodiversity. Too often, we think of biodiversity in terms of fur and feather. She is absolutely right that plants are intrinsically important. I went to the natural history museum within days of my appointment, and was shown the mind map that is biodiversity. Mammals are a tiny part of it. Compared with fungi and plant life, we are a small part of that great picture. The hon. Lady is right: that is why the millennium seed bank is important. We should all feel proud that it is based here in Britain.

I can give the hon. Lady the comfort that one part of the conservation zeitgeist in Britain at the moment is landscape-scale conservation. The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds cares about that, and it is the purpose of areas of outstanding natural beauty, national parks and wildlife trusts. It draws together key areas with farmland in between and does conservation work on that scale. That is how to succeed, and how the plants that she talks about will be protected.

The hon. Lady and the hon. Member for Ongar mentioned peat, which is important to the Government. I recently visited the Peak District national park and saw the impressive peat restoration project there. I had not understood how degraded the peat had become due to the effects of a century or more of pollution, or what work, skills and technologies were involved in the vital job of protecting it.

At the other end of the argument, it is vital that we consider the market for peat and ensure that it is sustainable. The quick win is getting companies such as B&Q to use man-made products; it is the smaller companies, the local garage and other such outlets selling peat that must be worked on. We love having summits; I hope that they are summits with a purpose. We are having a peat summit at which we will get together with all the companies that sell peat to ensure that we drive forward that vital agenda.