Storm Henk

Debate between Lord Benyon and Lord Watson of Wyre Forest

Wednesday 10th January 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Benyon (Con)]

On my noble friend’s last point, 99% of planning permissions given in the last financial year were done in accordance with the Environment Agency’s advice on whether those developments should go ahead. Over the last 50 years there have been some appallingly bad decisions and we have seen housing going where it should not. But I absolutely do not agree, if that is what my noble friend is saying, that we should say that there should be no building on flood plains, because that would mean having no new buildings in cities such as York, Leeds, London and Exeter. Of course, it is not what you build but how you build it and how resilient it is, so building in resilience is vital.

I do not know a precise date for the final stage of our implementation of the Pitt review—a point that my noble friend raised—but as soon as I can find out I will drop her a line.

[Lord Watson of Wyre Forest (Lab)]

My Lords, I wish the Minister a happy new year. Given the increased frequency and impact of flooding, how confident is he that current assumptions on infrastructure adaptation and resilience are accurate? Will he take a personal interest in proposed flood defences for the people of Wyre Forest in Worcestershire? The good people of Bewdley were promised defences by the then Prime Minister Boris Johnson but, since then, have been flooded twice.

[Lord Benyon (Con)]

The noble Lord raises an important point. I assure him that, through the various fora looking at weather patterns—not least the Environment Agency and Defra working closely together—and through our entire adaptation programme, we are changing our view of the risk, in accordance with the best available science, particularly meteorology. This is a requirement under our adaptation programme, but it is also something we have to do to make sure that our plans and the vast amounts of taxpayers’ money that go into these schemes reflect this.

An important difference that has allowed us to take many more schemes forward has been the partnership funding approach. I do not know the specifics of the noble Lord’s Wyre Forest scheme, but so many did not qualify under the value for money criteria in the past and were not built. Now that we have introduced our partnership funding scheme, with other sources of funding, planning conditions, local levies and a variety of other measures, we have seen hugely increased numbers of schemes and protections put in place. I hope the noble Lord’s scheme will benefit from that and I will raise it personally with the floods Minister to ensure that it is in the programme.

Water Companies: Water Pollution

Debate between Lord Benyon and Lord Watson of Wyre Forest

Wednesday 1st March 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Benyon (Con)]

In 2013, we only knew about 5% of the storm overflow points where sewage was going into our rivers. We now know about 90% because we instructed the water companies to provide that information. By the end of this year, we will know about 100%. The Environment Agency is the guardian of water quality and it takes forward prosecutions. The Government have said that they will increase the fines available as, at the moment, there is a cap on them, which we think should be higher. The Environment Agency is already able to launch criminal prosecutions against CEOs. Ofwat has the power to impose a fine of up to 10% of a company’s annual turnover and all fines are taken from the water company’s profits and not from customers.

[Lord Watson of Wyre Forest (Lab)]

My Lords, we consume twice as much water per capita as we did 50 years ago. There is an increasing frequency in sewage discharges as a result of extreme weather events, all of which require institutional investment. Do the Government not have the choice either to reduce profiteering in the sector in favour of this investment or to ask the taxpayer to subsidise this infrastructure?

[Lord Benyon (Con)]

We are asking water companies to spend a lot more—£56 billion. In this period alone, they are putting an extra £7 billion into investment in infrastructure. Water companies make a profit of about 3%. This is not dramatic, compared with what some other companies make, but we watch it very carefully through the instructions we give to Ofwat. We want to make sure that customers are getting a good deal but, more importantly, that there is investment going into infrastructure.

Agricultural Transition Plan

Debate between Lord Benyon and Lord Watson of Wyre Forest

Wednesday 1st February 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Benyon (Con)]

I thank my noble friend. His knowledge and interest in this subject are of course really helpful. We want to make sure that precisely those farmers are able to access these schemes. In fact, they are the people most often able to deliver the kind of benefits we want, in reversing the decline of biodiversity, hitting our net-zero targets and hitting our tree-planting targets. There is something in there for them, particularly in the upland areas. If they are farming areas that have either upland or lowland peat, there is a standard that would be of particular value to them. I also draw farmers’ attention to the hedgerows standard. Farmers are used to hedgerows, and they are restoring their number to deal with those that were taken out with government grants in the 1970s. They know that if they can manage those hedgerows in a different way, it can have enormous benefits, both in carbon and biodiversity. I really hope they will benefit from these new standards.

[Lord Watson of Wyre Forest (Lab)]

My Lords, the Minister said that there were no other deaths, but independent marine experts claim that there have been deaths of bivalve shellfish, octopuses, barnacles and algae and there is growing evidence that seal populations were affected. If the assumptions in this new report are accurate, it suggests that we have a discrete, pathogenic, multi-species serial killer committing ecocide. That is significant because it is also in an area that is coterminous with the blast radius of the explosion of the Teesside furnace, which was demolished by explosion with the dust cloud scattered across the sea. I am sure the Minister must be worried about that level of death in the sea. Can he at least try to challenge the notion that there is a multi-species element to this, because I think the report focused just on crustaceans?

[Lord Benyon (Con)]

I absolutely accept the noble Lord’s point. I want to make sure that my language is correct, because there are a lot of conspiracy theories at the extremes; then there are the absolutely genuine points made by people such as the noble Lord, who want, quite rightly, to ensure that they are addressed.

Although a novel pathogen—a disease or parasite—has not been identified, the experts concluded that it could explain the key observations, including mortality, over a sustained period along a 70-kilometre coastline. The report makes clear the unusual twitching of dying crabs and the deaths being predominantly among crabs rather than other species, and it concluded that a novel pathogen is as likely as not to be the cause.

That leads us to ask, “What now?”, which is why we are talking to Cefas to make sure that we are monitoring this issue. We are also talking to the IFCA about the measures that it brought in and making sure that we are drawing on the evidence of citizen science and other scientific organisations—some of which have understandably been taking part in campaigns on this. We recognise that, as yet, we do not precisely know what the cause is, but we want to.

Pollution: Rivers and Beaches

Debate between Lord Benyon and Lord Watson of Wyre Forest

Monday 30th January 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Watson of Wyre Forest]

To ask His Majesty’s Government what steps they are taking to protect rivers and beaches from pollution.

[The Minister of State, Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Lord Benyon) (Con)]

My Lords, I declare my farming interests as set out in the register. The Government are committed to protecting our water bodies from pollution. In December we announced our ambitious suite of legally binding Environment Act targets, including four targets to address pressures on the water environment. To tackle agricultural pollution, in November we published a grant scheme to improve slurry storage on farms, alongside almost doubling the budget for our catchment-sensitive farming partnership. In August 2022, we also published our £56 billion plan to reduce sewage discharges.

[Lord Watson of Wyre Forest (Lab)]

I thank the Minister for that Answer, but in the light of increasing public alarm, Thames Water now provides live information on pollution caused by combined sewage overflow spills. When will the Government mandate all water companies to provide their customers with this information?

[Lord Benyon (Con)]

By the end of this year. I am grateful for the noble Lord’s interest in this subject. In 2013, I wrote to every water company in England and was amazed to find that only 5% of combined sewage outflows were registered anywhere. We did not know, and the reason we now know and are able to hold them to account is that we now have over 90% of those, and by the end of this year we will have 100%, so all the concerns people have can be measured in real time. We are also requiring water companies to put telemetry just below outflows so we can see precisely the impact of legal outflows and use it for enforcement for when there are illegal discharges into rivers.

Environmental Targets (Marine Protected Areas) Regulations 2022

Debate between Lord Benyon and Lord Watson of Wyre Forest

Tuesday 24th January 2023 Grand Committee

[Lord Benyon (Con)]

The noble Baroness is absolutely right, which leads me on to my next point. I was not boasting, because I certainly do not know as much as some of the academics with whom I have worked over the years. However, since I wrote my report—it was published only 18 months ago—the understanding of blue carbon has moved on considerably. She will be pleased to know that a number of the marine protected areas that we have designated contain seagrass. In other areas such as maerl beds and kelp, there is enormous potential to lock up and sequester more blue carbon. She is right that our oceans have enormous potential to add to our abilities to achieve our net-zero ambitions. We need to weaponise the oceans to help us to achieve that.

[Lord Watson of Wyre Forest (Lab)]

I am absolutely certain that this Minister knows more about the oceans than I do, and I am grateful for his patience in allowing a new Member to intervene in a way that I understand might not be conventional, but I have a single question about the report of the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee. Its report highlights the additional targets that did not appear in the Explanatory Memorandum. One target is to reduce by 50% the length of waters polluted by

“arsenic, cadmium, copper, lead, nickel and zinc from abandoned metal mines”.

I have a personal interest in this with regard to the Cornish coast-line where, as the Minister knows, there is consideration of new lithium mines and, perhaps because of rising commodity prices, bringing abandoned tin mines back into mining. How could emissions from new mines be baselined? Will they be included in these targets? That is obviously quite a big consideration for the people of Cornwall.

[Lord Benyon (Con)]

Absolutely. I welcome the noble Lord to these proceedings and thank him for his interest in these matters. We debated these targets yesterday on waterways, under the same provision in the Environment Act. One of the four areas in which we are setting ourselves testing targets is on waste from metal mines. Some of the pollutants going into our rivers and thereby into our seas come from mines that ceased production before 1900. Nevertheless, there is a serious problem and there are now means by which you can detect the point source of pollutants. We have set ourselves a taxing target to try to tackle this.

The noble Lord is absolutely right about new mining. As commodity prices change around the world, there is a likelihood that certain areas that were considered redundant from mining in the UK might suddenly become viable. He mentioned tin in the south-west. If a new mine is to be opened, a strict area of regulation requires it to prove to the Environment Agency in the main sense, but other agencies as well, that it is not adding to the problem and is not impeding our ability to hit our target for mines and metals. I hope that reassures him, but there will be many other opportunities to raise these concerns as we go forward.

I will just tackle one or two other issues. This is part of a commitment that we have made, both nationally and internationally, to protect 30% of our oceans by 2030. We seek to do that in a way that stands the test of international oversight, because these should not be paper parks. We have not rolled out management measures as fast as we should, because the EU had to allow us to do this in the past, when other countries in the EU might have had arrangements for their fishers to fish these waters. We are now in a position to move this forward, and the welcome news that we are preventing bottom trawling in areas such as Dogger Bank is just part of this.

I hope I avoid the need to write to the noble Baroness, Lady Wilcox, but, if I fail to satisfy her, I am happy to do that. As she says, the management measures will be in place by 2024. These documents will be publicly available and they have to be clearly understood by all stakeholders.

We have great ambitions for marine energy as well as for other forms of marine activity including carbon capture and storage, which may yet be a few years away; but all this needs to be understood as we talk about the great spatial squeeze of our oceans. When you look at an ocean you think there are miles of it and plenty of room for everyone, but when you look at a map you see what is going on—which areas are favoured by fishermen, which areas will see the rollout of marine energy, which are covered in a cat’s cradle of cables that cross our ocean bed. We have to make sure that marine protection has its full place.

The most important thing I took away from doing my report was the marine environment’s ability to recover quickly. I talked rather depressingly about areas such as coral gardens—which explains our date of 2042—but other areas will recover very quickly. Highly protected marine areas around the world see an extraordinary abundance of biodiversity very quickly if protection is done in the right way. Of course, that needs the support of everyone concerned. In those areas that we saw around the world, their greatest supporters were the fishermen—because the biomass that spills out of them into neighbouring areas of the sea, which they can exploit, is immense if things are done correctly.

The noble Baroness, Lady Wilcox, talked about how the statutory deadline of 31 October 2022 for laying these target SIs was missed. In March 2022, the Government launched their consultation on targets relating to the Environment Act, determined to leave our environment in a better state than we found it. It included around 800 pages published following three years of developing the scientific and economic evidence. The consultation closed on 27 June. We received over 180,000 responses, which all needed to be analysed and carefully considered. The volume of material and the significant public response indicated that we would not be able to publish targets by 31 October last year as required. The Secretary of State reassured the other place and all interested parties that we would continue to work at pace to lay draft statutory instruments as soon as practicable. We are now at that point.

The noble Baroness also asked about good environmental status. The Government are already required to work towards good environmental status through our UK marine strategy. This is UK-wide, whereas the targets under the Environment Act are England-only. A UK-wide target makes much more sense for good environmental status given the dynamic nature of the marine environment. Regulators already have legal responsibilities to protect MPAs. The target to achieve a favourable condition by 2042 is based on halting damaging activities by 2024.

The final suite of targets is stretching. To deliver them will require a shared endeavour across the whole of government and all of society. We consider the evidence carefully. In some cases, it is not technically or practically possible to go further. In others, higher targets would involve significant restrictions and costs on businesses and people’s lives, which we do not think would be right to impose at this time. However, the Environment Act requires future Governments to report regularly on progress. If, as time progresses and technology evolves, there is evidence to show that we should be more ambitious, we can increase those ambitions.

MPAs are one of the most important tools we have for protecting the wide range of precious and sensitive habitats and species in our waters. The instrument will ensure that we greatly increase the number of protected features in a favourable condition. The MPA target will focus the efforts of our regulators to manage pressures, and sets a path for the recovery of the diverse habitats and species that live in our MPAs. I hope that I have addressed the issues raised and that the Committee will approve this instrument.

Environmental Targets (Woodland and Trees Outside Woodland) (England) Regulations 2022

Debate between Lord Benyon and Lord Watson of Wyre Forest

Tuesday 24th January 2023 Grand Committee

[Lord Watson of Wyre Forest (Lab)]

I feel grateful to the Minister for giving me one last roll of the dice. Could I make my offer to him again? I am absolutely convinced that he is across this, but I am prepared to do everything I can in my party to join his nascent squirrel execution pledge. If we could work together afterwards, we are likely to agree this or would at least restate or work towards the case for 17.5% politically, in what I think could be an agreement across the main parties’ manifestos for the next period. There may be at least an opportunity to review those targets prior to the 2028 review, as currently addressed in this set of arrangements.

[Lord Benyon (Con)]

I thank the noble Lord for that helpful and honest appraisal about where we want to get to. I want the highest possible ambition. We are setting targets that we think we can achieve within the current framework. Farming is going through a massive transition. I have spoken about the need for a land-use framework for the future and, as the next few crucial years go by, the kinds of incentives and encouragement will become more apparent, as will our success or otherwise. The private sector green finance that my noble friend Lord Roborough was talking about is already seeing tree planting, to the criticism of some people. This could be hugely effective in exceeding our target. I am certainly happy to work cross-party to achieve that.

The noble Baroness, Lady Twycross, asked me a number of questions, not least about nursery capacity, importantly. We have launched the nature for climate fund, which is spending £750 million on trees and peat-land restoration over this Parliament. It has seen progress on not just tree planting but building long-term capacity within the sector. We will commit around £28 million of this fund to projects to support the domestic seed and sapling supply sectors.

Other questions were put by the noble Baroness, Lady Parminter, who correctly set this within the context of the Government’s net-zero ambitions. They are not just ambitions but comply with the Climate Change Act. The Climate Change Committee is very clear about where we are and how we can get on track with the sixth carbon budget. I can tell her that, as part of the Government’s response, we are looking across the range of Defra’s responsibilities and to recent court cases. We want to make sure that we are not only saying the right thing and that something is deliverable but backing this by real fact.

This makes for difficult choices, because we want our relatively small country to continue to be able to feed itself and for it to be secure that that production is sustainable. We can achieve this. I have seen that from the scale of the farm to now talking about it for the nation. It takes courage to make those decisions and to argue them with sectors that may be very suspicious about what they mean for them and their businesses, so we must do it in the right way.

I take the key point about skills. We are training people to manage a different kind of environment. That might be about producing more energy crops or managing more wilder spaces. In terms of nature and its recovery, it is certainly about having more people working in forestry. That is why I am pleased that the Forestry Commission training scheme is now up and running, and that more foresters are being taken on and trained. Actually, it is not just for the Forestry Commission to do this; it is for local authorities and the private sector, as well.

The noble Baroness, Lady Twycross, asked me some questions about the targets, which I hope I have answered. So far, the Government have trebled planting rates to 7,000 hectares a year. This is the first step to hitting the target. I have talked about nursery capacity. Our £270 million farming innovation programme is seeing money going into a variety of different things, including skills and improving the market for timber products. This is very different from growing a crop of wheat, where you can have a discussion with your bank manager because you know you are producing something that may vary by 15% up or down every year, depending on the weather. You need to take a much longer-term view with trees, but there is business to be had in forestry and we want to make sure it is successful. We can really enhance our forestry targets if people realise that there is a future in it.

These targets, as part of the suite of Environment Act targets, will drive action to deliver our commitment to leave the environment in a better state than we found it. I commend these draft regulations to the Committee.