Tree Pests and Diseases

Lord Colgrain Excerpts

Thursday 13th February 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Colgrain (Con)]

My Lords, it is sobering to consider that not many of us alive today remember what the English countryside looked like before the ravages of Dutch elm disease. It is for those of us who do remember to draw a parallel between that cataclysm and the one we are told is about to descend on us with ash dieback, which I think will alter the countryside to a far greater degree than most can appreciate. It is timely that we are having this debate, and I congratulate my noble and learned friend Lord Hope and the noble Earl, Lord Kinnoull, on securing it.

I served recently on your Lordships’ ad hoc Rural Economy Committee. In our report we laid emphasis on the importance of a place-based approach. This is particularly true of any discussion about woodland tree pests and diseases, where my personal experience and observations relate specifically to Kent. We have two tree types most at risk from disease: the native oak, and the sweet chestnut, historically an import but which has now become part of our woodland vernacular.

With the Chatham dockyard nearby and the oaks of England providing the crucial first line of defence in the construction of ships of the line for the Royal Navy from Elizabethan to Napoleonic times, oaks and Kent come naturally in the same sentence. Oak dieback and acute oak decline have been evident for a number of years. We have an ongoing monitoring programme, and in many instances it seems difficult to distinguish dieback from the other diseases from which the oak suffers, such as defoliation by the oak processionary moth. Certain gradual and sudden deaths are problematic to diagnose, with some people maintaining that perhaps certain individual trees have been weakened by the effects of global warming—on which I have my doubts. Oak and ash trees dying across our landscape would make it nigh on unrecognisable, and any science that can be funded to help arrest such a tragedy should be hugely encouraged.

Kent has many tens of thousands of acres of sweet chestnut, a versatile wood used historically for pit props in east Kent coalfields, hop poles when we had a vibrant beer industry, charcoal when London depended on that fuel source, and fencing materials. It is still valued for the last and is an excellent biomass fuel source, given the intensity of its burn. The arrival of sweet chestnut blight has given us cause for huge concern. While it seems to be contained currently, it has brought home the need for the proper monitoring of imports and for endless in-field or in-wood vigilance.

Those who lived through the great storm of 1987 remember its immediate effects, but those who were in the eye of it continue to live with its consequences. For us in west Kent, the obliteration of the deer fences at the National Trust’s Knole Park resulted in the introduction to the locality of a fallow deer herd population that has been impossible to control. The effect on natural regeneration of native woodland has been devastating and catastrophic, as has the effect on ground-nesting birds when all natural cover has been grazed away. There are said to be more deer in England now than at any time in our history, which will have a severely detrimental effect on self-sown and self-selecting species. Advocates of rewilding who want to include the introduction of deer in that process should realise the disadvantages this can produce.

However, the foreign invader that has taken most advantage of the devastation wrought by the storm is the rhododendron ponticum, another persistent and vigorous invader that leaves a barren undercanopy that is hostile to all our native fauna and flora. Along with other plants introduced originally for Victorian gardens, such as Japanese knotweed, it is expensive and time-consuming to deal with and should be in the bull’s-eye for any new forestry grant programme that emanates from the Agriculture Bill.

Last but by no means least is the destroyer of much new tree growth, the grey squirrel—evidenced by brown strips of barked saplings and dead new growth in plantation and coppice—another pest introduced for aesthetic reasons with no appreciation of the damage it could do if left unchecked, not least to our native red squirrel, birds’ eggs and unfledged chicks. It seems we are unable to control it—a view that probably has much in common with the prevailing wisdom of our grandparents’ generation about the rabbit, which in its millions was devastating field and woodland crops. That was controlled in the end by the advent of myxomatosis. Let us hope that scientists can come up with a more humane solution for the grey squirrel, but a solution there must be if we are to encourage a vibrant commercial woodland industry.

We can expect to have to deal with natural and weather-related disasters, and we are at the mercy of windborne spores and pests, such as ash cholera and the box moth, but what we can prevent we must guard against, such as the import of disease on young plants and the release into the wild of animals that will upset our wonderful, historic, native ecosystem. We should also guard against our own ill-thought-out measures such as plastic tree guards, which blight our woodland for decades and leave permanent pollution.

Rural Economy (Rural Economy Committee Report)

Lord Colgrain Excerpts

Tuesday 8th October 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Colgrain (Con)]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Foster of Bath, on his deft chairing of the committee, and I thank the other members of the committee for making it such an enjoyable and informative exercise. My entry in the register of interests shows that I have a lot of commitments to the rural sector, and it was a real privilege to serve on the committee. I also thank the staff, two of whom are present. The clerk was Simon Keal, and such was the sure touch with which he conducted our affairs that we would never have known that it was his first time in such a role. Katie Barraclough, the policy analyst, and Breda Twomey, the committee assistant, instilled great confidence, and their committee was grateful for their application and professionalism.

The remit of the committee,

“to consider the rural economy and to make recommendations”.

could not have been broader and each chapter in the published report could have constituted the basis of a stand-alone report. However, there are two recommendations by the committee to which I would like to add further comment in the light of the Government’s response. The first relates to digital connectivity. The House has already heard much about this from committee members. On 3 August, the new BT chief executive gave no comfort at all when he was reported in the Times as saying that the company was ready to step up the construction of the next generation network and that:

“It could be a very positive story, a national mission”.


He has since tabled six points to the Government on behalf of the industry that must be addressed to meet the 2025 target. In addition, the Chancellor announced last week a further £5 billion to improve digital connectivity, but without, it must be said, the authority that would seem necessary to insist on the work being done with the timeliness that is required.

Let me give him a first-hand account of the obstacles that he, and we as a country, face. I am one of 45 households in our area of West Kent discussing a community fibre partnership with Openreach. We are located 30 miles from Hyde Park Corner, so it is not exactly the back of beyond. We are a mix of individual residential houses and businesses, and we are in the process of sending a sheet of completed information back to Openreach to apply for the requisite vouchers. We are told that this process will take four to six weeks in addition to the nine months that it has already taken us to get this far in the process, and we are assured that the work will be carried out within 12 months, but that is after the additional three months that it will take DCMS to approve the rural gigabyte voucher scheme. That means that if all perform up to their promise, it will have taken us two years to upgrade from our current 2.15 megabits per second to a promised superfast broadband speed. For rural businesses and communities, this timescale is calamitous. We have been told that 550 such CFP partnerships have been delivered by Openreach to date, with 90,000 households connected out of the 5% of the country still without broadband. Given that there are 1.5 million households still to be connected, it is evident that the recommendation in our report that Ofcom urgently review the universal service obligation is something on which this Government, and every future Government, must concentrate with an all-out effort to achieve. Our Prime Minister, in Billy Bunterish mode in his conference speech last week, referred to gigabit broadband spreading rapidly across the country like tendrils of superinformative vermicelli. Well, if he wants culinary imagery, he is talking tripe.

The second set of recommendations that I seek to highlight relate to recommendations 90 and 91 in our report on the subject of apprenticeships, and the Government’s reply, which in large part supports our suggestions. I know that the whole House agrees that in the person of the Minister, my noble friend Lord Gardiner, we are fortunate to have someone who is so totally in tune with and so personally well informed about the issues sweeping across the rural economy. However, I ask him to give special consideration to the apprenticeship issue. With the uncertainties relating to the availability of skilled full-time and part-time employees across the rural sector as a whole, and in particular horticulture, silviculture and now increasingly viticulture in Kent, these positive responses by the Government to the whole question of apprenticeships and the training of young people are to be welcomed. I urge the Minister to do his utmost to accelerate assistance in this area and to further the positive momentum that the Government have already generated. I would like to hear from him how this can be achieved.

Agriculture, Fisheries and the Rural Environment

Lord Colgrain Excerpts

Thursday 2nd November 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Colgrain (Con)]

My Lords, I may be the only person speaking here today who has not had the pleasure of either knowing or working with the noble Lord, Lord Plumb. However, I know I speak for all those in the farming community who have not had the opportunity to meet and work with him in giving him a great vote of thanks for his wonderful representation on our behalf over many years. I refer to my interests in the register, in particular my farm in Kent.

Two significant trends affecting rural industries are visible over the last few decades. The first is the ageing agricultural worker population, now averaging in their mid-50s, and declining in numbers overall. According to a Eurostat 2013 survey, 83% of workers are aged 45 or older. The second, a partial consequence, is the reduction in the number of family farms, and the increase in size of individual units. The average unit in our part of the world between the wars used to be one farmhouse and two cottages—three families in other words, on 120 acres; now, such an acreage would not support one person. We have a serious labour crisis looming in the industry. The most spoken about relates to seasonal labour in the fruit and horticultural sectors, this being tied in with the availability of casual labour post Brexit. The less spoken about, however, is the more problematic, and we must do whatever we can to encourage and attract more people to the sector.

In as much as subsidies will continue post Brexit, we must ensure that we direct some of the funding towards education, not only at graduate level—Hadlow College being an excellent example—but also at younger age levels, as some of the previous HLS schemes were directed. This is not only to motivate more and better qualified candidates to see a vibrant and exciting career in the sector, but to introduce the wider public to the rural environment. I recall an article by the noble Lord, Lord Bragg, pointing out that some titles in the English literature curriculum were no longer really relevant, given that the average urban reader could not identify with the basic rural themes, let alone some of the terminology of the great works of the canon. Surely we can devise enough of an introduction to our rural environment and its industries for children of school age to overcome such a basic disadvantage.

We have been told that post Brexit, grants will be harnessed more closely to environmental benefits. We need sensitive discrimination between those areas that will never be financially viable in pure agricultural terms—hill farms, for example, and owners of grade 1 and grade 2 land, who frankly neither need nor deserve subsidies. There has been a suggestion that the size of holding might determine eligibility for grant aid; I suggest that land quality should a fairer determinant. In the same way, approval for solar parks should be given only to sites where mainstream arable or livestock cropping will never be commercially viable. Brexit presents us with the wonderful opportunity to rewrite the catch-all policies of the EC. At the same time, we must ensure that our animal welfare standards and food production quality control are not compromised.

My experience relates specifically to the south-east of the country. I am one of the minority who farms around the M25 corridor, where, with the proximity of London and the commuter belt, property prices remain the prevalent topic of conversation. Broadband and connectivity run property a close second, and given that diversification is a sine qua non for all business in the rural economy, the failure of Openreach to deliver on its promises and the inability of the Government to drive through a successful national broadband programme, is nothing short of a scandal. Tens of billions will be spent on HS2, yet there is neither financial resource nor political application to support rural industries with one of their most vital and basic currencies of competition.

Likewise with planning. The principle of utilising brownfield sites, as opposed to greenfield, for new housing demand is generally accepted. The same principle should apply to light industrial businesses, since there is little purpose in building new houses in the countryside without endeavouring to provide jobs nearby. The present planning regulation for brownfield sites, particularly in the green belt and areas of outstanding natural beauty, is inconsistently applied, remains prey to the vagaries of individual planning officers and is failing in the Government’s stated objectives. It is not surprising that local sentiment is often hostile to planning applications when confronted with the evidence of inconsistent and irrational local policies.

Opportunities in the rural economy should be legion. Increased productivity as a result of new crop varieties and mechanisation, extended growing seasons as a result of climate change and a reputation for producing high-quality food safely should give the rural economy the ability to compete internationally regardless of the outcome of Brexit. But we must provide a regulatory framework that is simple to understand and not costly to implement, which cannot be said by any stretch of the imagination of the current regime.