Environment Bill

Lord Cormack Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 23rd June 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Bakewell, on her amendments, which I am afraid I did not sign. That was a complete oversight on my part. I think her introduction was excellent.

I suspect that not very far in the future, we will think of plastic as the new asbestos. When we first had asbestos, it was hailed as a wonder material. It is highly heat resistant and an excellent electrical insulator, and it has been used in construction, for fireproofing, and even for making clothing and furniture. In fact, archaeological evidence suggests that asbestos was used by humans quite a long time ago to strengthen ceramic pots, so it has been understood as a very valuable resource. Since the end of the 19th century, asbestos has been used in all sorts of buildings; any building constructed before the 1980s is likely to contain asbestos. Now, of course, the word “asbestos” is enough to stop people buying a property because it is so dangerous to human health when disturbed. I think we are going to see plastic as a dangerous material in the same way—probably more dangerous and more pervasive than asbestos.

Obviously, as other noble Lords have said, plastic has a lot of almost miracle properties, and the things that we can produce from plastic are integral to our way of life. However, its versatility and availability have led to exactly what the noble Lord, Lord Wigley, said: we have used it mindlessly. We have made so much plastic that we are now in danger of being polluted by it ourselves. We have known for a long time that plastic takes hundreds of thousands of years to break down, but only recently we have understood how bad that is. Plastic only breaks down into smaller and smaller pieces; it does not actually ever go away. It just gets tiny and it gets everywhere, with quite damaging consequences.

We now see that microplastics are present almost everywhere, including in our own bodies. Plastics accumulate in the food that we eat, moving up the food chain until it reaches its highest concentration in our bodies and, most concerningly, in mothers’ breast milk. When microplastics get very small, they are referred to as nanoplastics. They are so small that they can cross cellular membranes and actually work their way into our individual cells. We are currently clueless about what that means for our health and the environment, but if it is anything like asbestos then a tiny amount can be incredibly damaging for our health.

The noble Earl, Lord Lytton, and the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh, talked about disposal. The noble Baroness said that it should be disposed of well and the noble Earl talked about safe disposal. There is no safe disposal. There is no way to make sure that it is well disposed of; that just does not happen. It is still there. We know that we have produced far too much plastic, and it is within our control to reduce the amount that is made.

The noble Baroness, Lady Meacher, mentioned masks. I am going to make my regular comment about the fact that—and I am going to try not to look at any noble Lords wearing them—the blue masks that some noble Lords are wearing today in your Lordships’ House are actually highly polluting. They are not paper but plasticised paper; they cannot be recycled; they end up in our seas and rivers; they kill animals; and obviously they are extremely ugly to see. I know it is not easy to replace them, and I would say that at least those noble Lords are wearing masks in the first place, but I have offered to replace such masks with material masks made in my little haberdasher’s down in Dorset rather than still seeing them as I look around the House.

The Bill absolutely has to set targets for reducing plastics because we have to start now to reduce the future burden. The problem is just going to get worse, and if we do not get it into the Bill then we probably will not deal with it.

[Lord Cormack (Con)]

As always, it is a great pleasure to follow my friend the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb. I do not always agree with her, but she speaks a great deal of common sense—as well as a few other things. I am delighted to see her putting on a mask. She will be glad to know that I took my blue mask off—I am waiting for the one from the haberdasher’s.

The noble Baroness made a very good point about asbestos, but of course that is a specific substance. “Plastic” is a bit of a generic term that covers a great deal. We have to recognise that in its beginning it often brought hygiene where there was squalor and safe packaging where there was danger, but it has now got completely out of hand. No one could have watched programmes like “The Blue Planet” without being completely nauseated by some of the scenes we saw on our screens of animals choked or strangled to death. It causes an enormous problem even in our own countryside and in our towns and cities.

My noble friend Lord Caithness referred to litter. In many ways, litter is the curse of the age. I have been horrified when I have watched “Look North” on our local television station and seen that after the end of various phases of the lockdown people have gone out in their hundreds and thousands and desecrated, and defecated in, our countryside. I say to the Minister that it is crucial, as others have referred to, that we have targets and deadlines. The noble Baroness, Lady Meacher, made a particular point of that and she is right. We keep coming back to the phrase “a landmark Bill” but if this is indeed going to be a landmark Bill then there have to be deadlines for elimination. Of course one has to give manufacturers a degree of notice but we cannot carry on as we are or we will smother ourselves in our own detritus—it is as simple and alarming as that.

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[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Randall of Uxbridge, and to commend him, the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, noble Baroness, Lady Parminter, and the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Whitchurch, on Amendment 24, to which the Green group would have certainly given its support, had there been space on the paper for it.

I will, however, go back briefly to Amendment 23 from the noble Lord, Lord Chidgey, because it is crucial that we acknowledge the importance of chalk streams. It is something I have in the past done a great deal of work on, with concern about the arrival of what has been called unconventional oil and gas extraction and its potential impact on them. I will admit that seeing the noble Lord’s amendment also made me want to revisit amendments that I tabled to the then Agriculture Bill on meadows and hedgerows. They are all things we need to include when we are talking about the species abundance target more broadly.

However, what I mostly want to address is new subsection (4) in the Government’s amendment and the proposed amendments to that subsection. As the noble Lord, Lord Randall, has already set out extremely clearly, this simply does not live up to the promises that the Government made on the species abundance target: the words we heard from the Secretary of State in what was billed as a landmark speech.

Amendment 24 would leave out the word “further”. The Government’s amendment states that they will “further the objective”, and Amendment 24 says “meet” the objective, which is a considerable improvement. However, I have tabled Amendment 26, which would go further. I apologise to noble Lords, because I realise, looking at it, that in the Explanatory Statement I did not really get on top of the complexities of explaining it. The key difference in this context is that I say, rather than to “further” or to “meet” a target, “delivering an improvement”. We have the Government saying, “We’re going to try to at least not get worse”; Amendment 24 says, “We’re going to at least meet a target for species abundance”; and I say, “We have to see an improvement.” That is what would be written into the Bill.

I shall go back, as did the noble Lord, Lord Randall, to the speech of George Eustice in Delamere Forest. I have a couple of quotes from it. It used the phrase “building back greener”. I put the stress on the “er” in that: an improvement. He said that

“restoring nature is going to be crucial”—

we are restoring, we are improving. He said:

“We want to not only stem the tide of this loss but to turn it around and to leave the environment in a better state.”


I would say that to deliver on what the Government say they want to achieve, they need the words “delivering an improvement”, or words very similar to those, in the Bill to commit to seeing an improvement.

I shall give just a short reflection on what that means, and I shall go to the RSPB:

“More than 40 million birds have disappeared from UK skies”


since 1970. What the Government are offering is, “We’re going to try and stop losing more”; Amendment 24 says, “We guarantee to at least stay where we are”; my amendment says, “We’re going to bring at least some of those 40 million birds back.” That is what it is aiming to do.

We can reflect on a phrase which has been very much popularised by George Monbiot, the Guardian columnist and writer: “shifting baseline syndrome”. Older Members of your Lordships’ House may well say, “Well, nature just doesn’t look like it used to when I was a child”—but their grandparents would have said exactly the same thing. We have had a long-term, centuries-long collapse, and if you could get someone in a time machine from 200 years ago and put them into our countryside now, they just would not recognise it, with its total lack of wildlife.

It is also worth looking at the Government’s reaction. The noble Lord, Lord Randall, referred to the Dasgupta review. The Government have, of course, already put out a formal response to that in which they talk about a “nature-positive future”, which I suggest implies that there has to be an improvement: if you are going to do something positive, you are increasing it. That explains why I have worded Amendment 26 in this way, in terms of delivering improvement.

I want briefly to address the rest of Amendments 26 and 27 on the issue of species abundance. I have talked to some of the NGOs that have been instrumental in the petition that the noble Lord, Lord Randall, referred to—250,000 people had signed it the last time I looked to say that they want an improved species abundance target—I will be very happy if the Minister can correct me, but no one has actually defined what a species abundance target means. We go back to our debate on Monday about what biodiversity means: whether it is biodiversity of genes in a large population which has a large diversity of genes, one hopes; whether it is species; whether it is the fact that to have abundant species, you need a rich ecological environment. All those things fit together. Amendments 26 and 27 are my attempt to get the Minister to reflect now, or if not now, later, and explain to us what the Government really mean by a species abundance target.

What I have suggested, in trying to address those different aspects of biodiversity, is to look at the mass of wild species—we are talking about bioabundance. Keeping a few handfuls of tiny populations of every species going is not enough; we need to have lots of the popular species, lots of all species and also population numbers of red and amber list species, trying to address those rarer species on which a lot of the attention in terms of extinction is focused. I am sure all noble Lords have received many representations about Amendment 24, which is certainly a great improvement on government Amendment 22, but I ask your Lordships’ House, as we go forward to the next stage, to think about some wording in the Bill that guarantees building in improvement, not just ensuring no decline.

[Lord Cormack (Con)]

My Lords, I am glad to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett of Manor Castle. She and her colleague from the Green Party can certainly never be accused of falling down on the job. They are persistent; I do not always agree with them, but I salute them for keeping their cause going.

I was greatly impressed by my noble friend Lord Randall of Uxbridge’s speech but I must say to my noble friend, whose personal credentials I do not question for a moment, that his amendments this evening are disappointing, to put it mildly. The speech of the Secretary of State, George Eustice, to which reference has already been made, excited expectations. The amendments that my noble friend has tabled do not—if they will fulfil those expectations, there is a great difference between promise and performance. It is not just the road to hell that is paved with good intentions; in this context, the road to extinction is paved with good intentions. It is not a question of my noble friend’s intentions but of the performance that I think will follow.

I suggest that on Report my noble friend should toughen this up. I ask him to convene a meeting of those are speaking in this debate and others to see whether we can come to a consensus and amendments that will really reflect what I believe is his genuine intention, and what is certainly the desire of a large majority of your Lordships’ House. I urge him to do that, because I do not want this to become a politically contentious Bill; it is one that ought to command the allegiance of people in all parts of the country and in all political parties. I salute the Government for bringing it forward, but say to them, please do not fall down on this. It is crucial that in 10 years’ time, looking back upon 2030, people do not say, “There was a great opportunity that was badly missed.”

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[Lord Inglewood (Non-Afl) [V]]

My Lords, this is the first time I have spoken in this debate so I point first to my interests in the register. Specifically, I point out that I own land of environmental and historic significance. My comments are essentially probing ones attached to amendments in this grouping and relate to the Bill more generally.

My starting point is supporting the general gist of what the noble Lord, Lord Redesdale, has said. In particular, I would like to reiterate comments I made briefly during the Agriculture Act, where I sensed that some of your Lordships were a little bit sceptical about the point I was making, but I believe they were not right in that. It is commonplace to say that all landscape in the UK is, in one shape or another, made land by man. But there is a category—I am specifically referring to landscape parks and gardens—in which the natural and deliberately planned fuse in a kind of hybrid, because humans deploy natural materials to create a work of art. They range in scale from being only a few acres to being what Stephen Switzer, the 18th century designer and author, described as

“aiming at an incomprehensible Vastness, and attempting at Things beyond the reach of Nature”.

To use a contemporary form of words, they are a form of land art.

Our great parks and gardens are probably this country’s greatest distinctive contribution to 18th century visual culture and possibly to global visual culture more generally. I hasten to add that “landscaping” is not used in its general contemporary sense of hard or soft landscaping. “Park” in this context does not have its general contemporary meaning of urban or country and, for that matter, “garden” does not merely mean what it means these days, although it may include them. All these are conceived with a complicated and important cultural, philosophical and intellectual framework which links them to all kinds of other disciplines and art forms. Probably the best-known practitioner is Capability Brown, but he has many predecessors and successors from Charles Bridgeman at the beginning of that century to Humphry Repton at the end of it.

These are landscapes that are incredibly fragile and inherently physically unstable. There is a matter of course because of the inevitability of plants dying. This, though, in some senses, paradoxically, can help to preserve them, but they are easily swept away by changes in taste and in rural land use—things like golf courses and urban development, which, in turn, often lead to physical disintegration and dismemberment. Quite how many there are I do not really know, and I dare say not more, anyway, than 1,000. Sometimes, they can suddenly come out of the undergrowth, like, for example, the well-known Lost Gardens of Heligan. Or, equally, they can disappear more or less completely, like Eastbury in Dorset, designed by Vanbrugh and now green fields. As Sir Thomas Browne put it, “green grass grows where Troy town stood”.

The purpose of these remarks is simply to seek confirmation from the Minister of reassurance that such things as these, which are neither solely natural nor solely manmade, but a hybrid, will be given the highest consideration in the context of what this Bill does in respect of land. They are, after all, one of our nation’s glories and give a large number of people in our country both pleasure and inspiration.

[Lord Cormack (Con)]

My Lords, I am delighted to follow both the noble Lord, Lord Redesdale, and my noble friend Lord Inglewood. We owe a great deal to the noble Lord, Lord Redesdale, for putting down these amendments, drafted, as he said, by the Heritage Alliance, which represents so many heritage organisations in this country.

The poetic speech of my noble friend Lord Inglewood inspires me to think of so many of the landscape gardens I know and love. In my own former constituency of South Staffordshire, we had Chillington, one of the masterpieces of Capability Brown, with its wonderful lake, its Palladian bridges and its marvellous vistas. Just a few miles ago, there is Weston Park, the home of the Earls of Bradford through the centuries. But there are so many, many more, such as Studley Royal around Fountains Abbey in Yorkshire. I could dredge my mind and memory and go on, but I do not want to detain the House for too long at this stage of the evening.

Our landscape—my noble friend Lord Inglewood referred to this—is largely manmade and, even in its wilder aspects, man-moulded. It is a real deficiency in this Bill, which calls itself the Environment Bill, if some of the most memorable and vulnerable parts of our environment are excluded. I talked briefly on this on Second Reading, when I referred to parish churches, which are the centre of most of our villages. I am not suggesting that every historic building be brought within the compass of this Bill, but I believe it is important that we recognise the built environment, which is part of the environment. One thinks of hill forts, some of them dating back to the Bronze Age. One thinks of the canals of this country—manmade. One thinks of dovecotes; there is a particularly beautiful one not far from my former constituency that is owned and protected by the National Trust. These are all parts of our built environment, our environment and our heritage.

I would ask my noble friend, following what the noble Lord, Lord Redesdale, said a few moments ago: would he please convene a meeting of those of us who are particularly concerned about this? I speak as president of the All-Party Parliamentary Arts and Heritage Group, which I founded with the late Andrew Faulds way back in 1974, and which has attracted the support of many of your Lordships over many years.