Environment Bill

Lord Cormack Excerpts

Committee stage
Monday 12th July 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Boycott, and I thank her for getting down to brass tacks with an example. However, I am concerned about this group of amendments, which seeks yet further to strengthen adherence to the legacy of the EU habitats directive and to regulations made under it. When I was lucky enough to be a Minister much involved in negotiating on EU legislation, I used to attend Cabinet committees where, without revealing any secrets, the iniquities and inflexibilities of the habitats directive was a regular theme. The red tape and requirements, for example, to comply with protections in every relevant catchment even where a species or flora or fauna were abundant elsewhere, helped to fuel Brexit sentiment and the feeling that we should be able to do things our own way.

This Bill is an example in spades of not taking back real control and indeed doing far more than the EU has done on the environment. That troubles me, because we do not know how it will work out in practice, and of course the regulation powers in Clause 105—and indeed elsewhere in the Bill—are very wide. However, I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, on the need for proper consultation, and like him, I would appreciate some examples to enlighten us all before Report. I note that there is no impact assessment on these clauses; why is that?

I am highly doubtful about Clauses 105 and 106, since they leave us so close to the EU on habitats and, I fear, open to judicial review if we do things in a different way. Simpler, innovative ways of protecting our environmental jewels and changing things that the EU has decreed but do not work, has to be open to us. We want to get out of the straitjacket of Roman law and have a common-law, common-sense approach to protecting our exceptional habitats and indeed keeping countryside businesses vibrant, as the noble Earl, Lord Devon, has said.

I fear that these clauses limit our freedom too much. Moreover, nearly all the amendments in this group would make things worse and will therefore, I hope, be resisted by my noble friend the Minister. Whether you are a Brexiteer like him or not, we must all acknowledge that we have left the EU and must move forward independently.

[Lord Cormack (Con)]

My Lords, we are all very much in the debt of the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, for introducing this series of amendments and he is, of course, right to be concerned about habitats, the survival of species and all those things on which he touched.

I want, however, to focus the House’s attention on one specific matter. We debated some amendments the week before last, I think, on heritage and, underlying the debates that we have had day after day, has been a recognition that our landscape is manmade or man-moulded in its entirety. The villages, towns and cities in which we live are, of course, entirely manmade. I supported the heritage amendments, introduced very ably by the noble Lord, Lord Redesdale, because of my concern about buildings in general that have historic interest, and churches in particular. Nowhere else in our country is the story of our country more graphically told than in our country and town churches and, in particular, in the monuments and other artefacts that they contain.

We must get the balance right—balance has occurred time and again in these debates—because there is a real danger from one particular and specific source to the monuments in our churches. I refer to the danger of bats. Somebody may chuckle, and “bats in belfries” always raises a laugh, but this is a serious subject. I have brought it to the House’s attention before; I even introduced a Private Member’s Bill three or four years ago. But if noble Lords came with me to the wonderful church of Tattershall in Lincolnshire—one of the finest perpendicular churches in the country—they would be amazed, or would have been a few years ago, by the glory and beauty of the brasses. They have had to be covered, and in some cases hidden, because of the corrosive effect of bat droppings and urine. This is a story that can be told in many parts of the country, indeed in some thousands of our 16,000 listed grade 1 or grade 2-style churches. Nobody who cares about our country and the beauty of those buildings should dismiss this. We have to get the balance right.

I am not being so stupid or frivolous as to suggest that we try to exterminate bats as we exterminate rats. I am not doing that at all, but I am saying that there must be a real attempt to address this problem—and there is a partnership at the moment, experimental and very slow, between Natural England and English Heritage. When I raised it last time in your Lordships’ House, I had dozens of letters from all over the country. One in particular sticks in my mind, which came from somebody who worshipped regularly at the church of Abbey Dore, one of the glories of the golden valley of Herefordshire—one of the loveliest parts of our country. This particular correspondent was kneeling to receive holy communion on a Sunday morning when a bat defecated into his and the vicar’s hands. The vicar, who was a lady, was understandably distressed and so was he.

We have to wonder what we can do about this because, apart from anything else, there is a health hazard. We know—it is proven—that bats carry diseases. It is even suggested, with fairly good evidence to support it, that the pandemic under which we are still suffering at the moment originated in bats in the wet markets of China. So this is not scaremongering; this is making a serious point in, I hope, a serious way. Many of our monuments are brasses, but many are marble, which is particularly badly affected by bat defecations and bat urinations. It is not a pleasant subject, but it has to be addressed. I am very worried, because so many of our churches have been closed for so long during the pandemic—just what extra damage has been done during this period?

Again, I do not speak as a scaremonger; I am a long-standing member of the Church Monuments Society, vice-president of the Ecclesiological Society and have been warden of three churches for a total of 36 years. Like my noble friend Earl Shrewsbury when it came to shooting, I know a little bit about the subject of which I am talking. It is something that, in an Environment Bill, should be brought to your Lordships’ attention. I ask my noble friend the Minister one particular favour: perhaps the greatest expert on this subject is Professor Jean Wilson, former president of the Church Monuments Society, and I would be very grateful if my noble friend would allow me to bring her to meet him so that she can give him graphic examples and discuss this.

There are ways and means of diverting bats from churches, such as building special bat roosts or emitting certain sounds that will drive them out. There are a whole range of things that can be done. Some are being done at the moment, but this is an urgent problem. An Environment Bill passing into law which did not recognise heritage or recognise some of the glories of built heritage would be an inferior Bill. I do not question for a moment my noble friend’s interest in these things and his concerns about them, but none of us can be experts on everything, and a meeting with Professor Wilson might be extremely helpful to him. Government must have the opportunity to balance things.

I have great sympathy with many of the points made by the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, who spoke, as he always does, with calm and quiet authority. However, from a very brief conversation that I had with him, when I told him that I would introduce this subject this afternoon, I got the impression that it was something that he had not necessarily given a great deal of thought to. I do not criticise him for that at all. He is one of the greatest experts that we have in your Lordships’ House, and we are exceptionally fortunate to have him—but this is something that I am glad to draw to his attention, and I hope that he will appreciate the fact that I am doing so. We ought to have a post-Covid survey of our churches, we ought to see how much this damage has increased, and we ought to make it a real object of Natural England and English Heritage to try to come together to address this, because much is at stake.