Planning and Infrastructure Bill

Debate between Lord Cromwell and Lord Lucas

Committee stage
Wednesday 17th September 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Cromwell (CB)]

My Lords, I start by confirming my support for all three of the amendments in the name of the noble Lord, Amendments 253, 296 and 297. However, I caution the use of “non-native”; it is the invasive aspect that is the problem. What could be more English than a rose? What could be a more typical English fruit than an apple? Both of them originate from central Asia—they are not natives. However, I entirely take the point about invasive species.

Amendment 60, already debated, referred to guidance on planting along highways. There was much discussion about trees and wildflowers. I enjoyed reading what type of tree the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, might represent, which might repay people who want to look it up in Hansard. One plant that grows along our highways which was not mentioned in the earlier debate is ragwort, the bright yellow flowering plant seen everywhere alongside our highway network. Through lack of enforcement of existing legislation, this invasive plant has become a menace to the environment, animals and agriculture, and action to control it is long overdue. Once it has flowered, ragwort produces seeds that, like dandelions which people may be more familiar with, come with a downy parachute which means they float far and wide on the breeze across the countryside and into farmland, where they take root, produce more seed, and so on.

Ragwort is poisonous to livestock, and it is not advisable for people to touch it with their bare hands, although I spend many unhappy hours pulling it up myself with my own bare hands, as I am sure many other Members do. Grazing animals leave it alone while it is growing, but where a field is cut for hay or silage, as is the case on many grassland farms, it gets incorporated into the bales, animals cannot detect it, and they are poisoned by it. Finally, areas set aside for environmental benefits, such as margins for wildflowers, quickly become choked with ever-expanding stands of ragwort.

So much for the biology; what about the law? Ragwort is what is called a notifiable weed, and landowners and occupiers have a legal obligation to control and remove it, particularly if it is spreading, causing a nuisance, or posing a risk to livestock. The Weeds Act 1959 and the subsequent code of practice on how to prevent the spread of ragwort outline these responsibilities. Failure to comply can lead to legal action, and/or the relevant authorities can issue a clearance notice requiring action to be taken to remove it. Unfortunately, this has not been enforced for many years.

As part of my research in tabling this amendment, I asked a Written Question about notices or prosecutions in the last 12 months. I was informed:

“In the past 12 months, no notices in relation to ragwort control have been served to National Highways, and there have been no prosecutions under the Weeds Act 1959 or the Code of Practice”.


I would bet that we could go back a lot more years than the last 12 months and the result would be exactly the same.

That is not good enough. Defra and the Environment Agency need to enforce the existing law and regulations. The Bill will create new areas of land controlled by a quango. This amendment specifically identifies this problem plant and requires that at least in the development of new infrastructure, proper controls are carried out, and—my favourite theme—enforced where necessary. That would be a start.

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, I would like to speak on behalf of the Cinnabar moth, a very handsome creature which is nourished on ragwort. Ragwort is an ordinary part of the downland scene. It is an entirely natural, native plant in its right place. I agree that it can become a pest in some other places, but our downland is grazed by horses. They have the sense not to eat the thing, and we do not make hay out of it.

It is a plant that, in its ordinary place, you can work your way around. It is where someone leaves a field derelict, and it becomes a sea of yellow and the seeds are drifting everywhere, that something needs to be done about it. I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Cromwell, that we should be better, but we should not be too frightened of ragwort. It is not hugely disastrous for agriculture or livestock, in my experience of it.

[Lord Cromwell (CB)]

I invite the noble Lord to spend a series of weekends with me and my family pulling up ragwort across the organic grassland, which we bale for organic dairy farmers. After that, he may consider that ragwort is fine in his backyard but that, for those who are trying to feed the nation, it is a serious problem. Our livestock do leave it alone—he is quite right that they have the good sense to eat around it—but once it is baled and dead, they eat it.

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

The prospect of spending weekends with the noble Lord, Lord Cromwell, seems well worth some ragwort pulling.

I also sound a note of caution in respect of the amendments tabled by my noble friend Lord Roborough, as they are drafted, particularly Amendment 296. Animals such as the grey squirrel and the muntjac come and go as they please; you cannot eradicate them from an area. You can try pushing them back, but we are stuck with them until we develop a national solution. You should not penalise an EDP because it happens to be infected by them.

Also, are we referring to the list that is generated by retained EU regulation 1143/2014 when we are referring to invasive non-native species? This list consists mostly of things that are troublesome in much warmer climates. A lot of things that cause problems for us, such as sycamore, would not be included at all.

I am cautious. It is hard to eliminate invasive species from waterways. Unless you control the whole waterway and have a really integrated, careful and expensive campaign over several years, it is very difficult to do more than just reduce. By and large, we should learn to live with these invaders. I say this as a lifelong botanist. We have; we enjoy and celebrate the thousands of plants which have come to live here, mostly courtesy of gardeners, and which play a small part in the native flora.

There are very few plants that cause a huge problem in terms of invasiveness. Animals can be difficult. Insects are difficult but really hard to control. Anyway, when it comes to the flora of this country, we should recognise what we mean by “native”. If we go back to the ice ages, you are talking just about birch and a bit of Scots pine. The ice ages crushed the European temperate flora against the Alps. As a result, we have a really depleted flora in Europe compared with China or North America, which both had southern refuges that their flora could get to. You really see that in the case of forestry; we have 30 woody species in this country. Every year or two, a disease threatens another of them. I am starting to lose my mature oak trees to acute oak decline, having lost a lot of ash and all the elm.

A healthy temperate woodland has hundreds of species in it. That a few are finding their way back from gardens, diversifying and getting us back to a level of diversity that we ought to have is to be celebrated. Instead of this fuss about what is non-native, let us celebrate the immigrants. Surely the party opposite agrees with that.

[Lord Cromwell (CB)]

Without referring back as far as the ice age or taking as long as that to talk about it, my amendment relates specifically to one plant. Is the noble Lord suggesting that we do not apply the existing legislation? That is what my amendment seeks—merely to apply the law as it stands now through enforcement, not to create new law.

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, where it is troubling serious agriculture, yes, we should enforce.

Planning and Infrastructure Bill

Debate between Lord Cromwell and Lord Lucas

Committee stage
Monday 15th September 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, I have had a number of conversations with developers over the course of the past month or two. Their universal conclusion is that Part 3 makes it much harder to build houses. It adds huge levels of risk and uncertainty. It tears up the arrangements that they were half way through making—in order to get things done and deal with the environmental impact of housebuilding—and substitutes them with a regime where they just will not know what is happening. It will be really difficult to make commitments because so much could change if an EDP is imposed and because of the timescale of imposing an EDP. What will the consequence of an EDP be? It will make the whole business anti-business.

I really hope that the Government will take the chance of a change in the Secretary of State to look at this aspect of the Bill and say, “Even if it’s a good idea, we need to take it slowly and carefully, and we need to make sure that people can rely on it”, because, if you are setting out to build houses on any scale, you are taking a long-term decision. You need to know how the landscape will be for years in advance.

[Lord Cromwell (CB)]

My Lords, the Minister has kindly organised meetings with Natural England. I have been to two of them, in fact; I was late to one but, for the first one, I was there almost the entire time. One rather excited official from Natural England described what is going to happen as the most exciting thing that had happened in his career. I am not surprised—I mean, all its Christmases are coming at once. It is getting to have a role at the heart of planning and development; to design schemes across the country; and to run the authoritative model to determine where, how and when EDPs will be implemented. I have noticed several references tonight to the Soviet Union, an area with which I have worked extensively. I had exactly the same thought when I read this Bill. This is real Gosplan in action. The idea of some apparatchik sitting at his computer in Westminster and saying, “Bang—we will do that over there”, is absolutely what went wrong with the Soviet Union.

A lot of rude words have been said about Natural England tonight, many of which it deserves. My only real encounter with it was when I tried to put a catchment scheme together up the river—noble Lords may remember the days when we had environmental programmes that were still open. I was looking at doing one of those. The Natural England person said to me, “You know, it sounds like a lot of work, and it’s awfully complex. Are you sure you really want to do it?” These are the people who will be designing EDPs across the country and inflicting them on us. In our debate on the next group of amendments, there will be this question: why is it written as though Natural England is the only solution for all time? Why can it not be more general? I will leave that for others to talk about in the next section.

Two things came out of my latter meeting with them. One was that—noble Lords may or may not be aware of this—if you are a developer, you have to do biodiversity net gain, BNG. That is additional to the levy that you are going to be paying. I just think that everybody should be aware of that.

Planning and Infrastructure Bill

Debate between Lord Cromwell and Lord Lucas

Committee stage
Thursday 4th September 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, it is nice to see amity break out across the Committee after the previous group. I imagine a digital twin of the House of Lords would get to Amendment 135 by 7 pm.

Digital twins offer such an ability for local councils and their officers and members, and members of the public, to really get to grips with a plan. Otherwise, you are presented with something static that is really hard to change. It is just, “Shall we push it through or shall we retreat?” With a digital twin you can adjust, look at different ways of doing it and absorb comments as they come through, at a really low cost, and arrive at a much more evolved, much better, solution at the end of it.

I urge the Government, given that digital twins are part of the industrial strategy, to use this as an example to develop the Government’s role as a partner/customer, as a way of helping new small businesses and technologies cut their teeth and get a worthwhile first contract or two out of the way, and not to stand back but be part of the development of a strong new British industry. There is an opportunity here to do that, particularly with the Government’s new town programme. I really hope they take it.

[Lord Cromwell (CB)]

My Lords, I endorse completely the speeches by the noble Baroness, Lady Miller, and her supporters. She introduced it engagingly and comprehensively. I have therefore scribbled out most of what I was going to say. She has done the Committee a double service in that respect.

A common difficulty for those citizens who wish to examine or question a development proposal is the scarcity of information, expertise and resources they have, often when up against a large professional development company. Planning authorities have the same problem, and the risk of very expensive and protracted discussions and inquiries to get to grips with the proposed project. Some applications that I have seen seem almost designed to overcome planning authorities and public resistance through the sheer volume and number of boxes of paper that arrive, within which people have to try to find where the bodies are buried.

If such projects were obliged to produce a digital twin model, as the amendment proposes, not only would we have a more equitable process but it would also save a great deal of time, resources and money. I could say a great deal more, but I will not because we all dread the phrase, “My Lords, a lot of good points have been made” and I shall not repeat it. I genuinely shall not. I support these amendments, and I will now sit down.

House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill

Debate between Lord Cromwell and Lord Lucas

Report stage
Wednesday 2nd July 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Cromwell (CB)]

My Lords, much of the debate on the Bill has focused on what should be in it, rather than what is in it. Amendments 8, 14 and 29 seek to bind the Government into a timed programme of further reform after this Bill has passed.

In Committee I tabled an amendment to the effect that shortly after the Bill is passed, a time-limited group within the House be formed to hammer out not just the definition but the real application in practice of a participation requirement, and my amendment received wide support across the House. I have not brought it back today because, on reflection, it is a matter that might be best addressed internally in this self-regulating House, rather than included in this Bill and sent to the Commons to alter, block or tamper with it—much as the noble Lord, Lord Newby, was saying during debate on the last group, as indeed echoed by the Minister. That is why I no longer support amendments that seek to bind the Government to producing legislation about further reform, and I am encouraged by the idea of a Select Committee, which has become such a wide topic of discussion today.

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, I too support the idea of a Select Committee that has been proposed by the Leader of the House: I think this is a very good way forward. I therefore very much support my noble friend Lord Blencathra because, as he says, we need a way to implement the recommendations of that committee. All my experience in this House, and doubtless that of many other people too, is that the other place is extremely reluctant to embark on legislation regarding this House. I would not expect us to get the offer of another Bill for a decade or two. To give ourselves in this Bill the power to move forward seems basically sensible. If we are to have a committee, let us make it a potent committee, not an impotent one.

The noble Lord, Lord Newby, says that we can do that of our own volition. Given the difficulties that we had in having to go to primary legislation to give ourselves the right to have basic disciplinary procedures in this House, I am not aware of any evidence that we actually have the power of our own volition to change the sort of things being considered for the Select Committee. I would be very grateful if the noble Lord, Lord Newby, could outline what he thinks our powers are and on what he bases that understanding, because if indeed we have them, that would be an encouraging and simplifying approach. Depending on what the Minister says, I very much hope that my noble friend, when we come to it next week, will press his amendment to a vote.

House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill

Debate between Lord Cromwell and Lord Lucas

Committee stage
Wednesday 12th March 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Cromwell (CB)]

The rest of us are not blessed with the eloquence and wit that the noble Lord, Lord Swire, feels he has, but I think he has missed the point of my amendment and that, as a Committee, we are now trying to do all the detail on the Floor of the House. That is impossible. My amendment tries to establish that after this Bill a system is put in place to define these issues, to which we can all contribute usefully and sensibly—or foolishly, as we wish. That is the way to take this forward, not putting it into the Bill in detail. We need a system for the Government to show a bit of an ankle here and show us that they are really going to do this by putting this amendment into the Bill, not trying to work out the minutiae of percentages here. That is completely pointless.

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

I have Amendment 40 in this group. I find myself very much in agreement with the noble Lord, Lord Cromwell, which is a travesty of history. My route forward would be by Amendment 32, because I think it leaves the initiative much more with this House than with the Government. I would say, if the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Sentamu, were in his place, that St Matthew recorded some excellent advice about getting to grips with your adversary as soon as possible as the best way to deal with something. I think it is rather more likely that the next four and a half years will see the second coming of our Lord than a second Bill on the House of Lords, so to have something like Amendment 32 would be a great advantage.

The thing that unites us all is a determination to improve the way this House serves the public. There are many aspects in which we can work on this. The amendments we have in front of us are restricted by the nature of the Bill, but I absolutely think that this is the right moment to bring them forward and discuss them.

In my years in the House, I can remember one occasion when a Starred Question made a difference to government policy, which was when the Government were asked what their plans were to celebrate the 50th anniversary of El Alamein, in 1992. The answer was, “There are no such plans; it is the Germans’ turn to celebrate anniversaries this year”. With a House full of veterans, that led to a fairly rapid reverse of policy. I cannot recall one since. Much as we enjoy Questions, I think we should be much more critical about whether what we are doing actually has a function. I believe we should commission outside research, be self-critical, try to self-improve as a House and find ways of doing better.

When it comes to looking at our expectations of participation, I very much understand what the noble Earl, Lord Erroll, and my noble friend Lord Attlee were saying. There are many ways in which this happens. The form in proposed new Section 2A(1) in my amendment, asking people to sign a declaration to, as it were, say on their honour that they are participating fully in the business of the House, may be a good way forward. What the noble Lord, Lord Desai, suggests as a way of measuring that is certainly something to explore. We could also explore following the advice of Elon Musk and each week writing a postcard to the leader of our groups naming five achievements. I think that would put some of us on the spot.

In thinking about the worthwhile work this House does, we should focus on committees in all their various forms. That is where I have seen most value delivered and, in terms of what my noble friend Lord Norton says about fitting our membership to our function, that is very much the direction in which we should be trying to go.

House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill

Debate between Lord Cromwell and Lord Lucas

Committee stage
Monday 3rd March 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, I am very grateful to all who have spoken, and particularly my noble friend Lord Trenchard for his amendment, which is a very useful contribution to considering how to take this idea forward. I think my noble friend Lord Strathcarron is quite right that the elections process produces candidates who have staying power and determination over time, bringing us closer to democracy—not a huge amount closer to democracy, but at least it is a move in the right direction. I share the wish of my noble friend Lord Moylan to be much more radical in that. However, nothing in my experience of the House suggests that we will get there. It never seems to appeal to our colleagues down the other end.

As to the noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire, asking whether we would vote for a ballerina, the noble Lord needs to look at the background of the hereditary Peers that we have elected. We have artists, we have film producers and we have a number of other people whose hearts are very much in the arts. There is a notorious propensity for hereditary Peers to marry ballerinas, so I do not believe that there is any prejudice inherent in us against that particular profession.

[Lord Cromwell (CB)]

Apart from my curiosity about the noble Lord’s earlier remark about hairdressers, I cannot resist pointing out that my great-great-grandmother was in the Ballets Russes.

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

There we have it, and a very fine great-great-grandchild she has, too.

I am grateful for the support from my noble friends Lord Murray of Blidworth and Lord Strathclyde, who quite rightly said that, if we are to believe that the Government as a whole, as opposed to any individual, are actually determined on giving us another House of Lords Bill within this Parliament or the next, a Green Paper would be the least of our expectations. Get the proposals out there for discussion. Let us get this process on the road. Without that, all history says that this will run into the sand. Those who, like me, have tried through Governments of both colours to move changes to this House and have never succeeded know just how hard it is. It really is extremely difficult to get the machinery of government to spend time contemplating what should be done with the House of Lords.