Japanese Knotweed

Lord Greaves Excerpts

Tuesday 7th November 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Greaves (LD)]

My Lords, I pay tribute yet again to the noble Baroness, Lady Sharples, for her persistence in this matter. I am very sorry she cannot be here today and, if she is poorly, I hope she gets better as quickly as possible. The Minister referred to a two-pronged approach but over the years the Government have put too much hope on the prospect of armies of jumping psyllids crossing the land, chewing the knotweed in their path and getting rid of it. That will not be the answer, not for a long time at least. Is not the answer in the short run the work of local action groups, local authorities and others, to which the Minister referred? Is it not the case that the Government ought to be giving a lot more strong advice to local authorities to get on with it, because this stuff can and ought to be removed?

[Lord Gardiner of Kimble]

There are good examples of where local action groups have worked effectively and eradicated Japanese knotweed. In Defra we have an official who is co-ordinating the work of the local action groups. I very much endorse their work and think it is the way forward. However, research shows that we should be looking for a more robust psyllid. We have released in 16 sites this year 120,000 psyllids and I hope we will see some progress in that regard.

Brexit: Non-chemical Farming Methods

Lord Greaves Excerpts

Monday 6th November 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Gardiner of Kimble]

My Lords, on the issue of yields, the use of pesticides is precisely to protect crops and grassland. Obviously, we need to use them carefully and have them well regulated. Without pesticides, undoubtedly yields would be reduced. The most important thing is that there is active co-operation on this now: 4.4 million hectares of land are involved in the voluntary initiative and the integrated pest management situation. All of that is strong news.

[Lord Greaves (LD)]

My Lords, the comprehensive codes of practice issued by the department and Natural England include advice on how to deal with rights of way and other areas for public access in places that are treated with pesticides. Do the Government have any hard evidence on how effective those codes of guidance are in relation to recreational users of the countryside?

Agriculture, Fisheries and the Rural Environment

Lord Greaves Excerpts

Thursday 2nd November 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Greaves (LD)]

My Lords, I was thinking about the noble Lord, Lord Plumb, and I realised that in all the time I have been here—which is not as long as he has been here, but seems a long time—he has, if he does not mind me using the analogy, seemed like part of the furniture. Without him, your Lordships’ House will feel a little bit emptier.

I will speak briefly about the rural economy, particularly the contribution of outdoor recreation, which is an important part of it. Various noble Lords hinted at what is too often an apparent conflict between landowners and farmers, and people using the countryside for recreation, education and so on. An important part of any new system that will come in is to work actively and deliberately towards reconciliation and people working together, because the countryside belongs to everyone in the country, not just the people who own and farm it. Both sides need to understand that. It is a national resource, but at the same time it is there to allow farmers to undertake their livelihood and produce food for us. The noble Lord, Lord Cameron of Dillington, said in his very sensible speech that any policy must include agriculture, the environment and local communities, but it has to be done in a way that brings together the outsiders who use the countryside and the people who live there. This is important because of the contribution to local economies made by visitors, particularly people engaging in outdoor education.

Walkers are Welcome is an organisation that is now 10 years old. It was formed in Hebden Bridge, where a lot of good things used to happen. It has just produced a 10-year national survey of all the work it does to promote local walking in conjunction with local businesses. A very interesting report this year from Manchester Metropolitan University on behalf of the Sport and Recreation Alliance called Reconomics Plus sets out a large number of the benefits of people visiting the countryside. What the noble Earl just said about the need to educate the overwhelming number of people and children growing up in urban areas is vital. We all know the stories about people who, when asked where milk comes from, say it is from the supermarket.

One of the important things groups such as Walkers are Welcome are doing is spreading the load, because no doubt there are problems in some places that are honeypots, where the number of visitors is great. As the noble Lord, Lord Plumb, will remember when we did the marine Bill, I am a great supporter of coastal access and the coastal path. I went to Dorset last year to Lulworth Cove and saw the wonderful, newly built coastal path there. The queue of people walking up it was like an old-fashioned queue outside a cinema or a football ground. It was quite extraordinary. I thought, “Is this really what we want?”. Of course it is not. We want to spread the load and spread the visitors around.

A very interesting submission has just been made by an alliance of the British Horse Society, the Byways and Bridleways Trust, the Open Spaces Society—I declare an interest as a vice-president—and the Ramblers on how public access can be improved post Brexit. If and when Brexit occurs—even if it does not—this is vital work. These proposals suggest that an opportunity is here for,

“model funding schemes for agriculture to ensure that public money achieves maximum public benefit and promotes public wellbeing”.

It is talking about people walking on footpaths and on access land. It says:

“Public benefit should include public access, whether by paths or open access to land (freedom to roam), because such assets support local economies, and improve people’s health, wellbeing and safety”.


They are also one of the very important ways in which diversification of local businesses and farming businesses can be brought about. There needs to be a great deal more work to bring people together, rather than trying to keep them apart.

Brexit: Agriculture and Farm Animal Welfare (European Union Committee Report)

Lord Greaves Excerpts

Tuesday 17th October 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Greaves (LD)]

My Lords, there were a lot of wise words there from the noble Earl. This is a really good report and I congratulate my noble friend and his committee on producing it, and I associate myself with a lot of what has been said today, particularly the excellent speeches by noble friend Lady Miller and the noble Lords, Lord Wigley and Lord Whitty.

The report is amazingly topical. That it is topical five months after it has been produced is a sign that nothing very much has happened. After the initial speech by my noble friend Lord Teverson, we heard an interesting speech from the noble Lord, Lord Jopling, with whose conclusions I agree. However, in the course of it, he attacked the repeal of the corn laws and I thought, “Only in your Lordships’ House could the repeal of the corn laws still be an issue for debate and discussion”. As the noble Lord said, it was wrong then and wrong now to remove the tariffs; I would say that it was right then and wrong now. It was right then because Britain controlled farming policy not only in this country but in all parts of the British Empire, which were the great wheat-growing lands, and it controlled much of world trade. The world has changed since then.

Many noble Lords have pointed out defects in the common agricultural policy—indeed, there are many—but the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, reminded us of the way in which the underlying purposes of the CAP have evolved over a period of time. When it was set up so many years ago, its purpose was essentially food security: to make sure that the then six members of the Common Market had security over their own basic food supplies—this was just after the war, when there was great insecurity around. In that, there is no doubt that it has been outstandingly successful. As the years have gone by, many of the other things that it has evolved and the ways in which it has supported agriculture have changed, from tariffs and intervention payments to maintain prices, through to direct payments, through to the present system of area payments—where basically farms are paid for being a farm and for being a certain size, whatever they do on that farm—together with Pillar 2, which has not used as much money as Pillar 1 by any means, but has evolved in ways which have enhanced local environments and rural development. I do not believe that without the CAP those policies would have been introduced into this country.

What do the Government want? In this week’s Farmers Guardian I came across a statement by a Defra spokesman. I will read it out because it includes all the contradictions and the lack of clarity which underlie the present position. It says:

“Outside the EU and free from the bureaucracy of the Common Agricultural Policy our farmers will be able to focus on growing, selling and exporting more fantastic produce. We are determined to get the best deal, one that allows us to continue to have tariff-free, frictionless access to the EU market and we will strike new trade deals around the world to help farmers take advantage of the growing appetite for great British food”;


in other words, every possible advantage of every possible system and every possible circumstance. The fact is that completely frictionless access to the EU market, which we have now because we are in the customs union as part of the single market, is incompatible with regulation-free operations. The European Union is simply not going to agree—whether or not the talks get that far—to frictionless access to the market unless this country accepts most of the rules and regulations that operate within the existing CAP and single market. We will have to obey the rules and will have no say in what they are. That is a fact that this Government do not seem to understand.

I just want to say something about food security and the very learned comments made by the Transport Secretary on television on Sunday that all we have to do is grow more food in this country. I do not think we need to grow more food. We might need to grow better food and different food but what we need to do is stop wasting so much food. About half the food grown in this country is not eaten. It is ploughed back because the market has failed; it is rejected by the supermarkets because it is not the right shape and colour; it is left unsold in supermarkets and thrown away; and huge amounts of it are bought and thrown away. If only people would really tackle that problem, it would transform the food market and answer a lot of the problems.

Ask farmers what they think about government policy at the moment and they will say, “They do not know what they want, they do not know what they are doing and they do not know where they are going”. A decision has to be made. The Government have to decide: do they want full, frictionless access to European markets and to remain a member of the biggest free trading area on the planet, with all the advantages of that, or are they going to throw all that away and go for the unknown?

Flood Defences

Lord Greaves Excerpts

Thursday 1st December 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Gardiner of Kimble]

My Lords, perhaps I should say to the noble Baroness that, in fact, Flood Re does include leaseholders for up to three flats and contents insurance, but above three flats it becomes a commercial policy. So in point of fact there are permutations to the scheme. I want to emphasise that Flood Re is an industry-owned and managed not-for-profit reinsurer; it pools the risk of flood claims and is targeted, with a subsidy, to lower-income households.

[Lord Greaves (LD)]

My Lords—

[Lord Campbell-Savours (Lab)]

My Lords—

[Baroness Evans of Bowes Park]

My Lords, it is the turn of the Liberal Democrat Benches.

[Lord Greaves]

I am grateful. Last February, £450,000 was allocated to a vital scheme to improve a culvert, called Victoria Clough, in the small town of Earby on the boundaries of Lancashire and Yorkshire, but nothing has yet happened. Is there a problem of capacity or resource constraints in getting the schemes going in Defra, the Environment Agency or anywhere else? If there is, would it not be sensible to let a competent local authority take it over?

[Lord Gardiner of Kimble]

I think that I had better look into the individual case that the noble Lord has referred to and come back to him. Generally speaking, we are confident that this £2.5 billion allocated to Defra over six years is going to make a very substantial difference, but we need continually to review the situation.

Rural Bus Services

Lord Greaves Excerpts

Thursday 24th November 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Greaves (LD)]

My Lords, I too thank the right reverend Prelate for introducing this debate. The first point I want to make is one I often make: rural areas do not exist in isolation; they exist as part of an area that includes their local market and small towns, and the two are very often closely interlinked. We hear an increasingly large amount about big cities and city regions, and people talk about the more sparsely populated rural areas. The area I live in, in east Lancashire, is typical of a great deal of England: it consists of a mixture of small and medium-sized towns and the villages and rural areas that surround them. The two are closely interlinked, not least in the case of bus services.

Very often, the bus services that serve the villages are actually town-to-town bus services, which would not exist if there was not the trade from the towns. One of those, which we fought hard to maintain in the spring of this year when Lancashire County Council was discussing proposals to stop all subsidies to bus services, which I think were about £8 million in total, is the 65 bus. It runs from Burnley through the small town of Padiham, through the Pendle villages of Higham and Fence, and then through to Barrowford and Nelson, which is another small or medium-sized town. It provides services round the back streets and estates of Burnley, and then goes into the countryside and provides essential services for these villages. I have to report that the county council—the Labour county council, I regret to say—for Burnley Central West, which covers part of that area in Burnley, wrote on Facebook, when we were campaigning to save this service:

“Yes, our Liberal Democrat partners did betray us in saving our most vulnerable elderly for the sake of a few bus routes. May they rot in hell forever”.

I think he was referring to the Liberal Democrats rather than the vulnerable elderly. I am pleased to say that we did save the service. Whether we will rot in hell for ever afterwards, I do not know. Perhaps I will need to take advice from the right reverend Prelate on rather more than bus services after this debate.

The right reverend Prelate and other speakers, including my noble friend Lady Scott, are right that the heart of this issue is not the question of rural services but of all services and the funding of local authorities. Most of the cuts in bus services, according to the Government’s statistics, have been in subsidised services. It will happen again in the budgets for Lancashire this year and next year. It is not possible for local authorities to continue to fund everything they do if their budgets are being cut by millions and millions of pounds. In Lancashire it is something like one-third of a billion over three or four years. If those cuts have to be imposed it will be impossible to maintain those services.

The basic message for the Government from this and many other debates is that local authorities have come to the end of the road of what they can subsidise and pay for that are not statutory services. There is no hope for subsidised services, whether or not the new Bus Services Bill comes through, unless the Government are prepared to fund local authorities in a more reasonable and practical way than they are proposing to do.

Footpaths

Lord Greaves Excerpts

Thursday 17th November 2016 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Lord Greaves]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government, in the light of the results of the survey published by the Ramblers on 14 November, what steps they are taking to ensure that the footpath network is well kept and available for public use.

[Lord Greaves (LD)]

My Lords, I beg leave to ask the Question standing in my name on the Order Paper and I remind the House of my interests as set out in the register.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Lord Gardiner of Kimble) (Con)]

My Lords, responsibility for the management and maintenance of the 118,000 miles of public rights of way in England lies with local authorities. The Government have allocated central funds for the establishment of the 2,700-mile England Coast Path. We have also provided funding for the maintenance of national trails and national parks where the Ramblers’ survey recognises that rights of way are in a better condition than elsewhere in the country.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Greaves]

My Lords, we undoubtedly have the best network of footpaths in the countryside of any country in the world. Does the Minister agree that the work of all the volunteers for the Ramblers on the Big Pathwatch campaign and survey has been extremely valuable? However, the survey showed that one-third of the network was in need of improvement and that 10% of the footpaths surveyed were impossible to use because of barbed wire, obstructions, locked gates—

[Lord Foulkes of Cumnock (Lab)]

Japanese knotweed.

[Lord Greaves]

I am not sure about Japanese knotweed on public footpaths, although no doubt Ramblers will report it if it is there. I am not sure that I am supposed to take interventions on Questions, either.

Also, there are issues with signposts that either do not exist or point in the wrong direction, as well as paths that become quagmires. The footpath network is resilient but there are increasing signs of problems in many areas. What are the Government doing about it?

[Lord Gardiner of Kimble]

My Lords, first I acknowledge the tenacity of the noble Lord on this matter and on the matter of Japanese knotweed; I very much enjoy our exchanges. I acknowledge the work of Ramblers and all its volunteers. This excellent report says that nowhere is the network broken and that problems are highly localised. In fact, 91% of paths are “adequately”—some requiring improvement—or “well” kept. I will be in touch with the chief executive of Ramblers, Vanessa Griffiths, because I want to explore with her where the 9% of paths are that are poorly kept, and why.

Japanese Knotweed

Lord Greaves Excerpts

Monday 7th November 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Gardiner of Kimble]

My Lords, first, I acknowledge my noble friend’s tenacity in seeking to deal with this brute of a plant. On mortgages, the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors published an information paper only last year that aims to help valuers and mortgage lenders better understand the implications of this plant for residential properties. We anticipate that this will lead to a more pragmatic approach between all parties in dealing with it. On what my noble friend said about the tragedy, this invasive species of plant is of great concern and we need to deal with it where we can.

[Lord Greaves (LD)]

My Lords, while the Minister’s work with the psyllid, the jumping plant louse, gets going, will he encourage local action groups around the country to tackle this dreadful plant in the ways it can already be tackled—though that needs a lot of work? Is he aware of the good work being done in my own borough of Pendle by an organisation called the Environmental Action Group? It employs young people who might otherwise have difficulty getting jobs, trains them and does good local environmental work. Along with the Ribble Rivers Trust, it has set about the task of eliminating Japanese knotweed from our borough.

[Lord Gardiner of Kimble]

My Lords, I certainly acknowledge what is happening in the noble Lord’s part of the world and I am well aware of the group in Pendle. Many local action groups are working to treat this problem and there is very good national coverage. As examples of where, with tenacity, we can deal with this, the Norfolk local action group eradicated all Japanese knotweed on the River Wensum special area of conservation, while in Bristol Japanese knotweed on all publicly owned land is now 95% under management. There are a number of good stories to tell. My view is that wherever people are determined to deal with this, it can be dealt with.

Air Quality

Lord Greaves Excerpts

Thursday 3rd November 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Gardiner of Kimble]

Obviously, we will have to look at diesel. As I mentioned earlier, the updates we received on emissions at the end of September mean that we are going to be looking at this area very carefully indeed. The most important thing is that we wish to target our work at the oldest and most polluting vehicles. We have been working on that with the five cities, but many other cities will be working on it and we need to work together because we need to get it right this time. I assure your Lordships that the department and its officials want to make this a lasting settlement on this issue.

[Lord Greaves (LD)]

My Lords, local authorities throughout the country have a duty to test pollution levels—for example, on main roads passing through their towns—and they can declare zones where the air quality is not high enough, yet they have no real powers to do anything about it. What is the purpose of this exercise?

[Lord Gardiner of Kimble]

My Lords, my understanding of the Transport Act 2000 is that local authorities do have the powers. Referring to the question of the noble Lord, Lord Whitty—which I should have answered more fully—we believe that there are existing powers for local authorities to set up clean air zones. The ability of charging authorities to introduce a clean air zone was clearly set out in the Transport Act 2000.

Forest Holidays: Forestry Commission Stake

Lord Greaves Excerpts

Tuesday 17th March 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord De Mauley]

My Lords, although that is slightly wide of the Question, I think I can none the less confirm what the noble Lord says.

[Lord Greaves (LD)]

My Lords, when this Question was first put down, I had no idea what Forest Holidays was, but I have been looking into it, and the more I do so, the murkier the whole business seems. It appears that, since the framework agreement in 2012 and the new joint venture companies having been set up, pieces of the forestry estate have effectively been handed to venture capitalists to pursue log cabin developments. The questions that need to be asked are: first, are the public getting value for money for that through the forestry commissioners? There are arguments that they are not. Secondly, is it true that the forestry commissioners are not exercising their powers effectively over such developments? Thirdly, how far will this go? Is it the intention that Forest Holidays will expand substantially, using cheap Forestry Commission land and taking over some of the national forestry estate for its purposes?

[Lord De Mauley]

My Lords, as I said, I discussed this matter this morning with the chairman of the Forestry Commission. As he said, the reality is that only a limited number of sites are available within the public forest estate, principally because much of the land is either ancient woodland or SSSI or protected in some other way.