Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill

Debate between Lord Lucas and Earl of Caithness

Report stage
Tuesday 18th July 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

No. I have a lengthy speech, possibly of a couple of hours, to make.

I have considerable sympathy for all these amendments, but I am not committed to their wording. What is evident is that the national parks are in no state to contribute to 30 by 30 in the way they should, and something needs to be done. As the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Whitchurch, knows from her involvement with the South Downs that I live adjacent to, something needs to be done to make it possible for the national parks and areas of outstanding natural beauty to become a beacon for 30 by 30 and contribute their weight to that. But part of that is my noble friend’s emphasis on commerce.

The reason why our local big SSSI consists of waist-high brambles is that there is no income. There is no money coming into the area to deal with what is going on. It is really important that at the same time as dealing with nature conservation, we deal with providing the means for that—and that cannot be just endless subsidy from the Government. These places ought to become self-sustaining, particularly with regard to subsection (1)(e) of the proposed new clause in Amendment 139, which quite rightly points out that we want people to use these spaces a lot more. If they are using these spaces, which immediately generates cost for the owners and concern for the wildlife, we need them to do it in a way which generates income so that we can offset those things.

I am in no way committed to the route which these amendments take, but the matters they raise are important. The one bit that requires specific engagement is subsection (5) in Amendment 139. It is clear that other bodies are not contributing to the purposes of national parks and AONBs in the way that they should be and that the current regulations do not allow that, so some change of wording is required. I do not go as far, perhaps, as the noble Baroness, Lady Willis, would wish and am very happy to listen to what the Government’s plans are. However, it is really important that the Government address the concerns raised by this group of amendments, and address them well.

[The Earl of Caithness (Con)]

My Lords, what my noble friend has said is absolutely right; he has said much of what I was going to say. I want to raise one point about what the noble Baroness, Lady Willis of Summertown, said. It is a point that we ought to consider. She said that some species are thriving better outside national parks than inside them. As I said at great length on the Environment Bill and the Agriculture Bill, the management system is absolutely crucial. You can have whatever targets or designations you want on our land, but it is the management system within and on that land that will provide the right answer.

There is no doubt that, in the national parks, we can continue to produce food which we need for an expanding population. We can make them more productive and improve biodiversity. But having served on the Rural Economy Committee in your Lordships’ House, I know what a small proportion of the whole rural economy farming is, although it is still the backbone of it. Like my noble friend Lord Lucas, I have sympathy with all three amendments. I am not wedded to their wording but hope that my noble friend the Minister will be able to come forward, as he did with our amendment on water, with wording that captures everything we all want but in the right format to make the Bill a better one, and to make our national parks and AONBs the places we would like them to be—but also living communities and not just set in aspic.

Environment Bill

Debate between Lord Lucas and Earl of Caithness

Committee stage
Wednesday 7th July 2021 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Caithness (Con)]

My Lords, I listened with care to what the two noble Baronesses have said, and I support their arguments. They made some very valid points.

I am speaking to my two amendments in this grouping. Amendment 210A simply requires that Natural England has particular regard to nature-friendly farming. It has to

“have regard to … local nature recovery strategy, and … any relevant species conservation strategy or protected site strategy prepared by Natural England.”

One thing that has been missing in a lot of our debate over six days is the role of the human being in all this. We have talked a lot about biodiversity and what we can do to increase it, but what matters just as much is the role of the farmer and the landowner, because they are going to implement the policy. I was thrilled when my noble friend Lord Goldsmith, said on the amendment we have just discussed on biodiversity net gain, words to the effect of: “We are able to farm in a nature-friendly way.” I thought: “Good. My noble friend and I are on the right track together.” It is hugely important.

At the moment there is a Nature Friendly Farming Network that thousands of farmers have joined; it is doing tremendously good work for the environment at very little extra cost to the taxpayer—and sometimes at a cost to their own pockets. These are exactly the sort of people we need to encourage. The farmers are not particularly pleased with this Government at the moment. There is far too much uncertainty and change and, as we all know, the age of the average farmer is so high that they are finding it hard to adapt to all the pressures. I was really pleased by what my noble friend said, and I hope he will consider the amendment about biodiversity. The Bill cannot just be seen in isolation. We have to involve the human being—the farmer and the landowner. They are the people who will alter things on the ground.

Besides the Nature Friendly Farming Network, there is of course the Game & Wildlife Conservation Trust. We often talk about the UK being a world leader. We have on our own shores a world leader in this organisation. It has demonstration farms in Scotland and England, and has farmed for biodiversity for many years. It advises individual farmers and clusters of farmers, and does an awful lot of work for Defra. I urge my noble friend to visit its Allerton project. He and I have spoken about this before. The work and scientific research it does are so important. We cannot now take for granted everything I learned when I was a boy and a young man, working on the farms and the land. To convince the rest of the country, we have to have it scientifically proven. This is what the Game & Wildlife Conservation Trust has been doing so well. I hope that my noble friend, besides talking to us, will spare time between now and the next stage to visit it in Leicestershire. It would be an easy half day for him, and I think it would be very beneficial.

I turn now to Amendment 293, to which I am a signatory. It is in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Young of Old Scone, and is on a subject that both she and I have been going on about for quite a long time: the land use strategy for England. Perhaps we need no better excuse for introducing this amendment than what the noble Baroness, Lady Parminter, said about Horsham District Council and the problems it faces. I have said it before, and I will just briefly repeat myself: the Climate Change Committee reckons that we will have to transfer about 21% of our agricultural land out of farming. To feed ourselves, we will have to increase productivity by 10%. We all know that productivity has been flatlining in agriculture for many years, so this is going to be a hugely serious problem to try to tackle.

The noble Baroness, Lady Young of Old Scone, will wax much more lyrical than I will on this, so I will not say very much except that it is again about the human input into this. There are so many pressures now on the countryside: the building of new railways, new developments and housing schemes and, I repeat yet again, the threatened planning Bill, which is coming our way next year. That frightens me because it will undo quite a lot of the good in this Bill and in our climate change agenda. We will have to support these farmers and accept that they have got to increase their productivity.

We have talked about land being lost for biodiversity net gain. That is another pressure on the countryside. Surely, it is high time that England followed the lead of the other countries in the UK—Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland—in producing a plan of how it will use the land. It is the only way that we will make progress in a sensible way without having constant fights at all levels. We need a strategy from the Government: should we actually be farming our grade 1 Lincolnshire fen farms, which we are told have very few harvests left? Every time they are farmed, they are perhaps one of the greatest emitters of carbon in the agricultural sector. It is a terrible thought that our grade 1 land might not be farmable or should not be farmed, but we need to address that now before it is too late. I therefore give my full support to the noble Baroness, Lady Young of Old Scone, to get a land use strategy for England.

[Lord Lucas (Con) [V]]

My Lords, I am delighted to be part of this group and to be supporting the noble Baroness, Lady Parminter, in her Amendment 209. If we are to have nature recovery strategies, they have to be followed. I touched on this in a previous group in relation to biodiversity gain and planning consents. If that great source of nature improvement is done willy-nilly, with no reference at all to the nature recovery strategy, what is the point of the nature recovery strategy? This is one of the main ways in which things are going to improve. Why is it disconnected? Amendment 209 from the noble Baroness would reconnect it and other things in a most useful way.

My own amendments in this group are aimed at seeking remedies to things which seem to me, from my experience locally, not to be working as well as they might be and which could be made to work better, under the structures proposed in this Bill, with a bit of additional power. First, I observe that, within the land owned by the local council, there are substantial SSSIs which are supposed to be chalk downland and which are actually largely bramble. How has that come about? I think it has come about because the negotiations on what should be done are conducted between a council that is extremely willing but short of money and Natural England, which understands that and does not see the purpose of pushing a long-term relationship harder than it reasonably can. The net result is that things go gently backwards.

Agriculture Bill

Debate between Lord Lucas and Earl of Caithness

Report stage & Report stage (Hansard): House of Lords & Report: 1st sitting & Report: 1st sitting: House of Lords
Tuesday 15th September 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lucas (Con) [V]]

My Lords, I am very grateful to my noble friend the Minister for his responses to my amendments in Committee, and for his kind words in the last group. I am equally grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Grantchester, for bringing back this subject and for his equally kind words.

To my mind, this matter of advice is absolutely at the core of what is needed in the new system. We need it to be advice based, not rule based. We need it to have expertise, to be capable of being local and to be trusted. The adviser corps needs to be trusted by both Government and by farmers. We need to run the system so that it is objective based, not action based.

For instance, one of the objectives local to me should be restoring chalk grassland. No one has any real idea how to do that successfully in a modern agricultural system; we will have to try lots of different things, and a lot of people are going to fail. They need to be supported in that failure, and we need a system that helps us as a nation to learn from that failure and take people forward. That is what an advice-based system should be doing. It is a learning system, not a static system from some tablets of stone handed down but a system that learns from everything that is going on around the country and shares that learning. It is not centralised; centralised is utterly impossible, given the variety of the countryside and different agricultural situations.

We have had enough centralisation. I do not want the Environment Agency letting the Cuckmere flood disastrously because it is too small for it to be bothered with. I want once again to have curlews in the middle of Eastbourne—to have a local solution and not one imposed by the Environment Agency, such as what the water levels should be in the Langney Sewer, which, despite its name, is a pure chalk stream. I want the system to let us have a go at doing things differently—for instance, to have grass sledging on sheep walks. We need to have some way in which to raise money from our countryside to restore our SSSIs. Our local SSSIs are going back to bramble and scrub. We do not have the finance to bring them back as they should be—we need some greater way in which to earn money from the chalk uplands. We need to experiment and try things, and we need an environment where that is encouraged and supported. Trust, support and advice is what I hope we will get from the new system.

[The Earl of Caithness (Con)]

My Lords, I am very pleased to be able to put my name to the amendment moved by the noble Lord, Lord Grantchester, which we discussed in Committee. At Second Reading, I spent my allotted three minutes, or whatever I was allowed, talking about training. It is absolutely crucial; farmers are individuals and do not work in a uniform way, as businesses do in factories and offices. Soil varies across farms and varies over short spaces; what one farmer is doing in one place could be totally different from what another farmer is doing 200 yards away or half a mile away, where the soil, the criteria and the weather conditions are slightly different, because the soil is a bit colder in the spring. It makes farming a very localised and specialised industry. Also, farmers vary hugely, from those who have large estates with a large amount of land in hand to small farmers who are just managing to get by on almost a crofting basis. These are very different individuals, who will need help with these changes.

At the moment, we are talking in a slight bubble, because everything is going quite well. The Minister is having a peaceful time in introducing this Bill, but what happens when we start to get trade deals that start to cause problems with imports that are not up to our standards? What happens with the EU? Increasingly, I am concerned about its threats and actions with regard to farming in Northern Ireland and fishing. What happens when it takes retaliatory action that affects our farmers and fishermen? These people are going to need help and advice from the Government about how to be able to compete. It would be a very different climate in which we are discussing this Bill if it was in three months’ time when we were actually out of the EU and the EU had taken some of the measures that it has already threatened that it is going to take.

My noble friend and his department will have to respond very quickly to that—otherwise, in the famous words of the president of the NFU, Minette Batters, it will be game over for British farming. That is something that none of us who have been discussing this Bill in this House want. Without an amendment like this, or complete reassurance from my noble friend, it has to be put into the Bill to protect farming.

Agriculture Bill

Debate between Lord Lucas and Earl of Caithness

Committee stage & Committee: 3rd sitting (Hansard) & Committee: 3rd sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Tuesday 14th July 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lucas [V]]

My Lords, in moving Amendment 58 I shall speak also to my other amendments in this group. There are two basic ways of managing the flow of funding under the Bill: through penalties or through encouragement and advice. I hope that the Government’s intention is to focus on incentives—broad-brush, bottom-up, banded, with plenty of room for local initiatives and a clear understanding that initiatives will often fail—rather than opting for top-down micromanagement. I hope that the Government will institute a strong supply of advice and the funding for it, so that good practice and ideas find it easy to spread, rather than relying on audit and enforcement.

The management of chalk grasslands is a challenge local to me. These are a potentially immensely rich, if sometimes rather small, environment. They were created by a pattern of agriculture that has gone: cattle and sheep herded in large open areas, then folded in the lowlands at night, with a plentiful supply of shepherds and rabbits to keep the scrub from spreading. That has all gone, but we still want the chalklands ecosystem. It is the principal objective of the South Downs National Park.

We have to take the overloaded pastures that have resulted from wartime needs and subsequent agricultural policies, with lots of parasites and consequence high use of biocides, and end up with fields full of insects and wildlife, and a profit for the farmer. We have to find ways to allow the public to enjoy the results of the system that we create; to allow larks to nest undisturbed and people to listen to them; to have fields full of orchids that people can picnic in; and to combine dog walkers and sheep, and old ladies enjoying the outdoors and a herd of bouncy cattle.

Finding a way to do that will take lots of experimentation and there will be lots of failure. Farmers will participate in this over the whole of the chalklands. We do not need, “You can have money to do this, but if you don’t succeed, we’ll be after you”; we do need lots of advice, recording and sharing of data, experimentation and supported failure. That is expensive. The Government would have to fund a team of people over decades. To hazard an estimate, £10 million a year might be the basic level for 200 field staff. However, that £10 million would multiply the benefit of the hundreds of millions being spent elsewhere, because it would make that larger expenditure much better focused and better directed. It would also set the tone of the whole agricultural support system and make it a pleasure to interact with, since it would look for ways to make better things happen. That would make a huge difference to compliance and effectiveness in a fragmented industry.

Of my three amendments, Amendment 135 is key. That is the one I want the Government to get behind.

[The Earl of Caithness [V]]

My Lords, I am delighted to support my noble friend Lord Lucas. I have put my name to Amendments 58 and 119. The Minister will recall that I majored on the whole question of advice in my Second Reading speech. I dedicated all my time to it because I think it is so important.

Farming has been partially insulated from market pressures by the support schemes of the CAP. In particular, the area payments developed by the CAP since 1992 and subsequent steps in 2003 and 2013 have acted to reward land occupation, not business activity. This has been associated with reduced flexibility in land occupation markets, and thus with the relative weakness in the United Kingdom’s agricultural productivity growth.

The progressive removal of area payments and the prospect of more open trading agreements seem likely to drive an accelerated process of change in who is farming what land and how, by both unwinding the protectionist effects of past area payments and responding to the coming changes. This might affect poorer businesses on more marginal land in particular, whether cropping or livestock. My concern is that this process of change should be managed to maximise its economic, environmental and social benefits, while minimising costs.

Farming’s adaptation to the new policy and business environment will not be a simple and swift transformation, but will take much time and effort. The scale of the challenges and the changes associated with them should not be underestimated. Success will require attention to skills and training, investment, approaches to sustained innovation in business policy, technology and marketing. It will be all the better if this is enabled by a new positive regulatory regime after Brexit, ensuring flexible and open markets in land occupation and use. All this must be supported by effective and practical advice and facilitation.

The outcome will be a much less standardised industry than the one we created since the war through policies before and under the CAP, which were largely dedicated to full-time commodity protection. Achieving this will be a major call on all those involved, not only Governments and farmers.