Planning and Infrastructure Bill

Debate between Lord Lucas and Lord Blencathra

Committee stage
Wednesday 17th September 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, I have the last amendment in this group. I very much support my noble friend Lady Coffey on her ponds amendment. We are short of ponds in the landscape, generally, and they should not be hard to create. I like the idea of wild belt, but I am not convinced that we can compel anyone to create a natural environment in this country. We lack the natural systems that would maintain a natural environment. Anything in this country has to be managed, but to have places set aside for nature and properly managed seems a much better concept than a green belt. It is much easier for people to enjoy and much easier to look after.

My amendment says that we should recognise that construction and demolition activities cause disruption to nature, much as we recognise that wildlife can cause disruption to growing crops. The Government have recognised this in relation to wind farms; they accept the damage to wildlife that wind farms cause. What we do causes damage to nature. If I was to put on my house a bird box and a bat box, there would not be a single month in the year when I could repaint my house without some risk of disturbing wildlife. We need to take a realistic attitude to this, which I hope is what my amendment does.

[Lord Blencathra (Con)]

My Lords, I rise to address the amendments in this group. There are some important amendments here, some that raise interesting concepts and some that are apparently sexy but may be difficult to implement. Biodiversity is vital to preserving our ecosystems, which in turn provide clean air, water and food. It holds significant cultural, aesthetic and economic value, supporting industries such as tourism and agriculture. I thank my noble friend Lady Coffey for moving the amendment in the name of my noble friend Lord Grayling concerning biodiversity.

Amendment 335 seeks to ensure that a biodiversity audit is incorporated into the planning application process or application for development. I recognise the potential merit in integrating biodiversity considerations at this stage in the planning process and I keenly await the Government’s response. I agree entirely that, as far as EDPs are concerned, one must do an audit at the beginning to know what one has before one can say later whether it has improved, got worse or stayed the same—I hope that the Government will correct me if I am wrong—but I think that my noble friend’s amendment may refer generally to planning applications, where a balance has to be struck. I can see the benefit of doing an environmental audit beforehand, when it might speed things up and cost less, but doing it afterwards might also speed things up and cost less. I would like to know what the Government’s thinking is.

I understand that, before I joined Natural England, about eight years ago it reached out to HS2 and said, “We know that you’ll be doing a lot of work on the route. You may come across some biodiversity problems. Talk to us in advance and we’ll see if we can sort it out”. I understand that Natural England was told, “Pooh, pooh. We don’t need you involved in this. We know what we’re doing”. By not involving Natural England in the early planning stage, HS2 hit the bat problem, which is when it invented the £110 million tunnel. So there can be merit in getting nature bodies and the developers involved with Natural England early in the planning stage.

Amendment 336 calls for transparency in offsite biodiversity mitigation decisions. If the amendment were to pass, the Government would be required to publish a statement setting out the scientific basis for that decision. Government accountability is a principle on which Members on both sides of the Committee agree and I thank my noble friend for his contribution and my noble friend Lady Coffey for moving the amendment.

I also thank my noble friend Lady Coffey and the noble Baroness, Lady Grender, for their amendment contributions. These amendments seek to provide important protections for potential wild-belt areas and their associated ecosystems. I particularly like my noble friend’s amendment on ponds. It is an excellent idea and, if the Government do not accept it, I would like to hear a good reason why.

On heritage tree preservation orders, I can tell the Committee that on 27 September 2023 I was driving back from Newcastle along the Hadrian’s Wall road—well, my wife was driving and I was sitting in the passenger seat, giving my usual expert guidance on how to drive, as men often do. She said, “We’ve driven past this gap for years. Why don’t we go and look at it?” I said, “Well, you can go if you like. I’m not going to try to stagger up there. It’s about to rain”. That night, a few hours later, those swine cut down the tree. It grieves me that I did not try to stagger up to look at it. The Sycamore Gap tree was iconic. The word “iconic” is not in the amendment, but the tree, although it was not of cultural significance, was of iconic significance. I like the concept of the amendment. My only worry is that the definition seems rather wide and that it lands it all on Natural England, which is not geared up to do this.

If this amendment were to pass, I suspect that, within one month, Natural England would have a million letters from people saying, “You must ledger this tree, that tree and that tree”. It could not just say, “Thank you very much, it’s all in the register now”, and tick the box; it would have to investigate every single one, it would have to see whether it was genuine or not and, no doubt, there would have to be a review process, as people would demand that a tree be taken off the list or added to it. So, I like the concept and I agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Young, that something must be done, but I also agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, that we need to do it properly and find an easy way to do it that protects all the right trees, but not at a huge bureaucratic cost.

House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill

Debate between Lord Lucas and Lord Blencathra

Report stage
Wednesday 9th July 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Blencathra (Con)]

My Lords, I signed the amendment from the noble Earl, Lord Kinnoull, and I rise briefly to support him. The House may recall that in Committee I presented three options for the removal of Peers who attended infrequently, and the mood of the House seemed to coalesce around the 10% one. I say to my noble friend Lord Attlee that leave of absence should deal with the problem he has just described.

If we were not being constantly told by the Government that there are too many Peers, I might not necessarily advocate this measure. If a Peer turns up for just 5% of sittings, he is not getting an allowance for the 95% of sittings when he is not here, so there is no burden on the taxpayer. However, there is a burden on all the rest of us doing all our committee work, as we will find out when our hard-working hereditaries are removed and the Whips start calling around for volunteers to fill the slots they were previously filling. We will then realise how much our hereditaries have been doing. Of course, I think this issue will now be considered by the new Select Committee, and I look forward to seeing its conclusions.

I just want to flag up two points. First, I note that this amendment suggests amending the House of Lords Reform Act 2014. That proves the point I made to the noble Lord, Lord Newby, last week: we may need legislation to do these things, and it cannot be done just by internal Standing Orders. Secondly and finally, when the Select Committee makes recommendations on attendance, how will we pass them into law? If we cannot use Standing Orders, we have to use either primary or secondary legislation to do it. In the debate on my Amendment 23A, coming up shortly, I shall lay out a quick, simple and painless way to do it with secondary legislation; I commend it to noble Lords and hope they will all be here to support it.

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, when the noble Baroness comes to reply to this amendment, can she assure us that her new committee will look at the question that the noble Lord, Lord Newby, raised as to whether the House of Lords already has the powers to do this? As the Convenor of the Cross Benches said, we all agree to the terms of the Writ of Summons. There is a very strong argument that that inherently gives this House the power, through its Standing Orders, to achieve what this amendment sets out to achieve. It is clear that this question has never been settled or established. The noble Baroness’s committee would be an ideal forum to do that, and I very much hope that it will.

Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill

Debate between Lord Lucas and Lord Blencathra

Committee stage
Thursday 18th May 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Blencathra (Con)]

My Lords, I declare an interest as per the register. I apologise to the Committee that I have not previously participated in these proceedings, but I have been away a lot with the Council of Europe, monitoring elections in Montenegro and Bulgaria, and other places. As an aside, I must say, with Lib Dem Peers here, that Bulgaria adopted a proportional representation system. It has 14 political parties, organised into seven coalitions, and this was the fifth general election in two years we monitored, with exactly the same result as the other four. It has got a completely ungovernable country and, once again, a Government who will shortly collapse.

I say to the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett of Manor Castle, that we have 250,000 miles of footpath, and we will shortly have completed 2,000 miles of the King Charles III England Coast Path. That seems to me to be an awful lot of mileage for people to walk on, but of course there are some right to roam fanatics who want to make a political point about having the right to roam on anyone’s land. I think it is more important that we develop footpaths and make sure they are open for access by ordinary people in every part of the United Kingdom.

I really must congratulate my noble friend Lord Randall on an outstanding speech today, moving his amendment; it was highly persuasive. The current amendment is an important opportunity to further nature recovery aspirations across the 24% of England designated as national park or area of outstanding natural beauty. England’s areas of outstanding natural beauty and the national parks are even more important now as we face the climate, nature and well-being challenges of the 21st century. They are more important than when the iconic National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act was passed in 1949, as part of the World War II settlement.

I have lived in the Lake District National Park for about 20 years—just outside it now—and I can honestly say that the biodiversity of the national park is every bit as bad as some of the silage fields outside it, which are crop-bare three times a year and the hedgerows cut down to almost nothing. There is no better biodiversity in the national park. That is something which the amendment seeks to change, and I know the Government want to change it.

There is widespread recognition, including in the 2019 Landscapes Review commissioned by the Government, that aspects of the legislation need updating if our protected landscapes are to be able to rise to these 21st-century challenges and deliver the crucial benefits people and nature need. My noble friend’s amendment is a crucial opportunity to make these important changes, fulfilling the welcome intentions of the Government announced in last January’s initial response to the review. However, if the Government are minded to add a reference to nature recovery and biodiversity, it should be added, in my opinion, with equal priority to the current statutory purposes, not given primacy over the existing purposes. That is where I depart slightly from my noble friend: it should not be given priority over the other purposes but have equal weight.

I suggest also that the duty of regard placed on public bodies is strengthened and extended to encompass delivery of agreed statutory national park and AONB management plans. It is possible that a similar effect to the amendment, regarding statutory purposes, could be achieved if the Government and Defra, and my noble friend the Minister, asked Natural England, the statutory adviser on landscapes in England, to provide further advice or guidance to clarify interpretation of the current wordings, although I accept this would not give the same strength or security, or the signalling, desired by some concerned with the issue. However, I suggest that it might be an acceptable compromise if my noble friend’s amendment is not acceptable in any way to the Government. Without a slightly tweaked amendment or the compromise I have suggested, I am afraid we may miss the opportunity to build in appropriate and more effective tools to protect these landscapes at this critical time.

In my final comment, I say to my noble friend Lord Hodgson that I live near the A66 and, if I had known he was coming, I would have invited him in for a glass or two of Highland Park. I would hope that, after a few glasses, I could have persuaded him to give up this mad idea of walking the whole length and breadth of the country.

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, I congratulate the Government on their 30 by 30 target. It is an enormous and ambitious thing to take on. In that context, I urge them to support my noble friend Lord Randall’s amendment. We have large areas of national parks and areas of outstanding natural beauty, a lot of which does not sensibly qualify for 30 by 30 at the moment. We have structures within them which could help drive them in that direction, if we pass the sort of amendment that my noble friend has suggested. I like proposed new subsection (5) in particular, which would make other agencies join in the purpose of the national park.

My Amendment 504GJC—after 30 years, I still do not understand how the numbering works, but that is where it is—concerns other effective area-based conservation measures. We are not, I think, going to get to 30 by 30 on the basis of national landscapes. We need a structure which allows not for nature protection to be provided somewhere else but for nature protection to be something that all of us can influence and be involved in.

Fortunately, the Convention on Biological Diversity has provided the concept of an OECM, which I think we can adapt in very positive ways. An OECM could be a corner of a park in a city, or a corner of a school playground that is developed in conjunction with the National Education Nature Park, which I see from the Natural History Museum is starting to be rolled out. It could be this great network of connection that we want farmers to develop across the landscape, so wildlife can move across it. It could even be golf courses, for goodness’ sake—I believe there is one golf course which allows daisies on the fairways. There is real scope for getting wildlife back into golfers’ lives—I have not yet met one who wants it but we will get there in the end.

It was one of the underpinnings of the Dasgupta report that everybody should have an appreciation of and involvement in nature. The structure of OECMs allows us to create that, involving everybody in getting to 30 by 30. The structure I have proposed in Amendment 504GJC has a low threshold, because you want people to be able to join in to begin with, without going through huge layers of bureaucracy, but you may well need a fiercer award within that to qualify for 30 by 30. It identifies an individual who has charge of the area and a purpose for it. This should be something personal which is down to a group of people or an individual landowner, which they are doing themselves and for which they are responsible, for which we can thank them for taking responsibility, but to which we can also hold them to account. I therefore very much hope that the Government will democratise 30 by 30, spreading it out and making it a national rather than a purely institutional ambition, and that they will give us the tools with which we can do that.

Environment Bill

Debate between Lord Lucas and Lord Blencathra

Committee stage
Monday 5th July 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Blencathra (Con)]

My Lords, I declare my interests as on the register. Like my noble friend Lord Caithness, I support the thrust of both these amendments, though neither goes far enough, in my opinion, including my noble friend’s amendment.

Amendment 149 applies only to retailers generating more than 10 tonnes of food waste and in stores of more than 400 square metres. I would reduce those sizes by half and apply them to everyone producing food waste: retailers, manufacturers and the catering industry. We have no idea of the extent of food waste in the catering industry. Today’s uneaten roast chicken should be tomorrow’s soup or curry.

Similarly, Amendment 149A in the name of my noble friend Lord Caithness is absolutely right in concept, especially the idea of reducing food waste across the whole supermarket supply chain. We often concentrate on the food that is unsold in shops at closing time, but we really need to tackle the rejected misshapen carrots, the less-than-perfectly shaped tomatoes and all the other food that is thrown away before it gets to the shops or caterers. A lot of organisations, to which the noble Baroness, Lady Boycott, referred, usually charities, are seeking to use up food before supermarkets throw it away. My noble friend Lord Caithness is right to seek to reduce all food waste across the supply chain, before it gets to the ultimate shop or caterer.

In my opinion, it is wrong to set the bar at supermarkets with a turnover of £1 billion. That is too high. I would apply it to all retailers, manufacturers and catering outlets with a turnover of more than £200 million. As an aside, if I may say so—probably improperly—I hope there is still a Morrisons supermarket in five years’ time we can apply it to, after the vulture capitalists have loaded it with debt, robbed the pension fund and asset-stripped it. But that is possibly for another day.

Neither of the amendments deals with the appalling waste of food in our homes but, again, that is not a discussion for the Bill today. If my noble friend the Minister cannot accept the amendments, I hope he will stress to all those in the food supply business that at some point, the Government will be bearing down on them to drastically reduce all food waste at all points in the food supply chain and across all food outlets.

[Lord Lucas (Con) [V]]

My Lords, my noble friend Lord Blencathra is quite right to point up food waste at home. Here in Eastbourne, we have a universal system to deal with that, and a pair of them is nesting on the roof above me as I speak: very little goes to waste here. But on the broader front, yes, we absolutely must not accept the idea of waste. This comes back to the point I was making on previous amendments: the necessity of looking at things in the round. One of the prime ways to reduce waste is plastic packaging. The less you use plastic packaging, the more food waste you generate. We need to look at things as a whole, not at little bits. Within the area of food that, however packaged, has reached or is reaching the end of its shelf life, we indeed need to make it compulsory that it is offered to people, particularly charities, so that they can distribute it as it is needed and that, if there is no market there for it, that it is used in the most efficient way possible. By doing that, we will generate efficient ways to use it.

The other day, I came across a fascinating company called C3 BIOTECH, which is using biotechnology to convert food waste into useful fuels and other materials. These things flourish because we create the circumstances in which they can. If we do not mandate that people deal effectively with food waste, it just gets thrown away and the opportunity to do better things never arises. It is really important that the Government take action in this area. I wish the amendment of the noble Baroness, Lady Boycott, well: if not in the detail of its drafting, very much in its spirit.