Queen’s Speech

Lord Patten Excerpts

Tuesday 7th January 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Patten (Con)]

My Lords, wishing to reflect those sensible calls for post-general election result renewal and reconciliation, I set about ransacking our party manifestos for any evidence that there might be a consensus between the parties. To my surprise but delight, the most striking evidence of consensus is on the need to plant more trees. Whatever the numbers, I believe we should plant trees early, plant well and plant native, by planting lots of broadleaf trees where possible and resisting the needless cutting down of trees and hedges in town and country alike. That is why I welcome so much what my noble friend Lord Gardiner of Kimble had to say about the importance of trees when he introduced this debate.

The UK is certainly not well wooded by international standards. At one end of my Westminster and home commuting life, we live in one of the very least well wooded districts in England, South Somerset. We certainly need new housing but, alas, just as they simply do not make new land any more on which to build new housing, it is important that sites must be carefully chosen, with trees which are needed for health and wildlife. Trees are an integral part of not just a new place but creating a sense of place, giving people something to share and something to breathe. There should be at least two new trees planted for every new house or apartment built in this country, in addition to which every street should have some fruit trees—and not just those landscape architects’ street trees.

This should be paralleled by a national consensus that we need a complete moratorium on the needless cutting down of trees and hedges: no more chainsaw massacres, as alas we saw in Sheffield. I hope that the relatively new Sheffield city region, which I wish well, will now undertake to make recompense by replanting at least one tree for every one that was needlessly cut down. Replanting in cities is just like rewilding in the countryside, and greatly needed. In saying this, I know that I point a finger at one particular political party but I can also point it at the Liberal Democrats. For example, I live in a Liberal Democrat-run area in South Somerset. I am pretty unusual in this, just as their control is pretty unusual in the rest of the country, and I regret the way in which they permitted past developments to happen without adequate tree cover, and sometimes with such loose planning provisions that developers have been able to ignore those glamorous drawings which they put before councils. We have not seen those trees.

In the same way, I am quite prepared to criticise my own party—the Tory party—in Somerset. Over the years there, the highway authority has needlessly and grossly overlit the streets with ugly sodium and yellow lights, which has done no end of damage to nightlife and people’s sleeping. It has always been put forward as good for road safety but, as shown by the Department for Transport, there is no indication that there is any automatic link between reducing street lighting and an increase in road accidents. It is quite clear that the dumping into the night sky of unnecessary light pollution is just the same as the dumping on street corners, roadsides and highways of litter. All local councils should give this considerable thought. If it is good for children to see some fruit trees in the streets of new housing developments, it is very good for them to be able to see the stars as well. Local authorities have a major contribution to make in this respect.

I end as I began. It is good to see compromise, if it can be found, but of course I recognise that political parties come into existence to reflect and nurture different points of view, so compromise is never easy. But in seeking compromise, at least the body politic in this country can look at the Conservative Party and know what the nature of our conversation with the nation is to be over the next decade. Many commentators now say that with the lengthy elections we are to have for the leadership of the Liberal Democrat and Labour parties, and the possibility of more than one Labour or Liberal Democrat leader in the 2020s—we are only just in the foothills of the 2020s—we urgently need to know what sort of conversation the opposition parties want to have with the nation. For good or bad, we are entirely transparent as to what we wish to do. We have no idea at all—it is a bit of a magical mystery tour—what kind of national conversation Labour and Liberal Democrats wish to have. That is bad for democracy.