Queen’s Speech

Lord Stone of Blackheath Excerpts

Thursday 17th October 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Stone of Blackheath (Lab)]

My Lords, we are all connected. The noble Baroness, Lady O’Neill, was principal of Newnham College when my daughter Jessica studied there. So I note with pleasure that the gracious Speech included a section on improving the environment for future generations. I know that my noble friend Lord Bird is developing a Bill specifically to consider future generations.

Experts say that the best response to the climate emergency would be to stop deforestation, in combination with reforestation and permaculture-based soil regeneration. Trees have existed on earth for much longer than us—for hundreds of millions of years—and each lives for about 1,000 years. Yet trees share similar traits with us. In his book The Hidden Life of Trees, Peter Wohlleben describes how, by living in woods together and linking through the fungal network, trees help their neighbours through sharing nutrients and information, rear their young and care for old and dying trees.

Trees are important in our own lives, too. They aid our physical, mental and social well-being and abate respiratory conditions by absorbing pollution. Studies have found that people living closer to green spaces are more active, have lower rates of obesity and heart disease, and engage less in criminal activity. If every household were provided with good access to quality green spaces, it could save £2.1 billion in healthcare costs. The overall cost to the economy of physical inactivity is £8.2 billion a year—an issue that trees, along with walking, could resolve. An Exeter University study found that 72% of participants noticed positive changes in their health when prescribed nature-assisted therapies.

Trees are responsible for cleaning our water, protecting our communities from floods, preventing drought and desertification, sequestering carbon into organic matter and fostering healthy soil. A study at the University of Manchester showed that a 10% increase in tree cover in urban areas resulted in a 4% drop in surface temperature. Even when dead, trees support life, with their decaying leaves and bark forming mulch that feeds millions of micro-organisms and keeps soil moist and healthy. Trees also power rural economies and create jobs, from tree surgery to fruit harvesting, landscaping and green waste management. Forestry in Scotland alone is a £1 billion sector employing 25,000 people.

Despite all this, last year in the Amazon rainforest half a billion trees were torn down, destroying crucial habitats for mammals, birds, insects, bacteria and fungi. To save the life of this planet and its human population from extinction, we must cure the growing ills of trees so that they can cure the growing ills of humanity. Here in the United Kingdom, it is our duty to help our native trees in their resistance to pests, diseases and deforestation, in return for the abundance of physical and mental health rewards they provide for us. But this must be part of a far greater and more ambitious plan for the United Kingdom to become a light to other nations and spread this maintenance of trees across the globe.

Good people who are already doing this need governmental support. TreeSisters is a women-led UK charity halting the destruction of forests throughout the tropics through empowering ethical reforestation. It hopes to increase global tree numbers over the next five years by 1 trillion, thus preserving the tropical band that cools the essential global weather cycle. Friends of the Earth wants to double tree cover in the UK, with far more ambitious government targets for replanting, alongside agricultural techniques such as silvopasture—the practice of integrating trees, forage, and the grazing of domesticated animals in a mutually beneficial way.

The Findhorn Foundation is a community of 500 people in the UK, who, as an example to be followed, support and live the vision of creating a better world, starting with love between themselves and respect and love for their land. The charity Trees for Cities addresses London’s poor air quality by enriching school grounds through tree planting and greening. Its Perivale Park woodland creation project will transform 18 hectares, helping to connect natural habitats, promote biodiversity, reduce the frequency and intensity of floods, and increase green corridors for wildlife.

So I ask the Minister to suggest to Her Majesty’s Government that they might support reforestation projects, regenerative agriculture and permaculture-based soil regeneration on a global scale; educate the public on the value of trees and offer to fund a scheme for every UK citizen to plant one native tree; increase public awareness of “green prescriptions”; heavily scrutinise deforestation projects such as HS2—the largest deforestation programme since World War I—and develop ecological and ethical principles to cover the post-Brexit gap with an environmental standards sanctioning body.

In healthcare, we are already evolving preventive holistic projects to prolong healthy life. This must now be our priority for the health of trees, and hence the longevity of Gaia. To rise to these challenges, I ask the Minister to meet with a group of experts and leaders in the field so that we can create a national and international plan for trees, and with the recently created Peers’ group Peers for the Planet, which is concerned about the climate crisis and threats to biodiversity and the environment globally. It is meeting in October and seeks action through your Lordships’ House.

If we in the UK act as I have suggested and share our experience with our friendly 54 countries in the Commonwealth, where one-third of humanity lives, we will have the power to save the trees and save our planet.

Flood Risk

Lord Stone of Blackheath Excerpts

Monday 11th June 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Gardiner of Kimble]

My Lords, whether it affects families, communities or businesses, clearly flooding is devastating and the clear-up can be very much a long-term affair for many. That is precisely why the business-led Property Flood Resilience Roundtable published an action plan in 2016. It is now working on a flood resilience code of practice—this is really important for places such as York, which unfortunately flood very frequently—and how to adapt the electricity supply, for example, so that if there is future flooding, recovery is much speedier. That is the way forward.

[Lord Stone of Blackheath (Lab)]

I am not sure whether I heard properly, but in spite of the United Nations World Water Development Report, which promotes very favourable natural solutions for water, both ecologically and financially, did the Minister say that out of £2.2 billion, we are spending only £15 million on natural-based solutions? If so, can we think again?

[Lord Gardiner of Kimble]

I did not talk about £15 million, but there are some specific projects involving natural capital and the £15 million that I did not mention. But, the £2.6 billion includes both hard engineering and the use of natural capital in the scheme. So, the £15 million is about specific, often community- led projects.

Flood Defences

Lord Stone of Blackheath Excerpts

Wednesday 26th November 2014 Grand Committee

[Lord Stone of Blackheath (Lab)]

My Lords, the Moses Room is an appropriate room for this debate: maybe we should just part the waters. Seriously, as money is short while the dangers of flooding and water mismanagement are rising, rather than going for more and more expensive government infrastructure projects, commercial solutions, more research and lengthy reports, Her Majesty’s Government would do well to turn to already tried and tested, successful community methods of river and water control. There are very simple measures that can be taken now and do not cost a lot of money. They are not high-tech interventions, but they improve the catchment capacity by working with the community on simple measures.

There are several case studies in which solutions to flooding were achieved at low cost. There are many other flood-risk areas where such measures would equally apply. I compliment the Government on the work that has already been done, but there seems to be a great opportunity of implementing these measures more through local communities at low cost. In the village of Belford, in Northumberland, the Government estimated a £2 million cost of preventing the village from flooding using high-level engineering solutions. The actual cost of building a local, simple intervention in the landscape was less than £150,000 and the village now has the lowest incidence of flooding in its history. Moreover, last year at Holnicote in Somerset, the National Trust spent just £160,000 building such a community intervention, using natural flood management from the source of the river right down to the sea. The Environment Agency says that this protected £30 million of assets from the consequences of flooding last year.

Preventable soil-compaction events—due to basic lack of understanding or responsibility—could be averted at minimal cost by liaising with landowners on keeping their topsoil fertile and uncompacted. Runoff from grazed watershed has been shown to be 30% greater than that from ungrazed watershed. In the cases where this has worked, community action by farmers, land managers, the Environment Agency, local government and residents has led to very simple measures being taken, such as buffer strips, bunds and other soil retention techniques. These have slowed the flow sufficiently to protect downstream areas from serious flooding events and retained the fertile topsoil in the area, rather than washing it away into the sea downstream.

In 2011, Defra commissioned a study on 25 catchment management solutions such as these. The findings proved that catchment-based planning was successful and viable financially. Its recommendations included the following:

“Recognising that the costs of the Catchment Based Approach are low compared to the benefits generated, there is a compelling case for the wider adoption of the approach in England … Catchment groups should be allowed to develop their objectives and approach based on the needs of the catchment, the support available from the catchment stakeholders and local circumstances … This should not be prescriptive but allow local governance and activities to reflect local issues”.

However, it also spoke of the problem of funding. It went on to say that there are also a number of barriers, particularly through,

“confusion over available funding streams and timescales”.

There is a mismatch between the work that needs to happen and the current streams of funding.

This is not a top-down approach requiring huge funding and planning; these are small, simple, community-led initiatives with local and national government as equal partners. It is a lot less expensive and could even be self-funding in the long run. As in other areas of our ineffective banking system, while channels exist to put money into expensive technology and heavy solutions to flooding, there are only fragmented streams of funding to support these inexpensive natural measures. It is imperative that channels are created to allow local authority funding for these simple measures. This requires work at two levels: bringing the community together and building the needed interventions along the catchment area. We need more engagement from large landowners and land managers. The Government need to begin to approve, across the nation, the availability of local funds to experts and the community in restoring the catchments with simple measures, so preventing major flood events.

This is not either/or; it can occur alongside the bigger measures and will show the Government to be effective in a very short time in turning around the bleak prospect that we face this winter. The rapid and good growth in this country of social enterprises and the creation of impact bonds, developed by Sir Ronald Cohen, could be an excellent mechanism here. We could look at starting an impact bond programme where the community itself is able to invest in the long-term benefits of such measures for its area, and this would become self-funding.

Is the Minister prepared, with appropriate members of the government team, to meet those who have been working on such successful low-cost methods, cutting across disciplines and bringing unlikely departments together to achieve community-led results? I would be happy to play a part in facilitating that.