Environmental Improvement Plan 2023

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Monday 6th February 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Benyon (Con)]

The noble Baroness is absolutely right. It takes just a few millimetres of rain to fall on London for sewage outflows to start pushing sewage straight into the Thames. That is why, two decades ago, we were taken to court by the European Union for failure to comply with the urban wastewater treatment directive. That led to the investment of £1.4 billion in the sewer currently under construction. There are other storm overflows—or whatever they should be called; perhaps just “overflows”—where it takes a similarly small amount of rainfall to cause a problem. That is the low-hanging fruit that we want to see targeted, where we would see the quickest results from the £56 billion investment we will see made in our sewerage network—the largest since privatisation.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, in responding to the Front Benches, the Minister said that soil is absolutely fundamental to the Government’s environment plans. It is therefore a bit of a pity that the word “soil” does not appear anywhere in the Statement to the other place introducing the environmental improvement plans. None the less, I refer—as the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman of Ullock, did—to the Government’s former promise and quote a Defra blog from 9 September 2021, which announced:

“Soil Health Action Plan to be launched”.


We are told that the soil health action plan has been rolled into this plan. There is, as the Minister said, a target of 40% of soils being in sustainable management by 2028. The only action I can see in the plan is to create a baseline map of soil health by 2028. Do the Government not plan to take any actual action on soil health until after that map has been created?

[Lord Benyon (Con)]

As the noble Baroness will know, the Government—whether Ministers or civil servants—do not save soil; farmers do. We want, first, to incentivise them to do the right thing where possible. Secondly, we want to mandate doing the right thing. In our 300-page document on improving and protecting soil—it is not possible to mention everything in it in a Statement—we say that we will

“monitor soil health as part of the Natural Capital and Ecosystem Assessment”

and

“on top of this Defra will … Establish a soil health indicator under the 25 Year Environment Plan Outcome Indicator Framework … Publish a baseline map of soil health for England by 2028 … Support farmers and land managers to establish their own soil health baseline, so they can best manage the health of their soil … Provide a methodology and tools to collect consistent information about the health of the soil under all land uses … Share current guidance and best practice with farmers and land managers to improve their knowledge and work with them on how to improve soil health.”

We will also prevent

“valuable soil resources from being sent to landfill”

and secure

“the integrity of future soil carbon codes”

so that we can unlock the trillions of dollars of ESG money sloshing about in investment in the City and other investment centres to make sure that we are focusing it on our natural environment. Soil health will be fundamental to that. We want to increase organic matter to make soil function as an ecosystem, so that it does not leach what we do not want to see going into our rivers, along with soil itself. Soil is finite natural capital and, after a heavy rain storm, you can often see plumes of soil going into our seas. We want to stop that happening.