Wellbeing of Future Generations Bill [HL]

Baroness Boycott Excerpts

2nd reading & 2nd reading (Hansard) & 2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Friday 13th March 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Boycott (CB)]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to speak in my noble friend Lord Bird’s debate. I have had many adventures with him over my life and I am a great fan. I want to talk briefly today about the importance of nature and wildlife to us all and about how our current lifestyle is eroding it.

When I was a child I lived in the country. My father was a great naturalist, with a great respect for the natural world. In the meadows next to our house, we had so many cowslips we would add them to pancakes at this time of year. In the hedges in our garden were the nests of thrushes, blackbirds, wrens, blue tits, great tits and hedge sparrows. We could count the robins’ eggs just by looking at them. Now those things are mostly memories. Insects are in such short supply in our country now that if you tell a child that you once had to scrape them off your windscreen on a summer’s night, they think you are making it up. It must be as foreign to them as the dodo is to me and some of us.

There is one culprit: our industrial farming system. Right from the publication of Silent Spring in September 1962, the world has known about the deadly consequences of indiscriminately pouring chemicals on to the soil in the quest for higher food yields. Our country is a farmed country: 75% of the land is given over to agriculture, compared to only 45% in the USA, for instance. It defines what our country is like—the fields, villages and farms. After the privations of the war we joined a continent-wide push to banish hunger. It was an honourable pursuit and between 1935 and 1998, we more or less tripled the outputs of wheat, oats and barley and doubled milk production. The amount of chicken meat we produced increased by a factor of 25, but the cost was immense. It was much too high. Semi-natural habitats were drained. An estimated 97% of hay meadows were lost. Between 1990 and 2010, the area of crops treated with pesticides increased by 50%—this is almost yesterday.

The first State of Nature report, published in 2013, studied 3,000 species and found that 60% were in decline. Modern farming has been a total nightmare for the creatures from the stories of our childhood—the hedgehogs, moles, rats and toads. We all read about them; they are not here any more. By 2019, the new State of Nature report concluded:

“Farmland birds have declined more severely than birds in any other habitat”.


More than half have disappeared. We have one turtle dove where we once had 10. Some 250,000 miles of our nation’s hedges, almost one-third of the total, have been destroyed to create ever larger fields.

However, we are at a turning point. When we became part of the European Economic Community, we joined the common agricultural bloc. The CAP consumes $65 billion a year, about 40% of the whole EU budget. It has been rightly criticised for its perverse incentives and its environmental impacts. For me, the only bright light of leaving the EU is that at this moment we have a chance to reform our agricultural policy for the first time in 50 years. Beginning next year, we will transition from subsidies for just owning land, regardless of what you do with it, to subsidies linked to the public good.

The Bill coming forward is good, but not good enough. Nothing is good enough. This is why my noble friend Lord Bird’s Bill is so important. If our children are denied access to the natural world, we know from so much research how much they suffer. We all suffer. We are passing on a less than perfect world at the moment—very much less than perfect—and the numbers for wildlife, sad to say, are still going downhill, so I urge all noble Lords to work with those of us working on the Agriculture Bill and to support my noble friend Lord Bird’s Bill, and help to cement the reforms that are very necessary if we are to ensure that our children can also have a hedgehog in their garden on a summer night, as I did.