Environment Bill

Baroness Boycott Excerpts

Report stage
Wednesday 15th September 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Boycott (CB)]

My Lords, I am pleased to support the noble Baroness in this amendment. It is astonishing that we even have to have this debate and consider this amendment. Trees are astonishing. There is a tree a few miles from where I live in Somerset that was living before Stonehenge was a twinkle in a Stone Age eye. Not far from me is the tallest tree in England, inside a wood that is known as Atlantic rainforest. As the noble Baroness just said, we have 800 ancient woods that are currently under threat. I imagine Historic England would have something to say if that number of its buildings were being threatened with demolition right now.

The noble Baroness, Lady Young, has brought forward a simple proposition that requires the Government to develop and implement an ancient woodland standard of protection on a statutory basis. This would mean that our last remaining fragments of ancient woodland —as she said, the cathedrals of our natural life—are protected. These are not made by man, yet it always seems to me that we favour the buildings that we make ourselves, as though they are somehow better.

It is no excuse to say that to plant trees is a reason to cut down ancient woodland; They will not absorb enough carbon, as it will take them 400 years to become as rich. To my mind, it is like saying that we can replace a building like Blenheim Palace with a Wimpey housing development in its grounds and somehow say that it makes society better. I urge noble Lords to vote for this.

[Lord Whitty (Lab)]

My Lords, I also added my name to the amendment of the noble Baroness, Lady Young. This Bill is all about biodiversity—plants, insects, mammals, worms, butterflies and micro-organisms. It is all about sustainable ecosystems and healthy soil, the look and feel of our countryside, our heritage and people’s enjoyment of that countryside.

Ancient woodlands tick just about every box in that list and more, and they constitute only 2.5% of our landmass. Surely we should be able to protect them, yet many are under threat, directly and indirectly. I am fortunate; if I go out of my back gate and look over to the left, I see one of the most magnificent sights—Duncliffe Hill in north Dorset. It is less than three miles away and it is my destination for walking. When you get there, it is a truly magical place, particularly at bluebell time but also at most times of the year. It is home to almost every organism that we have in our natural environment, from lichens to roe deer.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Teverson (LD)]

My Lords, I start by congratulating the noble Lord, Lord Randall, on his speech and his due diligence on this issue, which is crucial in terms of deforestation. We have the frustration whereby we want extraterritoriality, which we do not normally have in the UK, but we can influence some of these matters only through supply chains and our own British corporates. The United States seems to get away with extraterritoriality in relation to more or less everything. We do not have that privilege.

As regards this approach, I also like the reference to recognising indigenous people. It is clear and obvious that it is so much more effective to keep forests rather than start to regrow them. That is the other side of the coin, as it were, to the previous debate and perhaps is even more important. That is why these Benches are very much in favour of the system proposed—although one of the big challenges that we have faced regarding environmental regulation and the Bill is enforcement and making sure that the regulations that we make can operate and are policed. We have the FSC, the Forest Stewardship Council, which works okay but all of us know of instances of duplicity in the system—not in the work of the FSC itself but among those copying and wrongly branding products. That challenge remains, but that does not mean that we should not move ahead in these areas.

I want also to congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Randall, on his pioneering work on the global footprint. We have mentioned a number of areas but the Dasgupta review, sponsored by the Treasury, again stressed that in terms of natural capital we are extracting far more than we are putting back into the planet. I suspect that the noble Lord is not expecting the Minister to accept the amendment but I hope that the Government will do further work in this area. I agree strongly with a point that the noble Lord made: if we can become the leader of standards in this area, it would be incredibly important.

Lastly, I come to the amendments of the noble Baroness, Lady Meacher, on urgency. That is the word I hear from her and she is absolutely right. We have so little time in so many of these areas and here, through these amendments—which I hope the Government and the Minister will accept—we have an opportunity to wind up that urgency and start to make right what we need to do soon and so urgently.

[Baroness Boycott (CB)]

I have put my name, although only online, to my noble friend Lady Meacher’s amendments as well as to Amendment 121 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Randall.

We outsource so many things in this country that globalisation has destroyed any sense we have of how products get to us or what they are made of. Just look at the list of ingredients that go into a cheap ready meal. They will certainly contain stuff that one’s grand- mother would not recognise and probably include ingredients such as soy. Manufacturers are keen to keep us ignorant of those chains.

Much of what happens on Amazonian land, in the forests of Brazil and other parts of South America, is the growing of soy and feed crops for cattle, which then go to feed us. From an environmental and energy point of view, that is a travesty. I am not even counting the transport involved. We are colluding—for many people, I am sure, completely unwittingly—in pulling and cutting down ancient rainforests for the simple reason that the loggers and farmers can get away with it. We actually do not know about it. It is time to stop it and for us to stop buying those kinds of products, but we have to know and have transparency.

Amendment 108C also makes it clear that we must be aware not just of illegal deforestation, which varies between countries and often between jurisdictions, but of what might today be considered legal. Brazil’s forest laws have changed in the past decade but that does not mean that we should lay off the pressure. The good news is that 81% of the biggest UK companies in the forest risk supply chains have stated that they aim to remove all deforestation from their supply chains, and 22 major UK businesses recently called on the UK Government to develop a legal framework to halt it. Citizens also support such a move. In the Government’s own consultation, 99% of all residents supported the introduction of just this kind of legislation. However, in the meantime we continue to see ghastly pictures of the Amazon on fire. Scientists know that decades of human activity and a changing climate have pushed the jungle near to a tipping point; 17% of it is nearly destroyed and the tipping point will soon be reached.

That brings me neatly to Amendment 121 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Randall, and I congratulate him on his speech and for all his work. The day that the UK overshot our planetary boundaries was 29 July this year—the day that demand for ecological resources and services in any given year exceeded what the earth can generate. It hardly needs to be explained why that matters. I understand that all the measures in the Bill are effectively working to ensure that we live in harmony with the earth and that we do not use more than we can regenerate. However, it is also easy to see that it is not entirely working. We are a long way from that but we are not the first country to take measures. We therefore need to measure the progress, even though it is difficult to do so.

I have just finished reading a chapter from a new edition of Jared Diamond’s extraordinary book, Collapse, about Easter Island, which was the home of a once-thriving community who drove themselves almost into extinction over a period of about 250 years. They had amazing trees called Chilean pines, from which big canoes could be produced that were capable of going out far into the Pacific Ocean. One can tell from dietary remains that at that point the people ate big fish such as tuna, and porpoises, dolphins and so on, and were very healthy. Indeed, the society was so wealthy and healthy that they could spend their time making the extraordinary heads found on Easter Island. At one point, the people cut down the last Chilean pine. No one thought that it mattered because they then made smaller canoes. Unfortunately, their diet worsened, as did the soil because there were no trees. When travellers visited that society in the middle of the 1850s—not really that long ago—they found a bunch of people in rags who were impoverished and soil that was incapable of producing many crops.

That is a metaphor for our time, because the point is that it happened not with a bang but a whimper. Right now, one could say that the earth was beginning to scream. When we saw Covid coming, that was a bang and we were able to respond, but what we are doing now is slowly grinding down the planet to a point at which one day, we might end up like the people of Easter Island.

[Baroness Hayman of Ullock (Lab)]

My Lords, we have been debating a number of amendments in this group that seek to strengthen Schedule 17. The first is Amendment 106 on forestry commodities, in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Randall of Uxbridge. He has clearly explained what his amendment sets out to achieve and, importantly, why it is needed. His speech may have been longer than normal, but it was important to hear his words.

In the 25-year environment plan, the UK Government articulated an ambitious set of goals and actions, including that

“our consumption and impact on natural capital are sustainable, at home and overseas”.

Unfortunately, as in a number of other policy areas, the Environment Bill does not adequately deliver on this commitment.