Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill

Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 18th May 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, I very much support what my noble friend has just said, having grown up in that part of the country and spending many happy decades fishing there. I just ask my noble friend the Minister, if he is going to give special consideration to chalk streams, to end the discrimination against Sussex. In particular, my local chalk stream should be included in the list, which it is not at the moment. The fact that it is called the Lottbridge Sewer should not be enough to exclude it.

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)]

My Lords, it gives me great pleasure to support every word that the noble Viscount has just said—a rare event.

I have recently joined a group of people who meet monthly to assess the health of the chalk stream that runs through their village by counting river flies, and the experience has been a real pleasure. There is nothing as satisfying as seeing a healthy ecosystem, and luckily theirs is.

However, as the noble Viscount has pointed out, chalk streams are extremely vulnerable. In fact, the amendment should not be necessary at all because we should automatically be protecting the health and well-being of our chalk streams. So I very much support the amendment. I hope it comes back again and again and we vote on it—or perhaps the Minister will snap it up as a good thing to do.

[Lord Deben (Con)]

My Lords, I too am not always in agreement with the words of my noble friend, but I strongly support the amendment.

The key point is that chalk streams are more vulnerable than almost any other water because they are concentrated in areas of considerable development and they are subject to considerable abstraction and the results of sewage disposal. There is therefore a particular reason for isolating them as opposed to other things.

The crucial reason is that we are fortunate enough to have the majority of the chalk streams in the world. Britain needs to be very careful about protecting those few things that we have almost uniquely. I have to say to the Government that, awful though the REUL Bill is, this subject is clearly not going to be part of it, so this is an ideal opportunity to make that statement.

I fear that I know precisely what the civil servants will have said to the Minister. First, they will have said: “First of all, we really need a wider range of things here. We need to apply this much more carefully because otherwise people who will not be covered by this will object”. Secondly, they will have said: “It’s very difficult to isolate chalk streams when we are not covering this, that and the other”. Thirdly: “There will be other opportunities to do this in other legislation”. Fourthly: “This is a very big Bill already and we don’t want to burden the system with anything more”. Fifthly: “This particular amendment doesn’t cover all the chalk streams that ought to be covered, and therefore it would be better to wait until we can cover them all”.

There may be other things that civil servants will have told my noble friend, but I suspect that those are the first five. I suggest to him that this is the moment in which he does not listen to, “Better not, Minister”, and puts in, instead of that, “Be off, civil servant!” We need to have this. It is not perfect, but if we wait for perfection, we will do nothing. I just hope that the Minister, in whom I have great confidence, will be able to say, “This is a sensible thing to do and I can’t really think of any good reason for not doing it”—and therefore will do it.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Hayman of Ullock (Lab)]

There is an enormous number of amendments, and I somehow did not spot it. If I had spotted it, my name would be on it.

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)]

Take that back!

[The Earl of Caithness (Con)]

If I were a fisherman on one of the Dorset rivers now with the mayfly hatching, I would have caught a most wonderful trout at the end of my line.

I say to the noble Baroness that I was alarmed, because I know that, in her heart of hearts, she is very supportive of this. However, her boss Keir Starmer said that he wanted to develop on green land. As my noble friend Lord Deben has just said, our chalk streams are going through highly developed land already. Which side of the fence is the Labour Party on? I hope the noble Baroness will reply.

I will ask of both Front Benches the question I was going to ask of my noble friend the Minister. Are they prepared to give the commitment to our chalk streams that the chalk streams demand? To remedy the chalk stream problem, it is not a question of days, months or years, but of decades, and an awful lot of interests have to be tackled. Unless we can get reassurance that all the parties across the House have that commitment, our chalk streams will not be in the health they should be