Energy Prices Bill

Debate between Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb and Lord Teverson

Committee stage
Monday 24th October 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)]

My Lords, I apologise for not speaking at Second Reading. I did listen to the Minister’s opening speech and I had made my views clear in an earlier briefing. My views sync very closely with those of the noble Lord, Lord Rooker. Quite honestly, this Government are out of control—we have known that for months, if not years—and it is time they understood they are not acting in a democratic manner. This is a “something must be done” Bill, and I understand why something must be done. However, it has so little detail, and the Government are expecting us to take this on trust. I do not trust the Government, and so there is a big problem here for me.

There are two big issues. First, these energy price schemes will make the difference between people being able to pay their bills or not pay their bills, and whether they can feed themselves, clothe their kids and that sort of thing. We have to be sure of all this detail. The Government are proposing to fill in about 90% of the Bill’s details at a later date, and they expect us to just wave it through. We cannot know the impact of this Bill on ordinary people.

Secondly, the Government have been determined to protect the profits of oil and gas companies, which we all know is a piece of idiocy when we look at the climate emergency. That profit will probably be reinvested in creating more opportunities for the oil and gas industry. The Government take a different approach to renewables, and this will cause a long-term disruption to renewable development. I would argue that investors will be encouraged to invest more in dirty oil and gas, rather than in clean renewables. That is a huge bailout for all those stranded carbon assets, and seems to me to be a completely illogical way to move forward.

I sense that the Government might mean well—actually, I am being too generous. I understand that something must be done, but this is not it. I want the Minister to explain those two issues. Will people be able to pay their bills? Will this cause more investment in dirty oil and gas?

[Lord Teverson (LD)]

My Lords, I will speak to Amendments 27, 31, 34 and 40. What I have to say is very much in line with the speeches that have already taken place and I will not detain the House for long, except to make this point again. We understand the urgency of the Bill, for the health of households and their heat and energy over the next winter, and that of businesses as well, but there is a lot else included in this Bill that need not be rushed through in the same way.

I turn to Amendment 27. On reading the Bill, I was quite shocked—the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, forensically went through this in principle—that it says on page 21, in Clause 22 (4)(a), that these directions “must be in writing”. These are key bits of government policy, where a Secretary of State or a person who is subject to directions under this clause—we do not even know who it might be—is able to just write what should happen. Our own amendment would substitute that with

“made by regulations subject to the affirmative procedure”.

Amendments 31 and 34, with Amendment 34 relating to Northern Ireland—it is great to see the noble Lord, Lord Rogan, here following his contribution during the Second Reading—would remove the powers of sub-delegation.

Amendment 40 is around the sunset clause, which again the Opposition has, quite rightly, majored on. Here, we have put down a two-year limit.

Clearly, the Bill goes way beyond the authority given to the Government and the Secretary of State, without reference to Parliament. Some of these amendments must be voted on for the Bill to be put right and sent back to the House of Commons.

Energy Bill [HL]

Debate between Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb and Lord Teverson

Committee stage
Monday 5th September 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Teverson (LD)]

My Lords, it is always a great pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Worthington, and although we do not always agree on absolutely everything, I reckon that I agree with about 99.5% of her speech.

First, I declare my interest as chair and director of Aldustria Ltd, an energy storage company; I will try to avoid too much discussion of that area. On these amendments, I very much thank the noble Lord, Lord Lennie, for having opened our debate today. I very much agree with the principle of what the Opposition Front Bench is trying to achieve here. What this Bill does not have—the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, put it very well indeed—is great focus or coherence. It would be good to start trying to improve that through a type of preamble that puts context, including strategic context, at the beginning of the Bill. I hope that we can refine that more on Report; it may not be perfect, but perhaps we can find a way of doing that between us.

I also agree with the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, about the pricing of electricity and how that works. As he says, our European colleagues are looking at that very strongly now. There must be a better way of doing this; it cannot make sense to the public that we charge and price our main energy sources on the marginal cost of the last producer. Clearly, that does not make sense, and it does not do the reputation of the fossil fuel industry any good either. Yes, they might use their money to give back to shareholders—hopefully they will use it for different types of investment and diversification—but it besmirches the whole sector, and we need to find a way around that.

Where I would disagree very strongly with the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, is around trying to game or look at alternative dates for net zero. It seems to me that in September 1939 the Cabinet probably did not look at whether to declare war on Germany this month or two years later or four years later. We may criticise Neville Chamberlain for all sorts of things in retrospect, but I guess that is not one of them. It was an absolute threat to our future security, and we made a decision. If we think of the costs to this country, and to us and consumers, of our right stand on Ukraine, I guess that we have not done those calculations either—because we know that Putin’s war has to fail and that, for European security and our long-term security, we in the western world need to pursue the tactics that we have.

I thank the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh of Pickering, for her amendments, particularly in mentioning rural aspects of oil—my own household is on oil, and we are not covered by a price cap—and in particular business. In all the media coverage that we have had on this very real energy crisis over the past months, it is funny how business has very much taken second place to households and consumers. Clearly, households and consumers are ultimately the most important, but business is completely fundamental to our economic performance and being able to solve this crisis in the long term.

I am not absolutely sure about energy from waste plants. Clearly, it does not make sense to export it, but the real challenge there is in starting to raise recycling again, or even AD in terms of other parts of household waste. I was so impressed by the forensic look by the noble Lord, Lord Ravensdale, at investment need and the scale of the challenge, and also at how we need to measure that and put proper planning into how we meet it.

The one other area that I would like to mention comes back to 2013 and the then Energy Bill, mentioned by the noble Baroness, Lady Worthington. At that time, one big thing that we discussed was the energy trilemma of security, cost and decarbonisation. The noble Viscount, Lord Trenchard, brought that back up again. But what this crisis, and the almost a decade between these two Bills, has shown, is that it is no longer a trilemma—they all work in exactly the same direction. Renewables are now cheaper than fossil fuels, as we know—it is why we have the huge price increases that we do. Our security is reinforced by having much more renewable generation on our own seas and our own land—and, as a result, we have lower costs and a decarbonised energy system as well. We have moved on since that time.

We need to have a focus in this Bill, and I support the amendments. We need to move on in this debate, but I am absolutely sure that we will need that coherence when we get to Report.

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)]

My Lords, the whip, the noble Baroness, Lady Bloomfield, has spoiled a lot of my fun today, because I was going to tell the Government exactly what they needed to do if they were going to produce an Energy Bill that deals with the crises that we are facing. We are facing three immense crises at the moment, and one of them is, of course, the climate crisis. There are strong whiffs of climate denialism in your Lordships’ House, which I find absolutely staggering, considering that the science is so very clear on it. However, it is a bit last century, that sort of attitude, so I understand why it might exist here in your Lordships’ House. But we have those crises—the climate emergency, the ecological crisis and the cost of living crisis—and this Energy Bill is so topical. It is exactly the sort of thing that we need to bring forward so that we can deal with all these crises, and I guess make life better for millions of people in Britain and the rest of the world.

I agree with a lot of what the noble Lord, Lord Howell, said. He made the point that this does not do the job. Also, I am very sympathetic to Labour’s initial amendments. I understand why they are in there, but it reads a lot more like the sort of issues that a Labour Government would bring forward—hopefully not too long in the future.

I am concerned that our time is going to be wasted on this Bill, because we have a new Prime Minister—a climate-wrecking ideologue who will make it incredibly difficult for us to get the sort of issues into this Bill that we need. The noble Lord, Lord Howell, and other noble Lords also mentioned nuclear. We have to get real on the fact that nuclear is not the answer. Nuclear power stations take a long time to come online. There will be all sorts of problems even getting them started, so they are not the answer. We have to think faster than that; they just will not work.

Environment Bill

Debate between Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb and Lord Teverson

Committee stage
Wednesday 14th July 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow my friend opposite, the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh of Pickering. I sort of see the point in her amendment; I had better not say that I support it, because I would probably get rude emails from the Green Party saying it has not been party policy, but obviously I would be happy to discuss it. On the issue of not being invited to meet the Minister, the Greens still have not been invited to meet him, and I cannot decide whether that is because we completely trust the Minister to understand everything that we are saying; I cannot think of any other option. We obviously trust the Minister completely to take our point of view back to Defra.

My amendment is on something that I care about very deeply, namely fracking. I have tabled it with a view to banning it once and for all. In doing so, I want to celebrate all the hard work of campaigners and activists across the country who delivered massive opposition against this dirty and dangerous polluting industry, often in the face of poor policy decisions by the Government and the fracking industry’s might-is-right attempts to quash them. In particular, I applaud the Preston New Road campaign in Lancashire. It was a thousand days of protest by the anti-fracking Nanas, a bunch of mainly older women led by Tina Rothery. They fought so hard in the face of well-financed and rather nasty, threatening behaviour by Cuadrilla.

In the 2019 general election, it was announced that we had won on this particular issue. The Conservatives, along with every other political party in Parliament, declared themselves to be against fracking. However, we in the UK are still supporting fracking in Argentina, which means we are offshoring the horrid stuff, so we do not have to count all the carbon emissions and so on, and Namibia is being exploited by a Canadian company. Ireland called for an international ban this year, and calls are now growing for an Irish-led global ban on fracking. I would be interested to hear from the Minister whether that is something that the Government might support.

Here in the UK, there are still legal loopholes that could allow fracking to be forced on communities. I am most worried that, even if the Secretary of State did reject planning permission for fracking, this could be overturned in a judicial review. The Government may have changed their policy to be against fracking but, if this conflicts with the law in a judicial review, their policy will be ruled unlawful. For this reason, we must change the law to reflect what is now common agreement: that fracking is banned in the UK. I hope that the Minister will agree.

[Lord Teverson (LD) [V]]

My Lords, I am very pleased to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb, and her strong advocacy, which I very much respect. I am going to speak to Amendment 280, to which I was very pleased to put my name, alongside that of its proponent, the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh of Pickering. As the noble Baroness said, this is an area that the EU Environment Sub-Committee looked at. When we started looking into the areas of research, planning and the various impacts of wind farms, we found far more questions than answers. I look forward to the Minister coming back in this area.

I clearly welcome the renewable energy programme that we have. Obviously, offshore wind—whether it be floating or on the seabed—is going to be a very major part of that. However, it is important to make sure that that programme has the least negative impact on the environment, whether it be all the marine areas that the noble Baroness talked about, or birdlife—seabirds and migratory birds as well. There is not enough research in this area; there ought to be research for the future shared among all the countries around both the North Sea and the Celtic Sea, so that we can make sure that we locate turbines in the most favourable way to protect—and, in some areas, to encourage—environmental life at marine level. As the noble Baroness said, there might be positives in this area as well.

I want to ask the Minister about the fora that we deal with now on energy in the North Sea. We have been excluded—I think unreasonably—from one of the main European ones, which was not an EU institution, and included us in the past. However, I understand that there is a new forum that we might be involved in where these discussions are taking place. This is important because, clearly, the locations of wind farms in the North Sea and, in future, the Celtic Sea should be co-ordinated, if for no other reason than to make sure that as much infrastructure as possible is shared. I would be interested to hear from the Minister how we will ensure, as we start to develop the Celtic Sea as well, that we do not have multiple landing points and multiple cables put down, as has happened in the North Sea. We should have some co-ordination there to minimise damage.

Environment Bill

Debate between Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb and Lord Teverson

Committee stage
Monday 12th July 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Teverson (LD)]

My Lords, as some of my amendments are associated with nature recovery network strategies, I once again declare my interest as chair of the Cornwall and Isles of Scilly Local Nature Partnership.

I know the Minister has assured us that the marine environment is included in the Bill. It hardly has a high profile, yet our national waters, including the EEZ, have an area of 885,000 square kilometres, whereas the terrestrial landmass of the United Kingdom is a mere 242,000 square kilometres, so that marine environment is three and a half times larger. My contention is that it is just as important and should receive at least the same amount of interest. Last year we had the Fisheries Act, and the Government made it very clear that that was not a piece of environmental legislation. It dealt with fisheries management plans, but those were not environmental management plans. Indeed, we gave credit that the Fisheries Act had a number of objectives relating to the environment and climate change, but that was not the mission of that piece of legislation—yet nature recovery in our marine area is just as important as in our terrestrial environment.

I was interested to see that one of the Government’s targets is to have good environmental status for our marine environment. In 2019—two years ago—they published an appraisal of progress made on having good environmental status for our marine environment, looking out beyond our territorial waters to our economic zone as well. I am afraid to say that of the 15 areas the government report focuses on, in six we managed not to meet targets at all; in five we made partial progress on those targets; and in four we actually achieved them.

I will take the Committee through some of the areas where good environmental status targets were not achieved: commercial fish, non-commercial fish, benthic habitats, invasive species, marine litter and breeding birds. None of those was achieved. There was some improvement in pelagic habitats, the food web, underwater noise, cetaceans—primarily dolphins, as we know them—and seals. As far as I can see, things such as seagrass, which is hugely important not just for the marine habitat but for carbon capture, were not covered at all in that report.

We have a real crisis and challenge out there in the oceans that surround our island and islands, so that is why I have tabled these amendments. The first one is to ensure that local nature recovery networks include not just the land area but the adjacent territorial waters—that is, out to 12 nautical miles—of those areas. They have to be included in those plans. As the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hope, said on another marine amendment some days ago, it is not just the fact that they are two different environments; they are connected—literally—so it is important for that reason too that nature recovery networks include marine, littoral and territorial areas.

But it would clearly be unreasonable to ask, say, Sussex or maybe even more so Cornwall to look at its whole EEZ stretching way out into the Atlantic, yet EEZs also require important help in terms of nature recovery out to the 200 nautical mile limit. So, to be practical, I have tabled separate amendments to propose that the Secretary of State should be responsible for creating, producing and revising nature recovery networks for those offshore EEZ areas. Indeed, it would make a lot of sense if they tied up with marine management organisations and marine planning areas, but, again, those plans are not primarily environmental ones. They are mapping and usage ones. They are not primarily environmental plans, but they should come together to do that.

In the other amendment I put down—Amendment 246—I tackle highly protected marine areas. I have to give good credit to the Minister and the Government in this area, because, since I laid down that amendment, at the early stages after Second Reading, the Government have opened a programme and asked for bids for pilots for highly protected marine areas. So there is progress on this already, and, to some degree, this amendment is now redundant—but I would be very keen to hear from the Minister the progress on that and how he sees the timescale in terms of rolling out beyond pilots.

At the moment, we have some 372 marine protected areas around our shores. They cover some 38% of our total waters. That sounds impressive, but the regimes for those marine protected areas are extremely weak in many cases and certainly do not protect the seabed and all the habitats. These highly protected marine areas absolutely have to be done in consultation with the fishing industry and other commercial interests, but it is so important they are rolled out quickly, effectively and as soon as possible. That is why these amendments are important.

In Cornwall, as I have said before, we were lucky enough to have one of the pilots for the nature recovery networks. When we started work on that, Defra may not have been “against” it—that is perhaps too strong a word—but it did not see marine as being included in that pilot strategy. We went ahead and included it anyway, because you cannot talk about the environment of the far south-west peninsula without including marine; it is just impossible. The Minister could hopefully make my amendments redundant—not the EEZ ones, but these amendments—by confirming that it is now government policy that nature recovery networks, when it is appropriate and there is an adjacent ocean or territorial waters, should be included within those nature recovery network strategies. That is my clear message and question. I beg to move.

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, with all his expertise. The Government bring legislation to this House so that we can help them improve it—so the expertise in your Lordships’ House can be of benefit to the Government and of course the nation. So I really think that, if the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, were not a Lord already, he would deserve some future honour for all his hard work in contributing to our work here and to the Government. He has highlighted another example of how this Bill has passed a suite of legislative measures without reference to water—to territorial waters, to the sea.

We looked at agriculture and fisheries: they do not tie together in any coherent way, and I do not understand how we can keep on passing legislation that does not tie up. Without these amendments, we are at risk of seeing our seas and fisheries as being separate from the rest of our environment and all our ecological activities. This sort of silo thinking would undermine the realities of the inseparable ecosystems and natural systems. I would be particularly concerned and upset if an upland authority had a nature recovery strategy that failed to take into account what was happening to its downstream neighbours and, ultimately, to the seas where the watercourses will end up. An Environment Bill that allows for that eventuality is fundamentally inadequate and incoherent, with no basic understanding of the environment.

I am sure the Minister will take time over the Summer Recess to ensure that this Bill fits with the Agriculture Act and the Fisheries Act. I am sure that is going to be a priority, so these two important ecosystems can be integrated into the mechanics of this Environment Bill. The alternative is that, inevitably, in a few years’ time, the Government of the day will have to bring in new legislation to try to patch up these incoherencies, with perhaps a decade of lost opportunity to heal the environment in that time. It is much better that we work together now to get it right.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Teverson (LD)]

My Lords, I owe the Committee an apology, as I tried to change this amendment from one group to another—the first group we did today—but then I managed to de-group it totally, so it is my fault that noble Lords are all still here. I apologise for that.

This is a serious issue. It is often said that we know less about our oceans than we do about the surface of Mars. I do not know whether that is completely true, but there is certainly a strong element of truth about it. We lack information about the ecology, biodiversity, quantity and types of species there are in our waters. Yet, unlike Mars, which I think has at least three rovers trundling slowly over its surface at the moment, we have thousands of fishing vessels sampling the ecology of our oceans every day.

I was very interested to receive communications from the Shetland Fishermen’s Association a few days ago. I know that Shetland is clearly in Scotland, although it sometimes sees itself as independent of it, and that this is an English Bill, but I will take this as an example because one of the things it is complaining about is the data on fish coming from ICES—the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea. We all know ICES; it is the key data provider for us and the European Union in setting quotas, TACs and that whole area. To quote Simon Collins, executive officer of the Shetland Fishermen’s Association, on the ICES recommendations about changes of TACs in the North Sea and off the west coast:

“These numbers bear no relation to what our members are seeing out on the fishing grounds every day … With such wild swings in both directions a regular occurrence in recent years, it is clear that ICES needs to take a good hard look at the process and consider whether its modelling is still relevant.”


I have really good news for the Shetland fishermen: using remote electronic monitoring with the help of artificial intelligence and machine learning, and very cheap technology, we can have live data of what is in the ocean, what is being caught and what is discarded. We can really firm up on the data on our marine environment. It has probably escaped the Minister’s notice that I put down a similar amendment with the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, to the Fisheries Bill—or he has perhaps forgotten. One of the things which we emphasised there was not the control aspect of fisheries regulation, but the fact that this provided plentiful hard data about fisheries, the marine environment and everything that happens to be caught. That is why I brought this amendment back into this Bill, because it is equally—if not more—an environmental issue as much as a fisheries management one. That is why this amendment is important.

Following Royal Assent to the Fisheries Act, I was delighted that Defra went out and undertook two consultations around remote electronic monitoring. I would be very interested to hear from the Minister what the responses were, and when the Government are going to move those forward. I congratulate them on moving this process further forward. It is the way to sustain fisheries stocks, and it is the way, more importantly, to be clear and have hard data rather than the opaque and fuzzy data which we have on our fisheries at the moment, and our marine biodiversity and ecology more broadly. Again, here we can actually lead, and in such a way that all those nations that want to enter with their fishing vessels into our EEZ and our waters can be told, “You must do the same thing”. For those foreign vessels, most of them from the European Union, but also Norway and other Nordic islands, we can actually start the process, and have others start it as well.

This is a truly important way of moving forward. I welcome the fact that the Government took on these consultations. It would be a huge shame if they got no further. I would be very interested to hear from the Minister what the Government’s plans are for remote electronic monitoring. With this technology, we can really understand what is going on in our oceans. I beg to move.

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)]

I begin by thanking the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, for tabling this amendment, which I have signed. It is the latest move in his long and valuable campaign for the adoption of remote electronic monitoring of fishing vessels. I do not blame him at all for our being here late at night; I blame the Government. If they had written a better Bill, it would not have attracted 300 amendments and we would not still be here after seven days, with an eighth day in prospect.

We discussed remote electronic monitoring when considering the Fisheries Bill, and your Lordships were able to get the Minister to put a firm commitment in support of it on the record. The noble Lord, Lord Gardiner of Kimble, stated:

“The Government are clear that we will be consulting on increasing the use of REM in the first half of 2021, with implementation following that. I am not in a position to give a precise date today for when this will be implemented, but I can absolutely say—and I want to put this on the record—that the Government are absolutely seized of the importance of REM.”—[Official Report, 12/11/20; col. 1174.]


That is great, isn’t it? We could all be confident that this would go in the Bill.

Unfortunately, things do not seem to be progressing particularly quickly. The latest update I could find on the GOV.UK website, from 7 May, says:

“We’ve considered all the submissions and will continue to use the evidence provided to inform further thinking on the use of remote electronic monitoring in England. We’ll engage more with stakeholders in the near future around the topics that were highlighted in this call for evidence.”


This language does not reflect the previous enthusiasm of the noble Lord, Lord Gardiner of Kimble, so can the Minister here today please confirm that the Government remain

“absolutely seized of the importance of REM”?

Can he please give details of the Government’s thinking that has been informed by the consultation? It would be wonderful to know how long it will be before this thinking turns into action. Given the long lead-in times for retrofitting all the existing fishing vessels, the sooner the Government can move forward on this and articulate a specific monitoring scheme, the better. We need to embrace this technology as a matter of urgency. If the Government continue to drag their feet, it would seem that the noble Lord, Lord Gardiner of Kimble, has been left hanging out to dry.

Agriculture Bill

Debate between Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb and Lord Teverson

Report stage & Report stage (Hansard): House of Lords & Report: 1st sitting & Report: 1st sitting: House of Lords
Tuesday 15th September 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)]

My Lords, for those of us who have spent decades advocating for human society to work with instead of against nature, the specific references to agroecology in these amendments represent a great success. These amendments would each expand the principles of agroecology and ensure that ecological outcomes were delivered.

In particular, I have attached my name to Amendment 7 from the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh of Pickering, which would specifically support pasture-fed livestock systems and the improvement of landscapes and biodiversity linked to pastureland. This is all about a farming and ecosystem format that can help to move us towards some sort of food security.

Food security will be an absolutely huge challenge. Anybody who watched David Attenborough’s programme on Sunday will be aware that he mentioned several times that biodiversity is falling. We need biodiversity drastically. If we do not have it, growing food will become harder and harder. We are at a point in the world where some of it is burning, some is melting and neither of those things is good for the human race.

In addition, the world has not even fully met any of the 20 biodiversity targets set a decade ago by Governments globally. Nature protection efforts have been ineffective. We already have 1 degree of warming and are heading towards 3 degrees of warming. It will be a world that we simply will not recognise.

I am delighted to support Amendment 16 from the noble Earl, Lord Caithness, and Amendment 11 from the noble Earl, Lord Dundee. Amendment 16 would ensure that agroecology was truly nature friendly. Amendment 11 would support farming opportunities for new entrants and young farmers, ensuring a healthy supply of innovative and motivated farmers ready to take on the challenges and opportunities of greening our farming and land management.

I hope that in his response the Minister will set out specific and deliverable plans for each of these issues.

[Lord Teverson (LD)]

My Lords, I will speak to Amendments 8, 21 and 23. I say again that I am very pleased that the Government have added a definition of the word “agroecology” to the Bill. That is a great step forward. I not only thank the Government but congratulate them on recognising this type of agriculture as something that is not just from the past—although it looks to the past for many of its methods and ethics—but is an important way to move forward. The motive of the amendments I have put forward—and I thank the noble Earls, Lord Dundee and Lord Caithness, and the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett of Manor Castle, for their support—is to reinforce that message within the Bill.

The area that is not mentioned is agroforestry, which is equivalent. This is not the forestry that the Forestry Commission is into—not that I have anything against that generally—but is around integrating forestry into whole-farm management. Benefits from water management include biodiversity, crops from those trees, silviculture and even energy. So the motive of these amendments is to up a style of whole-farm management that looks to the future and entirely fulfils the reason for having ELMS and this new funding structure. I very much hope that the Government, having taken this one step forward, will be able to take it further forward as well.

My Amendment 21 adds to the word “agroecology” at the top of page 3 of the Bill, which states that

“‘better understanding of the environment’ includes better understanding of agroecology”.

I am just suggesting that we add “and agroforestry” to the Bill. I am sure that that is something the Government would wish to promote in the new financing structures and I can see no reason why it would change the meaning of the Bill in any way. If the Minister could do that, I would be hugely grateful to him, knowing of his commitment to the future of farming and ways of farming that promote biodiversity.

That biodiversity and quantum of nature, which the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, just mentioned, are crucial to how ELMS rolls out. I will be talking about this later, so I will not say more about it now, but biodiversity is something that agroecology and agroforestry can promote to achieve what the Government want.