Environment: 25-year Plan

Baroness Miller of Chilthorne Domer Excerpts

Monday 29th January 2018 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Miller of Chilthorne Domer (LD)]

My Lords, I declare my interests as in the register. Today, I mostly want to talk about biodiversity and measuring improvement. Of course, the aims in the plan are laudable, but how will we know that the environment is in a better state? Sure, we can measure that water is cleaner or that the air has fewer pollutants in it, and we can see some things, such as those which the author Michael McCarthy describes in his book, The Moth Snowstorm. I am sure that many of your Lordships will remember when moths used to,

“pack a car’s headlight beams like snowflakes in a blizzard”,

or the insects that used to stick to the windscreen. There was just so much insect life. Now, those moths have, by and large, gone.

Perhaps that tells us as much as a scientific calculation, but the environment plan needs to measure whether the whole ecosystem is improving. Currently, the lack of definition of ecosystem health undermines the plan’s entire approach to biodiversity. Will the return of a few iconic species be measured as success, even though many other species become extinct? Take the plan’s proposed increase in wildflower meadows. It is of course a good aim in itself, because a wildflower meadow is a lovely thing to behold, but it should be about far more than its flowers. It should support colonies of insects. Butterflies, bees and, in turn, insect-eating birds, should do well and find enough food to feed their young. In damper areas, frogs would find shelter. The meadow is cut later for hay when the seeds have mostly set and, in the meantime, hares can make their forms in the long grass for themselves and their leverets.

The picture I am painting is of a whole ecosystem, but what if the new wildflower meadows have no hedges where birds can nest? What if the meadow is next door to arable fields where there is intensive use of slug pellets? Then the frogs, thrushes and so on are likely to die of metaldehyde poisoning.

As I search the plan for definition, I found that it is only marine areas that benefit from the government ambition to be ecologically coherent. Those words are very important. I hope that the Government will develop an ambition for the terrestrial places, too, to be ecologically coherent.

The environment plan has a nod to Lawton and the need to create landscape-scale areas and wildlife corridors. It talks of the nature recovery network, and I was very excited about that. Like the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, I turned anxiously to the actions listed on page 59 that would enable that to happen. As he found, they are “considering”, another “considering” and then “evaluating”. In my book, those are just thoughts about actions.

What about measuring the health of ecosystems or, as the report calls it, metrics, which is rather a dry word for its job of creating a picture of ecosystem health? In its current form, the plan will be like a 500-piece jigsaw with 250 pieces missing. The plan itself recognises this, because on page 130, it states that the Government need “better measures”. The metrics need to consider, for example, the potential value of the site, including the role that it can play in connecting habitats. Currently, the metric looks only at habitats in development sites and, strangely, does not account for the species present. The inclusion of the species metrics will be essential to the delivery of biodiversity net gain. For biodiversity net gain to be effective, it should be mandatory for all developments, which I believe is not the case currently. As other noble Lords have identified, there are no milestones for the delivery of long-term targets. This is very much a work in progress, and there is a long way to go.

I was surprised at the very strong emphasis on the reintroduction of native species. Is that really the most productive use of limited resources and effort? Why not try first to preserve what we currently have but which is really threatened, such as the curlew, the small tortoiseshell butterfly, the natterjack toad or even the hedgehog? The environment plan is very light on whether, in future, farming policy will be based on a conversation with nature or just diminishing somewhat the battle against it. I was heartened that the Minister talked about working with nature because too often there is a mistaken thought that it is a choice between agricultural productivity and an agro-ecological approach.

There is a very interesting quote from John Cherry, the farmer who started the organisation Groundswell. He said:

“It has been calculated the ‘good’ bugs outnumber the ‘bad’ bugs by a factor of 1,700:1. So the chances are collateral damage by insecticides will take out a lot of the guys looking after our wheat and controlling potential pests. Many farmers now find they are routinely applying slug pellets. Could it be they would be better off allowing ground beetles to control them? It may be coincidence, but on our farm we have found since we stopped using insecticides on wheat, our need to pellet for slugs has all but disappeared”.


That is the sort of approach that we need to see in this plan.

In my last few moments, I shall just mention a few of the things that I welcome, such as the tree health resilience plan and, maybe, the integrated pest management. I do not understand quite what the Government mean by,

“at the heart of a holistic approach”.

I hope that it means what I think it means. I welcome the national parks and AONB proposals. The Government obviously feel that they are on more solid ground there than with land with no particular designation. I particularly welcome connecting people with the environment. The Government should recognise all the work done by people like the RHS, delivering horticultural learning into schools.

I welcome the statement on illegal wildlife trade. Does that mean that the Government are committing to continue to fund and, one hopes, expand the wildlife crime unit, which is of global importance but is always having to fight for its financial future? Finally, I welcome the mention of international work on migratory species in our overseas territories. I hope that we continue to contribute to scientific work globally.