Environment and Climate Change Committee Report: An Extraordinary Challenge: Restoring 30 per cent of our Land and Sea by 2030

Baroness Young of Old Scone Excerpts

Wednesday 11th September 2024 Grand Committee

[Baroness Young of Old Scone (Lab)]

My Lords, the worst thing in the world is to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Parminter, for two reasons. One is that she was a magnificent chair of this committee, on which I was very privileged to serve, and the other is that she has now said everything that needs to be said, and said it eloquently and with no notes—goodness, there are days I hate her. I could just say that I agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Parminter, and sit down, but that would be a bit of a cop out. I would like to make a few additions, mostly focusing on the land-based elements of our report.

The noble Baroness used the word “slogan”, and that is what 30 by 30 is—it is a great slogan, and there are some in this Room who helped invent it, but we now need a plan, and it needs deliverables, and timescales for those deliverables, and a way of monitoring them, or we certainly will not hit the 30 by 30 target.

I will start with sites of special scientific interest. They are the jewel in the crown of nature conservation and biodiversity in this country, and they are the best protected sites that we have, but particularly the subset of those that are special areas of conservation and special protection areas. However, there have been no real increases in the number of these sites for the last 20 years.

I was probably chairing English Nature at the time when the last major additions to the suite of SSSIs went through. A small number have been declared since then—I can see that some noble Lords are going to contradict me on that one—but generally speaking we need more. It is true to say that it has not been the fashion to declare SSSIs over the last few years, but there is a real gap: there are ecological networks that need to be filled and species that need to be protected where an SSSI would be the appropriate way of doing that. We have to get over the unwillingness to declare SSSIs and see them as the pinnacle of protection. There is not a huge number of them, and we need more to fill in those gaps.

Perhaps more worrying is the whole condition argument. To hark back again—I am so old that I can remember the 1990s, for goodness sake—we at English Nature used to agonise that only about 60% of SSSIs were in favourable condition in those days. That was a key English Nature performance indicator; it had to report on that every year in its annual report, and it was a big issue for us. We are now at the point where we have less than 35% in favourable condition, and that is down from last year’s number of 37%. There is a pressing need for management plans to improve these SSSIs, for those management plans to be resourced and for there to be a system of monitoring conditions that is better than the one at the moment. In reality, if the two issues of the extent and condition of our SSSIs were tackled effectively, those two simple remedies would take us half way to 30 by 30.

One of the two other big contributions to the 30 by 30 issue is our national parks and our protected national landscapes. The Climate Change Committee was keen on giving an additional statutory duty to protect nature to what were in those days AONBs and national parks, but that was rejected, rather fulsomely if I may say so, by the Government during the Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill—I break out into hives when I utter the words “Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill”. There was a compromise amendment on protected landscape plans and the contribution to environmental improvement targets, but the regulations to make that happen in practice were delayed by the fall of the Government. We now need to revisit that. To be honest, I do not think the compromise amendment should be pursued any further; we should just go straight to an action that declares a new nature purpose for protected landscapes and national parks.

There has been some progress on delineating the draft criteria for what should count towards 30 by 30. In the early days of 30 by 30 it was felt that, if we lumped in the national parks and the AONBs, we would hit it in one go, but most of the land in the national parks and AONBs is not managed for nature conservation as its primary purpose, or indeed its secondary purpose, so we have to be pretty clear about what should count and what should not. In common with the noble Baroness, Lady Parminter, I think we should simply fall in line with the IUCN guidance and the international definitions, and then include other effective area-based conservation measures if they can be demonstrated to be well managed.

The last chunk of land that we need to focus on—a very big chunk—is agricultural land, which makes up a huge proportion of the land under management in this country. Nature-friendly farming is going to be crucial in this. We need to ensure that more farmers are encouraged, advised and supported to move into the higher tiers of nature-friendly farming schemes, and particularly that the guidance for that is made more specific and simpler, and is clarified. It is only at those higher tiers that we will get the right sort of outcomes that will produce genuinely high-quality land that is in favourable condition for nature conservation.

The current Government, of whom I greatly approve, have made some commitments already. They have said they will halt the decline of species by 2030, which is quite a big ask, and have honoured their international commitment to 30 by 30. Most importantly, there will be a new statutory plan to protect and restore our natural environment, with delivery plans for each of the targets therein, and a rapid review of the environmental improvement programme. That is crucial, and all our work on 30 by 30 needs to clearly link to that.

We also need to make sure that all of this work on the 30 by 30 agenda relates to other strands of work that are under way. We have local authorities beavering away on local nature recovery strategies, so we have to ensure that we understand the relationship between those and site protection. We now need to see what the land use framework—the broader framework that the Government say they support—will actually comprise; it will put nature conservation, food production and trees and all sorts of other non-environmental issues into one framework that allows us to make the best of our land, a scarce resource in this country.

The land use framework will, I hope, provide an overarching way to look at the need for land in this country. It will allow actors at national, regional and local authority level, and individual land owners, to have a basis of sound and well-analysed data, and a set of principles under which they can begin to think about how land that they have any influence on can do the best it can not only for private landowners but for the nation as a whole. It need not be something we are scared of. It is not going to be obligatory. It will, I hope, be a help. I hope that it will also be a help in some of the rather nasty local disputes we might see coming up around the use of land for development, infrastructure and housing.

I want to make one last point that your Lordships will not be surprised by from a former chairman of the Woodland Trust—about ancient woodland, my favourite topic. The time has come for proper protection for ancient woodlands. Ancient woodlands would be a key part of 30 by 30, but they have absolutely no statutory protection beyond some very finely crafted words in the National Planning Policy Framework. We had to work pretty hard to get those words in, and we are working pretty hard to make sure they do not fall out in the review of the NPPF.

In this country, we still have over 1,000 sites containing ancient woodland that are being threatened by development or inappropriate land use. That is unacceptable. They are irreplaceable habitats, they are hugely environmentally and biodiversity rich, and they have historic heritage, as well a very modern purpose of combating climate change and giving the public a lot of pleasure. Let us grasp the nettle and have a new designation of equivalent protection for ancient woodland as currently exists for SSSIs. We are due to report to COP 16. Unless we do some of these things, we are going to look a bit cheesy.