Public Access to Nature

Bob Seely Excerpts

Thursday 18th May 2023 Commons Chamber

[Bob Seely (Isle of Wight) (Con)]

I am going to look at access to nature in relation to protection of the natural world—and, indeed, access to it—through the prism of my constituency, which means that I will be very parochial, but I am also going to pitch a series of arguments to the Minister, as I have done in addressing previous Ministers. I thank the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion (Caroline Lucas) for securing the debate; it is also nice to see the Minister here, and it is great to see a fellow co-chair of the all-party parliamentary group on Ukraine, the hon. Member for Leeds North West (Alex Sobel) on the Opposition Front Bench.

First, I will explain why I believe that the Isle of Wight, for the purposes of the natural world and human access to it, should be seen as a single whole rather than, as is currently the case, a patchwork of designations with some undesignated land. Secondly, I will make the case for a specific island designation. There is no national park on the Island, but I should like to see an island park, which would be slightly different. That could possibly be introduced on other islands as well, such as Anglesey and the Scottish islands. I may have misunderstood, but I thought that there was to be primary legislation following the Glover review. We were looking at the idea of city parks, and I should like that to be extended to the idea of an island park. Thirdly, in support of those two points, I shall explain why the remarkable depth and diversity of animal life, marine and landscape habitat and geology on the Isle of Wight, which is unique in the United Kingdom, should be much more valued by policymakers in London. First, however, I will make my argument in a little more detail.

The Island is said to represent England in miniature. The east resembles Sussex and Kent, with its thick hedges and coppices; the stone walls around the Undercliff on the south side of the Isle of Wight resemble Cornwall, as do the sandy little coves; in the south-west, where I live, the windswept chalk downs somewhat resemble parts of Dorset; and the creeks of Yarmouth, Newtown and Wootton on the north of the island resemble those in Devon. Importantly, being an island, we have not had the invasion of non-native species such as deer, grey squirrels and escaped mink from mink farms—we are free of those.

The Island has a series of internationally and nationally important nature conservation sites, which I will list. We have special areas of marine conservation; as part of an island designation, we would include marinescape as well landscape. We have the Newtown national nature reserve. We have a remarkable 41 SSSIs and 395 local wildlife sites. We have two of the south-east of England’s four heritage coasts, and just over half of the Island is an area of outstanding natural beauty. It should be much more. Someone turned up in 1963 from the Ministry, spent half a day on the Island, threw a few splotches of AONB on the map and left; it was not a well-conducted exercise.

We are again applying for dark skies status for the south-west of the Island. I got back from London last Friday morning at 2 am—I got the midnight ferry down. Even with a partial moon, the intensity of the night sky in the south-west, where I live, is breathtaking. Having dark skies and being able to see the night sky—sadly, in our light-polluted civilisation, fewer and fewer people are able to—is humbling and uplifting at the same time.

Let me put all those explanations and categorisations into terms that geographers might recognise—again, I apologise for listing, but I am using the geographical terms from Natural England and other organisations. Our landscape and seascape include: broad-leaf mixed and yew woodland; maritime cliff and slope; lowland calcareous grassland; coastal and floodplain grazing marsh; lowland meadows; reedbeds; lowland dry acidic grassland; fens; lowland heathland; the chalk downs that provide the spine of the Island, from Bembridge on one side to the Needles all the way over in the west; saline lagoons; mudflats; coastal sand dunes, and coastal vegetated shingle.

I will mention specifically our chines, which are mostly unique to us, although I believe there are a few in west Dorset too. Those are spectacular steep-sided gorges where rivers and streams flow down to the sea and, over thousands of years, have carved their way through soft sandstone. Shanklin chine, celebrated by Keats, is one of the more famous, but there are chines all over the Island, including near me on the south side.

What does all this mean? With our English landscape in miniature, our range of different habitats and our role as an island, we are pretty unique geologically and geographically—I will say a little more about that in a second. We are also home to many different species, some of which are unique to the Isle of Wight. Importantly, we have species on the Island, some of them flourishing, that are near-extinct in other parts of the United Kingdom. Those include red squirrels, dormice and water voles, because we do not have grey squirrels or lots of escaped mink. I thank the Isle of Wight Red Squirrel Trust for its great work looking after injured red squirrels, which we sadly see occasionally on the roads.

We have some of the UK’s rarest bats. I think 17 or 18 species have been identified on the Isle of Wight, including the greater horseshoe bat, which those who know their bats—I do not, but I read the work and talk to people who do—tell me is very rare nowadays. We also have the Bechstein’s bat and the grey long-eared bat. I thank the Isle of Wight Natural History and Archaeological Society for the information.

Our specialised flora includes early gentian, which is found in Wiltshire, Dorset and the Isle of Wight; field cow-wheat, which is present in only a few locations in the country; and wood calamint, which we have in a single dry chalk valley on the Island. For insects, the Island is the sole British location of the Glanville fritillary butterfly and the reddish buff moth. About a decade ago, we rediscovered the bee hawk-moth in part of the Island. I am sorry to list stuff, but I want to get it on the record, because it is important to the arguments that I am going to make.

For birds, the Solent as a whole, including our marshes, is a Ramsar designated site—a wetland of international importance. Brading marshes and the Newtown and Western Yar marshes and estuaries are internationally important for migrating and wading birds, and for the insects and plants that exist in that saline estuary— I think that is the geographers’ term—habitat. The sea eagle—the second largest in the world—was reintroduced in England on the Isle of Wight, and there is now a nesting pair, I think at Brading marshes. Buzzards, which were once rare, are now relatively plentiful, especially in the middle of the Island.

The areas surrounding the Island are protected by marine conservation zones, special protection areas and special areas of conservation. There are two species of seahorse that can be seen—sadly, often to a lesser extent nowadays—around the British coast. Those are the spiny seahorse and the short-snouted seahorse—a bit of an alliterative struggle, that one. Both exist in and around the shores of the Isle of Wight. We have other rare or semi-rare marine species, including native oyster, peacock’s tail and stalked jellyfish. There is a plan to reintroduce the white-clawed crayfish, the English crayfish having died out in many parts of the UK because of the bigger American crayfish, which we find in Pret A Manger sandwiches and so on. I thank the Wildheart Animal Sanctuary for that potential work.

The purpose of my listing those species is to show the Minister the variety of the wildlife that exists on the Island but is relatively rare in other parts of the United Kingdom. There is a little bit more of the list and then I shall come to my points.

We have seagrass meadows in Osborne bay, Yarmouth and Bouldnor. Seagrass is very important for carbon capture, which is why a project is taking seeds from those coastal waters around the Isle of Wight and replanting them in the Beaulieu river in the Solent. The relative strength of our natural world—I accept that it is relative—is being or will be used for the benefit of the wider UK, as is exemplified by what is happening with the crayfish, the seabeds and the sea eagle.

All that—thank you for bearing with me, Mr Deputy Speaker—means that the variety, diversity and depth of our habitats, natural flora, and common, rare and unique insects, marine life and animal life are pretty much unique in the United Kingdom.

Let me say a word on geology, too. We have one of the most complex geologies pretty much anywhere in the world, but certainly in Britain. The Undercliff, a breathtakingly beautiful area along the southern tip of the Island, is the most geologically unstable inhabited part of Europe. Sadly, our roads occasionally slip alarmingly towards the sea. The last time that happened, eight years ago, about 75 metres of A road parted company with the rest of the road during a particularly bad storm. Sadly, that road has not yet been repaired.

Along the south-west of the Island, we have a near-complete exposure of Cretaceous coast—of orange Wealden rock. If one looks at the Isle of Wight, one sees white rock and orange rock. They are from roughly the same period, about 120 million years ago. The Wealden rock produces dinosaur fossils in relative abundance, which is why the Isle of Wight is Europe’s No. 1 site for the discovery of fossilised bones of dinosaurs. Indeed, we have dinosaur footprint casts near where I live in Brook bay. I hope that I can say without sounding like a member of the Flintstones that we actually have a family dinosaur. Fossilised bones of an iguanodon were found on my great-great-great-grandad’s farm in about 1870, so there is actually an Iguanodon seelyi. There is some discussion among palaeontologists about whether it is a true species or a subspecies. I will let others argue that point.

The point is that our wildlife is pretty unique and there is not such concentration of different landscapes in any other part of the United Kingdom. That is not to question the beauty of the moors, the lake district, bits of Yorkshire or Dorset, but there is not the concentration of almost every type of habitat in the UK in one place, apart from on the Isle of Wight. There is not the concentration of wildlife—common, rare on the mainland, or unique to the Island—anywhere else, and, frankly, there is not the geology.

Our access to nature is relatively good; we have 500 miles of footpaths. That is probably largely because we avoided enclosures back in the 18th century—we were quite slow to take up those things—so we kept our medieval rights of way, which existed for hundreds of years before that, into the modern era. We also have about 2,000 hectares of open access land, and we have a coastal path, which in most places goes along the coast. We have some 2 million visitors a year.

Frankly, back in the 1940s and ’50s, the case for making the Isle of Wight Britain’s first national park was overwhelming. J. B. Priestley, one of the great authors of the 20th century, argued as much. Unfortunately, it did not happen. I am not arguing for a national park, but I am arguing for a specific island designation because of the uniqueness of our geology and so on.

The Isle of Wight should have a unique role. Indeed, my hon. Friend the Member for Worcester (Mr Walker) talked about Save the Shire and how people have written in celebration of the landscape. For its size, nowhere compares to the Isle of Wight on that score. Lord Tennyson used the landscape and the seascape in many different ways, and he used the Solent in “Crossing the Bar”, a breathtakingly beautiful poem about crossing from the mainland to the Island, and metaphorically from life to death—it was one of the last poems he wrote.

John Keats’s most famous poem “Endymion” was probably written about Shanklin Chine:

“A thing of beauty is a joy forever”.

Like many others, he was bowled over by the Island’s natural beauty. Turner sketched and painted on the Island, and the 19th-century Freshwater and Bonchurch sets were hugely influential on the Island’s artistic heritage. Some of the finest collections of pastoral poetry, in which we have tended to specialise, were written in the 19th and 20th centuries, including some breathtakingly beautiful poetry. The daughter of William Makepeace Thackeray asked on a visit to the Island in 1853,

“Is there no one who is commonplace here? Is everybody either a poet, or a genius, or a painter”?

Considering that she was talking about previous constituents, I would undoubtedly say yes, but it shows that our countryside, our seascape and our landscape are widely celebrated.

I now come to my political argument. Thank you for bearing with me, Mr Deputy Speaker. I am constructing an argument, but there is a reasonable amount of detail that I want to get on the record.

The Isle of Wight has a single designation under the UNESCO biosphere, but that has no standing in UK law. How about thinking of ways that it could? I thank Joel Bateman of the Isle of Wight AONB for his great work leading that campaign. In UK designations, more than half our land is an AONB, which I believe is wrongly parcelled into different areas. If we are to treat one bit of countryside as a unified entity, surely it should be an island, and therefore it should surely be the Isle of Wight. I have driven through the Cotswolds AONB and it is very beautiful—do not get me wrong—but it has flat, boring bits. Different lumps of the Cotswolds were not parcelled out. The Cotswolds were taken as a single entity, so why is a much smaller part of the world, the Isle of Wight, not being treated as a single entity? It is effectively a patchwork because someone turned up on the ferry in 1963 at midday and left at 6 o’clock, having pottered around the Island in an Austin 7 and made a few notes. Not only did we not get a national park, but we did not even get a unified area of outstanding natural beauty.

Our protected landscape, although fragmented, is incredibly special. Our finite landscape is in danger of being damaged. Natural England has said:

“Urban development is spreading, with waste disposal sites, extensive holiday and industrial developments and caravan parks blurring the edge of settlements.”

The extent to which rural landscapes on the Island have been disturbed by urban development increased by 27% between 1960 and 2007. Some of our rivers have been badly damaged—we now know of the dirty rivers scandal—and Southern Water is thankfully now using the Isle of Wight as an example of best practice in how to clean up rivers. I hope the rest of Britain will catch up with the Island’s natural regeneration in the years to come. In this area, we are leading the way.

An all-island designation could encompass both maritime and landscape. Why not have both in a single entity? A single protected landscape status for the Island would fit with its single unitary authority and its biosphere status. Frankly, it would also help our branding. The Island is special in many ways, but we are not one of the richest parts of Britain, and we are certainly not one of the richest parts of the south-east. Environmental and ecological tourism would be a significant benefit. The Island’s 2 million visitors already contribute about £560 million to our economy.

If I had a choice, I would choose controlled development that both looks after the Island’s housing needs and protects our landscape, without appealing to a mainland market, because the landscape is important in its own right and it is important for our tourism economy, rather than the endless urban sprawl. Large-scale development is completely unsuited to the Island.

An island park designation would see the Island as a single ecological and environmental entity. Access to nature would be provided wherever necessary, respecting the law, but it would primarily function for the benefit of the nature recovery plan. I thought the Glover review would result in primary legislation.

I assure you that I will be winding up in the next two or three minutes, Mr Deputy Speaker. I normally make concise speeches, so I feel a bit guilty whenever I go for more than 15 minutes.

An island park would effectively function like an AONB. It would rule out large-scale development, so we would no longer build for a mainland market, but we would, importantly, look after the Island’s housing needs, which we have not done for 50 years. We would probably have more affordable housing, more social housing and more housing association housing. That would be our priority to get our youngsters on to the market. If people want to retire to the Isle of Wight, that is great, but the back pages of the Isle of Wight County Press list 500 homes for sale at any one time. If we are building, we should build for Islanders—mainly the young, but occasionally the old when they need to downsize. I would seek a ban on largescale housing development in favour of smaller developments in existing communities, using the few brownfield sites and perhaps mildly increasing the density of our towns.

I am frustrated that, whenever I talk to the Government or Natural England, they say they are looking at extending the Cheshire Sandstone Ridge AONB and the Yorkshire Wolds AONB, as justified as that would be, and potentially creating two new AONBs. We will have to wait 10 years for a review of our AONB. Why? The next time we have a landscape protection Bill for, say, city parks, why do we not consider special island designations for the Isle of Wight, Anglesey, the Isle of Arran and the Outer Hebrides?

The former Prime Minister, my right hon. Friend the Member for Uxbridge and South Ruislip (Boris Johnson), committed to 30 by 30 and to an additional 4,000 sq km, which is welcome, and I assume the current Prime Minister would do the same. In the Isle of Wight, the Government have a natural partner that wants to work with them. The council has committed to an all-island designation, and so have I, because we want to be an example of best practice for how human beings can live in harmony with the natural world and for how we can get the nature recovery we need, because it is obvious that we are becoming less biodiverse. If we can do that on the Island, with its multiple types of species and multiple habitats, we could learn how to do it elsewhere. This is a no-brainer, as the Americans would say, and I would welcome it if the Government wanted to work with me on this.

To recap, the Island should for the natural world, and the human enjoyment of it, be seen as a single whole. There is a very strong case for introducing an island designation in our landscape protection, and I believe it should be introduced first in the Isle of Wight because of the uniqueness of our environment, the uniqueness of our habitats, the uniqueness of our wildlife and the uniqueness of our geology. I look forward to talking further about this with the Government.