Environment Bill (Eighteenth sitting)

Cherilyn Mackrory Excerpts

Committee stage & Committee Debate: 18th sitting: House of Commons
Thursday 19th November 2020 Public Bill Committees

[Rebecca Pow]

I thank the hon. Member for Cambridge for the amendment and for his constant endeavour to strengthen the Bill, which we want to be a strong one—he is right about that—but I do not believe that this amendment is necessary, and I will set out why.

Local nature recovery strategies will be a powerful new tool to help us take a more strategic approach to how we plan for nature’s recovery and to how we use nature-based solutions to address wider environmental challenges. The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right about nature-based solutions, but they are very much part and parcel of this new will to deliver for nature and for all those other benefits—flood control, better water quality, carbon capture and sequestration, and so on—so I think we are on the same page on that.

[Cherilyn Mackrory (Truro and Falmouth) (Con)]

I think the point that the Minister is trying to make, which I reiterate, is that a lot of those schemes are in their infancy. We have just discussed the five pilot plans, one of which my constituency is involved in. If the Bill is too prescriptive, we will be unable to tweak those plans later if they do not work. It is important that we set out the intention on the face of the Bill and let the pilots do their work, so that Ministers and experts in the field have the flexibility to learn from and use best practice moving forward.

[Rebecca Pow]

I thank my hon. Friend for highlighting that; I could not have put it better myself. That is why we are running the pilots, and it is great that they are already running. The hon. Member for Cambridge asks when we are going to do all this, but we are actually already doing it. My hon. Friend is absolutely right to say that each area will be different: Cornwall will be quite different from south Humber or Keighley. Those areas’ requirements and demands will vary and that is why we need to run pilots.

We do not want the pilots to go on forever—the hon. Member for Cambridge is absolutely right about that—and the Secretary of State and I are at pains to say, “Yes, we want all the data and feed-in, but we do need action.” I like to think that we will see action. The Secretary of State said on Second Reading that we have to ensure that we work to promote actions through the environmental land management scheme and that those actions work with what we are putting into our local nature recovery strategies. The idea is that those will all work together and that we will then deliver our biodiversity net gain, which will also be helped by the strengthened biodiversity duty on public authorities in the Bill.

Beyond the Bill, the strategies will support local authorities in protecting and enhancing biodiversity through the planning system, and encourage more collaborative working between the public, private and voluntary sectors, to establish and achieve common goals. We are keen that each responsible authority leading production of a strategy properly understands and considers the different mechanisms through which the net gain and adding to nature could be achieved. The responsible authority will not always have direct control of all those different delivery mechanisms, however, so they will need to work collaboratively with other organisations, as we have proposed.

Simply requiring the responsible authority to give its opinion on processes that it does not control will add little to the strategy and could deter partners from engaging constructively. My intention is instead to use the statutory guidance provided with the clauses to explain how the responsible authority should take account of potential delivery mechanisms when preparing its strategy. I agree with the hon. Member for Cambridge: he is absolutely right that we are coming up to a crucial year, with COP26. However, I hope he is very pleased that nature and adaptation are part of the COP. That is why it is so important that we demonstrate that we are going to lead by example, with the pilots and all the measures in the Bill, which show that we are taking these issues seriously; it can work and add to nature. I therefore kindly ask the hon. Member to withdraw the amendment.