Environment Bill

Duke of Montrose Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 7th July 2021 Lords Chamber

[The Lord Bishop of Manchester [V]]

My Lords, I draw your Lordships’ attention to my interests as set out in the register, specifically with the Church Commissioners—a significant owner of agricultural and development land. On matters of climate change, we are a leading edge and an awarding-winning investor, yet the Bill reminds us that climate is only part of the story.

I support Amendments 196, 198 and 199. I am grateful for the speech of the noble Baronesses, Lady Hayman of Ullock and Lady Bennett of Manor Castle, the noble and learned Lord, Hope, and others, who convincingly made the points that net gain must not be subject to time limits and must be adequately funded.

Back in my days as a parish priest, one church in my care had a notice in its vestry which read: “Please leave this room a little cleaner and tidier than you found it.” That was, in its small way, an attempt at net gain. The Bill offers a golden opportunity to apply that philosophy on a far wider scale. My little village church was an early adopter of a national church programme to increase biodiversity. Churchyards form a refuge from the built environment in urban areas and intensive agriculture in more rural surroundings. Setting aside an area of sanctuary in God’s acre enables wildflowers to re-emerge and small creatures to find a home. Yet churchyards are able to play this role precisely because they benefit from stable stewardship over a term far longer than a mere 30 years. Net gain cannot have a cut-off date. I am grateful to the Minister for his amendment today to extend that net gain requirement to some major national infrastructure projects. In supporting that, I echo the calls of the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, and others in seeking assurances that net gain here will also be robust and long lasting.

With a suitable offsetting regime in place, where gain cannot practically be achieved on site, local churches will stand at the forefront of those ready to step in. In doing so, we will be enhancing the work to which we have been long committed, both theologically and practically.

[The Duke of Montrose (Con) [V]]

My Lords, the Bill is systematically revising so many aspects of the environment where former approaches have been lacking. A large slice of the area where noble Lords have been discussing improvement is in basically rural issues. I have declared my interests as a livestock farmer.

The Government have laid out their framework for dealing with overall environmental issues in Clauses 1 to 19—their targets, reviews and renewal plans and what they term their environmental principles. Do we reckon to approach people with a carrot or a stick? In my last intervention I quoted a phrase from Gulliver’s Travels about increasing the blades of grass from one to two, which gave a positive spin to an environmental principle and a vision for people to work towards.

In trying to invent something similar in its phraseology, I will borrow a phrase from Bob Geldof and say we are now asking as many people as possible to enlist to feed the world holistically, in terms of its air, water, biodiversity and people. By this, we could earn the thanks of future generations. There might be a catchier way of expressing it, but many feel that this is the sort of thing they should make an effort to achieve, even if we differ in our views of how to achieve it. The mountain in front of us is to learn to change the motives of countryside managers. That is the best guarantee of the permanence we are looking for.

This group of amendments focuses on biodiversity gain as a condition of planning permission. I listened with much interest to the Minister giving some clarification of what it intends to achieve for national strategic infrastructure projects. His Amendment 201A, at a quick glance, appears to be asking for the ultimate Henry VIII measure; it is almost saying that we do not know the detail of what we want to achieve, but want all the powers that might be necessary to achieve it. This echoes what those with responsibility in rural areas are feeling; we do not yet know what new support systems will achieve. But there is a critical difference in their case, as it comes without any power to change the terms other than as the Bill allows.

It is still possible that all agriculture will achieve some biodiversity once reliance is placed on crop rotations and restoring natural fertility. Can the Minister clarify, first, whether there will be some guidance on what level must be reached before land is considered suitable for biodiversity off-setting? In the same context, will assisting the achievement of biodiversity gain on a remote site be regarded as equal to a gain within the boundary of a significant site?

We are embarking on an unquantifiable change in the countryside. As farmers, we know that Mother Nature will respond, but with what? We cannot tell what the final outcome will be to it all. There will always be some looking to achieve a viable enterprise from the land, and we may have to adapt. That is where I cannot support Amendments 196 and 201AZB put forward by the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman of Ullock. She feels that 30 years is not long enough, and perhaps we all feel uneasy leaving some of this entirely in the hands of the Secretary of State. Would it make any difference to their position if the stipulation was 50 years? I heard the noble Baroness, Lady Young of Old Scone, talk about 100 years.

I was looking forward to supporting Amendment 200 in the name of my noble friend Lord Blencathra, but I gather that this is unnecessary because the Government have decided to accept it and all its implications. The only thing in my mind is whether it would be better to introduce the marine element to the main section of the Bill, as is proposed in a later group by the noble Lord, Lord Teverson. Would it still be necessary to mention “marine environment” in this section? I look forward to the Minister’s response.

[Lord Krebs (CB) [V]]

My Lords, I support Amendment 196 in the names of the noble Baronesses, Lady Jones of Whitchurch, Lady Parminter and Lady Bennett of Manor Castle, and the noble Lord, Lord Teverson. I also support other amendments in this group, which I will mention when I come to them.

I join other noble Lords in welcoming government Amendment 194B and the new Schedule 14A, which will include nationally significant infrastructure projects in biodiversity net gain. In this context, I also support Amendment 194C, which aims to close a potential loophole by including other major infrastructure projects, such as those concentred under a hybrid Bill procedure, in the net-gain requirement.

Amendment 196, as we have heard, seeks to remove the 30-year time limit for off-site compensatory habitat under biodiversity net gain. Many Peers have spoken eloquently in support of this change, although some have said that “in perpetuity” may be too long. So there may be a debate to be had: if not 30 years, how long should it be? Still, it should certainly be for much longer than 30 years.

The Government’s argument for the 30-year limit appears to be that landowners may be reluctant to maintain habitats and lock up land in perpetuity. However, if the aim is to protect nature for future generations, it is crucial for net-gain projects to have a longevity of greater than one generation. Furthermore, the development projects that net gain seeks to off-set will often certainly last much longer than 30 years, as the noble Baronesses, Lady Bennett and Lady Hayman of Ullock, mentioned. If a habitat created to compensate for damage by a development can simply be ploughed up after 30 years while the damaging development is left standing, we will not be passing on a guarantee of nature in better condition to the next generation. This is not damage avoided but damage deferred—an asymmetry that punishes nature.

As it stands, the Bill creates a carousel of land-use changes where landowners are paid to off-set environmental harm for a while before turning the land over to some other use. Instead we need lasting habitat that will genuinely help to create a nature recovery network, even if the result is fewer parcels of habitat for sale; that is the price of restoring nature. As the noble Earl, Lord Devon, rightly pointed out, we have to make hard choices about land use.

Furthermore, as others have pointed out, the creation of new habitats and the arrival of new species can often be a long, slow process. We have already heard several examples, to which I add my local RSPB reserve on Otmoor, near Oxford. It was established in 1997 by converting farmland into wetland, and it is still attracting additional new species of birds each year. A limit on the time horizon of net-gain projects will add to concerns already raised by ecologists at the Durrell Institute of Conservation and Ecology at the University of Kent, who found in a recent report that net gain is leading to large losses of green open space, off-set by the promise of better-quality habitats at an uncertain time in the future. They also found that 95% of the off-setting projects produced small disjointed areas of habitat rather than following the principles of

“more, bigger, better, more joined-up”

proposed by Sir John Lawton.

Given the shortcomings already identified in the operation of net gain, surely the opportunity in this Bill is to strengthen the protection of nature where we can, including by lifting the 30-year restriction. In other jurisdictions, such as the United States and Australia, off-sets are required to last either as long as the development itself or for perpetuity. If the Government are serious about creating real gains for nature from development then those gains need to be lasting.

Amendment 198A in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Young of Old Scone, seems a no-brainer. Just as we have a waste hierarchy, we should surely have a biodiversity hierarchy: do not do harm, minimise harm and, lastly, compensate for harm.

In conclusion, the onus is on the Minister to explain to us why the perfectly sensible Amendments 194C, 196 and 198A should not be accepted. I very much look forward to his response.