Environment Bill

Duke of Montrose Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 30th June 2021 Lords Chamber

[The Principal Deputy Chairman of Committees (The Earl of Kinnoull) (CB)]

The noble Earl, Lord Devon, has withdrawn, so I call the noble Duke, the Duke of Montrose.

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

My Lords, it is a great honour to follow the noble Lord, Lord Curry, with his deep scientific knowledge of agriculture and soils. I declare my interests: my family runs a livestock farm and owns a series of SSSIs in two areas of nature reserves.

In this clause, we get to define the extent and, where necessary, the boundaries of what we want the Bill to influence. On soils, I support my noble friend Lord Caithness’s Amendment 110, which is necessary because the government strategy for carbon sequestration is considerably dependent on the soil and peat. I hope that my noble friend the Minister will respond positively to either of these amendments.

I will produce a quote from a rather different angle: 300 years ago, in Gulliver’s Travels, Jonathan Swift expressed the old saying that

“whoever could make ... two blades of grass … grow upon a spot of ground where only one grew before, would deserve better of mankind, and do more essential service to his country, than the whole race of politicians put together.”

That was in his day. This has inspired our farmers for 300 years. To me, it is an environmental principle, but in the Bill the Government have given us as their environmental principles a set of prohibitions, protections and penalties.

The judgment, from the measures contained in the Bill, is that that earlier principle has now gone too far. The protections listed will be necessary, but we need to be sure that our purpose is not simply to put all the processes of the countryside into decline. It would be nice if someone could come up with a phrase that would draw all our aspirations together and point the way forward. The outcome will hang on the wording in these clauses and what we interpret as the meaning of “natural environment”.

I support Amendment 113, in the name of my noble friend Lady McIntosh and the others who have signed it. This draws our attention to the whole marine biosphere, an area that is under great threat at the moment. It is essential that this is not overlooked. The various marine organisations are still drawing up their inventories of what is in the natural environment at present, and a great deal of expense and research will have to be dedicated to that area. I too served on the EU Environment Sub-Committee that my noble friend Lady McIntosh mentioned, and I contributed to the work that was put in. There are huge areas where we have hardly any information.

My noble friend Lady McIntosh spoke of the importance of the marine area to the UK. In December, Scotland published its latest marine assessment report, which has to be updated every three years and which, in turn, covers an area six times greater than the Scottish landmass—so biodiversity is a very important field for that Administration.

At the same time, the Bill will incorporate the policies of species abundance and the encouragement of biodiversity. We have spent so much time discussing targets. Given the role that mankind has taken upon itself over the centuries, targets are necessary. The Secretary of State can introduce almost unlimited targets under the Bill, but Clause 3 has a number of subsections that must be observed if the Secretary of State wishes to reduce them.

However, there is no requirement for the Secretary of State to pay any attention to taking actions if a crisis develops when one element becomes prolific or threatening and the need to cull numbers requires some urgency. The nearest experience that I have had did not have the urgency in question: it was decided that the deer population in the huge Queen Elizabeth Forest Park, which is next door to me, was well above what was good for forestry purposes and that it should be reduced to four deer per square kilometre. They then set about culling 4,000 deer out of this area, which is not something that I would readily support, but it was a necessary management action and is an indication of what might be required if proliferation becomes extreme. In the spirit of the Bill, it will always be preferable to employ nature-based solutions, but, if diseases or threats to biodiversity occur, we must be prepared to act in whatever way will be effective.

My noble friend Lord Caithness’s second amendment raises the important question of defining biodiversity. “Biodiversity” in the Bill seems limited to the abundance of species, particularly in Amendment 22, moved by my noble friend the Minister on day 2 of our deliberations. Amendment 113B would mean that attention could be given to how far biodiversity should be supported.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I rise to offer the Green group’s support for all the amendments in this group, which have given us the opportunity of an important debate about what we are trying to save, what we are trying to protect and what we are trying to improve.

Amendment 110, in the names of the noble Earls, Lord Caithness and Lord Shrewsbury, and my noble friend Lady Jones and myself, proposes that soil be regarded as a habitat. I will address it with Amendment 112 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Randall of Uxbridge. I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Curry of Kirkharle, that it perhaps does not matter so much where “soil” appears; it needs to appear somewhere. I would suggest that a very simple solution which the department could implement easily would be to go through the Bill and look everywhere where “water” and “air” appear and add “soil”. I doubt that there would be many problems when one looked at the result. We are of course revisiting our debate on day 1 of this Committee—which now feels like quite a long time ago—about Clause 1 and an amendment in my name which would have added soil as an important target. It needs to be in all these places.

I hope that the noble Baroness, Lady Boycott, will forgive me if I pre-empt a little what she is perhaps going to say, but it is so important that it needs to be highlighted. I saw that she was speaking to the Secretary of State at Groundswell. During that discussion, it was said that soil health was perhaps the most important thing and would be the focus of the sustainable farming initiative. Perhaps the noble Baroness can tell us more about that; it would be very interesting. The Government themselves identify soil as a huge priority. As the noble Earl, Lord Caithness, and many others have said, we are talking about how the Agriculture Act and the Environment Bill fit together. The Agriculture Act provides directions on the methods of action; this Bill judges how successful it has been.

I have circulated to a number of noble Lords—I realise that I neglected to circulate it to the Minister, for which I apologise and I will fix it shortly—a briefing paper that I received from a number of farmers, academics and farm advisers on the difficulty of being paid for results in managing soil health. It makes an argument for payment for practice instead, with the three key things identified as minimising soil disturbance, maximising soil cover and maximising diversity of cover. All are clearly good things to work towards, but we need to measure how the results come out, and that has to be in the Bill.

Following the coverage from Groundswell, there was a lot of discussion and excitement about work done on worms. There is perhaps an argument for the number of worms per square metre being a very good measure. I am not putting that forward entirely as a serious proposal although it is certainly something to look at, but I would point the Minister to the publication last week of a volume entitled Advances in Measuring Soil Health, edited by Professor Wilfred Otten from Cranfield University. It is a real sign of how much this field is moving forward. That brings me back to our discussion on Clause 1, when the Minister, in arguing why soil should not be included in the clause, said that

“the Government are working collaboratively with technical experts to identify appropriate soil health metrics … it is a complicated business”—[Official Report, 21/6/21; cols. 94-95.]

and that they were looking to develop a healthy soils indicator as part of the 25-year environment plan. This is a matter of extreme urgency and focus, as identified by the Secretary of State; it cannot wait for something off into the far distance. A great deal of new work is available now; a great deal of ideas are available now. The first metric that we end up with may not be perfect, but we need a metric, and if that needs to be improved in future, so be it. It could be dealt with by regulation, as the Government so like to tell us.

Environment Bill

Duke of Montrose Excerpts

Committee stage
Monday 28th June 2021 Lords Chamber

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

My Lords, in addressing the amendment put forward by my noble friend the Minister, the Committee has today listened to some skilful analysis of the devolution situation from the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hope. I await his comments on this amendment with some interest.

I want to probe my noble friend the Minister a little more on one aspect of what he sees as the content of his amendment, which refers to

“how the OEP intends to co-operate with devolved environmental governance bodies.”

Like some of your Lordships, I sat in the House as we debated Schedule 5 to the Scotland Act in 1998. The argument ended up being not to reserve the environment to Westminster, but there was still the oversight of all the EU’s environmental legislation to fall back on. That is the situation we face at the moment.

The Government are working on the problems that this now presents. I understand that they have hopes of a legislative consent Motion for their ideas. We foresaw some of this when we debated the Trade Bill in January. The Government were prepared to admit that one route to achieving agreements was to have a number of framework agreements. How many frameworks do the Government expect to have in relation to the environment, and what mechanism are they using to reach agreement on any of them? Are they working on any of these? If so, what stage have they reached? I wonder whether my noble friend could give us some details either now or in writing.

[Lord Krebs (CB)]

My Lords, I will make a couple of brief points in relation to Amendment 96 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Lucas. First, a system exists that I think would meet what the noble Lord is asking for: I refer, of course, to the guidelines developed by Lord May of Oxford when he was the Government’s Chief Scientific Adviser. These guidelines have three core principles governing the use of evidence in policy-making, which is partly what the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, was talking about. They are: first, seek a wide range of expert opinion; secondly, recognise uncertainties in the evidence; and thirdly, openness and transparency in the use of evidence. These guidelines will be especially important for the OEP because many, if not most, of the environmental issues that it will deal with will be ones where the evidence is contested. People will have strongly held opposing views, or they will claim that the evidence is incomplete or that there is uncertainty.

The answer to the request from the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, is for the OEP to follow the Government Chief Scientific Adviser’s guidelines. At the same time, the OEP may wish to follow the example of many other public bodies in conducting as much of its business as possible in public meetings so that the decision-making processes can be directly observed and the evidence, as it is being evaluated, can be studied by the public. Does the Minister agree that it would be valuable if the OEP operated under the guidelines set out by the Chief Scientific Adviser?

Environment Bill

Duke of Montrose Excerpts

2nd reading
Monday 7th June 2021 Lords Chamber

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

My Lords, I welcome the Bill and declare my family interest as a livestock farmer and other interests in the register.

This is a massive Bill. We can see that, overall, we have worked on this topic in many guises before, and that is well exemplified by the huge sections devoted to amending previous legislation, right up to the Natural Environment and Rural Communities Act 2006. In addition, there is a virtual forest of Henry VIII powers, which I hope your Lordships will be able to narrow and point more clinically where necessary.

The elements I draw to your Lordships’ attention are, first, the statement of principles; secondly, the 25-year plan to improve the environment; and, thirdly, the current calculation of our agricultural emissions. On the first, I hope we can get a bit more detail on the principles we can expect over and above the generalities listed, and I eagerly await the government amendments that my noble friend the Minister hinted at earlier. In its briefing, the Countryside Alliance outlined a few suggestions, and I think there could be merit in its innovation principle and possibly in its appropriate scale principle. The Bill already incorporates the precautionary principle, which might do with clarification on whether it applies to definable harms or must include unknown harms, as it has done before.

Other than straightforward environmental elements, the Bill’s essential contribution is that it combines the element of sustainability with environmental and species recovery. The main strategy for this is already laid out in the 2018 policy paper A Green Future: Our 25 Year Plan to Improve the Environment. This incorporates and addresses more directly the questions of mitigating and adapting to climate change.

As we struggle to find a commercial solution to the capture and storage of CO₂ to meet the targets set for us, adaptation and mitigation on land is still one of the major paths we have found, so there is immense pressure on land managers. Anyone who farms will see this as an attempt to manage nature—and there are few things which are more unpredictable than nature. Good scientific data in this field is available for the carbon potential of forests and peat bogs, and there is a lot on emissions from livestock. However, as yet there is nothing very comprehensive on grassland.

Traditional and organic agriculture are heavily dependent on the benefits that accrue from having ruminant animals as part of their rotation; that is stated in the 25-year plan. To address biodiversity and carbon storage, a necessary place to start is with soil, which is much degraded in some areas. The Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board has produced figures some of which sit uncomfortably with our popular preconceptions. It estimates that degraded arable soils contain only 23 tonnes of carbon per hectare, whereas in mixed woodland and improved grassland the soil contains around 63 tonnes of carbon per hectare. The surprise comes with permanent grassland, which contains 83 tonnes per hectare. Surprisingly, if that is then planted with trees, it might take a few years to balance out the loss of storage capacity with the amount of new carbon to be accumulated in the crop.

The latest news on grassland I have received is that our friends in Australia and New Zealand, with whom we are likely to be sharing our markets, are now working towards net zero in the production of sheep and cattle. This would be an immense challenge to our production, and the industry here will be looking to see if there are lessons that we can learn and how we could move in that direction. Agriculture is currently burdened with responsibility for 10% of UK emissions. If these lessons are meaningful, this could change markedly, and it could bring the association of grazing livestock with carbon emissions more into line with other foodstuffs.

I look forward to Committee stage of the Bill.

Heather and Grass etc. Burning (England) Regulations 2021

Duke of Montrose Excerpts

Thursday 18th March 2021 Lords Chamber

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

My Lords, I declare my family’s interest in managing an area of blanket bog in Scotland which is now in a peat restoration programme.

I agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, on the need for more research, but I am afraid I do not agree with some of her other points. The guarded tone of this measure is appropriate but, as the noble Baroness said, until the promised guidance is issued, it cannot be of much comfort.

In high rainfall areas, such as the one in which I live, any burning is totally site-specific and governed by the wind and weather on the day in question. Given all this trouble, it is easy to wonder why we should bother with burning.

By way of illustration, on National Trust land on the Isle of Arran, near my home, an ecologically oriented policy of no burning was adopted for a number of years, until someone on a day out dropped a match, which resulted in a fire which burned for two or three days.

There have been commercial incentives for installing fire breaks. If these activities are being limited, the guidance will have to consider what incentives there will be for this necessary work. My experience with blanket bog is that, provided a controlled fire is handled in the right way, it will consume the surface vegetation and only scorch the waterlogged peat moss, thus sparing the peat. It is a very exact science. Licensing will have to take account of all this practical experience. So I give this measure only a guarded welcome until we have more detail.

[The Deputy Speaker (Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall) (Lab)]

The noble Lord, Lord Botham, is not participating in this debate, so I call the next speaker, the noble Lord, Lord Knight of Weymouth.

Tigray Conflict: Axum

Duke of Montrose Excerpts

Tuesday 9th March 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon (Con)]

My Lords, on the noble Lord’s first question, there are currently no concerted efforts at dialogue between the conflict parties. Regrettably, while I agree with him that the efforts of the AU are important, they have not picked up yet again. We will continue to call for Eritrean troops to leave, and to work with the AU as well as other partners to ensure peace in Tigray.

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

My Lords, I strongly endorse the comments of the two previous noble Lords. In view of the more than three months of communications blackout, along with continuing reports of the killing and rape of civilians, the destruction of harvests and medical facilities, widespread looting and starvation, do Her Majesty’s Government agree that what has taken place in Axum is almost certainly being repeated across Tigray and that there is enough evidence to suspect that ethnic cleansing is taking place in the province? In the light of the adoption by the UK of the responsibility to protect commitment of the 2005 UN World Summit, including paragraphs 138 and 139, what further steps do Her Majesty’s Government plan to take to secure the protection of the Tigrayan population?

[Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon (Con)]

My Lords, the situation in Tigray is both challenging and dire, as I have just said. Our most recent efforts have included the formation of a joint humanitarian political team from the British embassy, which on 4 and 5 March visited Mekelle, the capital city of Tigray. The team met the provisional administration of Tigray and humanitarian agencies. Our efforts are both political and humanitarian in this respect.

Foreign and Commonwealth Office and Department for International Development: Merger

Duke of Montrose Excerpts

Monday 27th July 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon]

My Lords, parliamentary committees are very much a matter for Parliament. I disagree with the noble Baroness on consultation. As a Human Rights Minister, I have engaged closely with human rights organisations, and my noble friend Lady Sugg and the DfID Permanent Secretary have been meeting with NGO partners on the development programmes.

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

My Lords, my noble friend the Minister gave us a wonderful collection of high-level aims. A neighbour of mine runs a programme through an independent charity in Madagascar, tackling environmental and poverty issues. People at that level want to know whether the Foreign Office will be better able to direct funding down to grass-roots need or whether an even larger proportion of the aid budget will be devoted to international development banks, including the European Development Bank and its like.

[Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon]

My Lords, we remain committed to ensuring that grass-roots organisations, such as the one my noble friend described, continue to be recipients of UK support, because they deliver excellent scope and results on the ground. But the IFIs are also important partners, and we will continue to have their expertise in the new department.