Natural Environment and Rural Communities Act 2006 Committee Report

Earl of Caithness Excerpts

Monday 2nd July 2018 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Caithness (Con)]

My Lords, it was a great pleasure to serve on the committee and I declare my interest in that I am also on the Rural Economy Committee, which meets in this current Session. Many of the points just made by the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of St Albans will I know be picked up by that committee, which has a very wide brief and will cover areas such as transport and schools. I believe that the right reverend Prelate will give evidence to our committee, and we look forward to that.

I thank the clerk of our committee and the committee staff. We are very lucky to have such good quality staff to enable us to produce the reports that we do. Of course, they were backed up by Professor Maria Lee and Professor Mark Shucksmith, both of whom helped the committee in our deliberations. I also thank our chairman, the noble Lord, Lord Cameron, who, as the noble Baroness, Lady Scott of Needham Market said, was very tolerant. I was a lone voice on many issues and at least he gave me the chance to air my views, even though he did not necessarily agree with them.

It was a strange time to undertake a committee of this nature because, as the noble Baroness, Lady Young of Old Scone, said, many of the recommendations to which we should have got a firm answer are still in the pending box because of the changes that are going on. However, that had the advantage of allowing many members of the committee to put their views to the Government on what is happening. All of our committee proceedings were dominated by Brexit. Of course, the 25-year plan was not announced until 11 January, by which time most of our evidence had been taken, so I thank the Secretary of State for changing his diary and coming to see us personally to answer questions about the 25-year plan and other points raised from our earlier evidence. From that point of view, it was a unique experience and it was a unique reply from the Government.

Chapter 2 of the report refers to Brexit and the natural environment, and of course we do not yet know what is going to happen. However, to my mind there are two overriding objectives that cover recommendations 2 and 3 which concern the new environmental body. The first is that the legislation should underpin the promised policy statement on environmental principles in two ways. It should require all public bodies, not just the Government, to act in accordance with, rather than simply have regard to, the policy statement on environment principles. The second is that the legislation should set up a new environmental body with the necessary independence, expertise and resources, including powers to hold both of the public bodies to account for the implementation of environmental law.

When I refer to the word “independent”, I do not mean the pseudo-independence of Natural England and which we make a lot of in chapter 3. Our chairman, the noble Lord, Lord Cameron of Dillington, mentioned it quite often in his speech. I turn to the recommendation made in paragraph 105:

“We recommend that Natural England should be funded to a level commensurate with the delivery of its full range of statutory duties and responsibilities. This situation should be addressed as a matter of urgency”.


We were careful not to specify how much we thought Natural England should be allowed, and I know that my noble friend the Minister will say that what it is getting is absolutely right, but I should like him to ponder on the fact that when Sir John Lawton produced his report entitled Making Space for Nature in 2010, he suggested that in order to create a resilient network, between £600 million and £1.1 billion would be needed, whereas Natural England’s budget on a like-for-like basis has fallen from £177 million 10 years ago to £112 million now.

I believe that Natural England has changed significantly, and for the better. The present chairman has woken up the organisation and it is now working much more on an area basis, and that is to be welcomed. We suggest in paragraph 181 of the report that the role of Natural England will have to change again in the future, and indeed my noble friend Lady Byford spoke about that. I think that she raised this issue the most in our committee because where Natural England ends up will probably not be anything like Natural England today, if it exists at all.

However, I was alarmed by the Government’s response to that recommendation. In it the Government talk about the Countryside Stewardship Scheme and the Environmental Stewardship Scheme. The role of Natural England is going to be lost and transferred to the Rural Payments Agency. My noble friend Lady Byford also mentioned the Countryside Stewardship scheme but I would be a little firmer than she was. The scheme is a mess. It is thoroughly overcomplex. The start date for new applications has already had to be put back by a month because the papers are not ready, which means that applications will now have to be in by the end of July. Harvest will begin on some farms in the south of England in the next couple of weeks or so, and once the combine harvesters start rolling, farmers do not have time to fiddle around on their computers filling in forms that should have been completed a couple of months ago because of the inadequacies of Defra and the Rural Payments Agency.

The Rural Payments Agency is not liked by farmers and the fact that Natural England is losing its influence on this issue is a serious worry. I hope that my noble friend will take this on board. He knows that over the next three years or so, some 5,000 existing schemes will come to an end. The environment will not be as well protected because I know that many upland farmers have no interest in the new scheme. It is too complicated, it requires too much verification and there is too much bureaucracy. The slightest change in, for example, the area of a field causes the whole scheme to have to be thought through again. It means more work for the RPA, which gave the wrong figures to Natural England in the first place. I hope that the Minister will take back the message that the Countryside Stewardship Scheme needs to be thought through again and brought forward on a much simpler and more farmer-friendly basis.

I move on to chapter 4 on the biodiversity duty. It was not a recommendation of your Lordships, but I draw the House’s attention to paragraph 184 in particular, which is a quote from Dr Nick Fox in Charlie Pye-Smith’s booklet, The Facts of Rural Life. I was glad that the committee took this on board; I hope that the Minister will confirm that, as far as he is concerned, the statement is right:

“Conservation should be about maintaining high levels of biodiversity, which is the sign of a healthy habitat. Biodiversity is not just about species diversity, but the structural diversity of habitats and the range of trophic levels. It’s not about encouraging the biggest population of any one species, but ensuring that each is in balance with the habitat and the resources”.


If Defra worked on that basis, there is a good chance that our habitat would improve.

The noble Baroness, Lady Young of Old Scone, is absolutely right that planning is fundamental to the environment. We would like to know more about natural capital, which I hope will emerge in due course. I want to stress the benefit that one can get from net gain. I believe that every planning application should have net gain built into it. It does not need to be net gain related specifically to the application; it could come from elsewhere. One needs a fairly loose approach. If the Mayor of London pursues his policy of trying to build on gardens in London, we will lose a huge environmental benefit. If that policy is allowed to go through, which I hope it will not be, I hope that there will be considerable net gain elsewhere to create the green lines that our migratory birds need when they pass through London, which will be denied to them in the future.

Like others, I want to say a little bit about research. I will say less than I was planning to because it has already been well covered. I say to the Minister that we had only one, short evidence session with the Rural Economy Committee, but the one message that came loud and clear from everybody was that we lack proper statistics, based on good research. We will come back to this point and labour it, so my noble friend had better get a better brief than he has now.

Where should rural policy sit in government? This is where I was at odds with the rest of the committee. Despite a strong, powerful speech by the noble Baroness, Lady Scott of Needham Market, I remain of the opinion—contrary to what to the committee said and what I signed up to—that it should remain with Defra. I believe that it would get thoroughly lost if it moved to MHCLG. Rural affairs would become a tertiary issue. One might say, as the noble Baroness said, that it is a tertiary issue with Defra now. I do not believe that my noble friend will allow it to be so for very much longer. I went back to the days when I was the Minister for the Countryside in the Department of the Environment. I lamented the fact then that I did not have the responsibility for the agricultural side of things, which handicapped my work enormously. When I mentioned this to the committee, I was told that I was about 30 years out of date. That is true, but it does not mean that I was wrong then or wrong now.

We moved on to the challenges of delivering services for rural communities through rural proofing. Enough has been said on this by the noble Lord, Lord Cameron, so I shall not add anything more.

I turn finally to a subject that none of us has mentioned. Chapter 6 deals with the eternal problem of what to do with green lanes. In Her Majesty’s Government’s reply to our recommendation about traffic regulation orders they said that the motor vehicle stakeholder working group would produce a report. What is the up-to-date situation on that? From what I have been able to garner from the internet, the two sides are as far apart as the Brexiteers and the remainers. There does not seem to be any common ground for the Government to work on. If there is no common ground, will my noble friend take matters into his own hands and come forward with the recommendation we suggested?

I hope that we will soon be able to give a big thank you to the Government for what they are doing on the environment and agriculture, but at the moment I am afraid that the applause is slightly half-hearted.