Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill

Earl of Caithness Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 24th May 2023 Grand Committee

[Baroness Young of Old Scone (Lab)]

My Lords, I support Amendment 483, to which I have put my name. I will not repeat that excellent introduction by the noble Baroness, Lady Boycott, but simply commend the amendment on the basis that it is probably truer to the title of the Bill and to levelling up—which we have drifted rather away from in many of the recent amendments—than many others. It is about healthy food, environmental improvement and well-being. For me, it is mostly about allowing communities to express self-agency and be the driving force in achieving those benefits.

I pay tribute to Incredible Edible, a group that the noble Baroness mentioned, which is a force of nature. If noble Lords want to see some really uplifting stories about what communities can do, they should go on its website. The point it makes on a regular basis is that, often, the land we are talking about is already in taxpayer ownership—owned by public authorities—but temporarily not doing very much and could be brought into use for a number of months or years, until its permanent use has been agreed and taken forward.

The noble Baroness was very uplifting with her stories of success, but I am a miserable soul. I will tell the Committee why this needs to be in law, rather than simply in admonition. I was involved very tangentially in an attempt to get a community growing scheme going in one of our major cities. It was led by a celebrity gardener, working with a group of local residents. It was exactly that: an acre or two for a shorter or longer period—however long it could be released—for a community in a particularly disadvantaged area to grow their own food and encourage young people to get involved. It was hugely flexible, and we did not much care where or how long for, provided that they could get started.

There were terrific words of support from the top end of the local authority but, three years later, they still had no land, so they gave up. Every plot that was identified had some reason or other why it could not be used. The lawyers got in the way and there were always health and safety and insurance issues, which became a morass that they could not get out of. However, it is great to hear from the noble Baroness, Lady Boycott, that there are lots of good examples, including from Incredible Edible.

This amendment would do a couple of things. First, it asks the local authority to do something very simple: to list the bits of land available on a transient basis that could be used for community cultivation, or even just for simple environmental improvement. Secondly, it could be underpinned by what the noble Baroness, Lady Boycott, called a “meanwhile lease”—something like a certificate of lawful use, a simple agreement between the local authority and the community gardeners that is standard across the country, has already been crawled over once by the lawyers and therefore does not need to be crawled over on every occasion and avoids the expense and slowing-down effect of lawyers being involved on both sides and every agreement having to be negotiated afresh. I hope that the Government will have a rush of blood to the head in this run-up to the bank holiday and support this amendment.

[The Earl of Caithness (Con)]

My Lords, as we enter this record-breaking 15th day in Committee on a Bill, I pay huge tribute to my noble friends on the Front Bench and noble Lords on the Opposition Front Bench for their considerable patience, humour and endurance.

The sadness of this levelling-up Bill, which has not ground us down, is that there has been absolutely no give from the Government. I am not as hopeful as the noble Baroness, Lady Boycott, for this amendment, because I fear that the top right-hand corner of the Minister’s brief will say, “Reject”. If I may say so, that has not helped the process of this Bill. Perhaps a message could be sent back to the department that, if one wants to get the Bill through this House, there could be a little more understanding that a lot of the amendments, whether from the Opposition or our side, are there to constructively help the Bill, not destroy it. Because we do not divide in Committee, we will have to go through the whole process in a few weeks’ time on Report, which will be longer and more agonising than it might necessarily have been.

I come at this from a different perspective from the noble Baroness, who made an interesting speech from her own experience. When I came here, I was told that you speak on your honour and experience and vote on your conscience. It is wonderful that we have someone like the noble Baroness, with her experience, but I come at this from the point of view of having served on the Food, Poverty, Health and Environment Committee of your Lordships’ House. The devastating evidence that we received on food made me reassess what the priorities ought to be. Food in this country will probably kill you more quickly than any disease. We eat an enormous amount of processed food—it is 57% of our diet. Some 80% of the processed food that we eat in this country is not fit to be fed to children. It is not good for us, which is why 60% of us are obese and the number is growing. It is one of the unsung scandals that will one day hit the headlines in a major way. Hopefully, we can take some action before that happens. The cost is astronomical. It is estimated that the bad food that we eat contributes to losses of about £74 billion a year to the British economy.

That is the angle that I come at this from, so let us do anything we can to help to grow and produce our own vegetables freshly. It must be devastatingly sad for farmers to grow top-quality food—because our standards are so high—only to have it macerated into virtual poison and sold in supermarkets. What a waste of time and effort, from their point of view.

I also come at this from the health and recreation angle, picking up the point of the noble Baroness, Lady Young. I do not have my own kitchen garden, but I dig my daughter’s. I have been fascinated by doing that with my grandson because, over the last three years, I have noticed a considerable change: this year, he was fascinated by the difference in the sizes of the seeds of the peas, the salads and the courgettes. He kept asking why each one was different and why they were not all the same. He has now taken charge of his vegetables in the garden. His willingness to eat green vegetables has gone up in proportion to his interest in the garden, because they are his vegetables and they are now on his plate. He has seen them grow—he helped me to plant them and will help me to pick them this autumn.

When I was doing this with him a couple of weekends ago, I thought that this amendment absolutely encapsulates that. I gave your Lordships just one instance, but, if this were done on a much bigger scale, not only would there be recreational and mental health benefits from being outside and digging the garden but the young would be educated. My grandson and I now have a competition about who is the first to see the robin once we start digging, because, sure enough, one will appear on a fence-post, looking for what we have turned over in the hope of getting a free meal. If this can be done for those who have never had the experience of handling food in its natural state, the benefits could be amazing.

Going back to what the noble Baroness, Lady Boycott, said about the gardens that she helped to create in London, I multiply my experience of this and think, “Yes, we can do something”. That is why I hope that the Government will take on board that this is something where local authorities can give a real benefit. It is not allotments; it has to be on a different scale from that. We have heard about the problem with allotments and how long the waiting lists are, so a different tack has to be taken to try to get the local authorities to move, because the end benefits are so worth while.

[Lord Foster of Bath (LD)]

I assure the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett of Manor Castle, that we on these Benches have supported her in the past and will continue to do so. I should reveal that it was me who quietly raised the issue of resources with her just before we began. I note that the amendment mentions identifying

“resources required to bring all land contamination in England to safe levels”.

I say to her and the Committee that that will be a challenging task. She rightly pointed out that, in your Lordships’ House, we are not allowed to discuss those matters, but I hope that someone will take this on board, whether through this amendment or through anything else, because it is a big issue.

This is a helpful reminder to us that, if we recognise that huge problems are caused by land that was previously contaminated, we have to make sure that we are not continuing to create problems for the future with the contamination of land now. Separately, I have been looking into the issue of lithium-ion batteries and the way we are currently disposing of them, which I do not believe we have yet addressed. There are all sorts of problems. People have been killed by lithium-ion batteries exploding, but increasingly they are being dumped, not least in single-use vapes, which, sadly, many young children are now using. They are thrown away in landfill sites and cause all sorts of problems. It is worth checking what lithium can do: lithium toxicity can lead to cancer, brain damage and even death, so we are currently creating toxicity in our landfill sites that we need to address. This is a reminder to do that.