Environment Bill

Earl of Clancarty Excerpts

Report stage
Wednesday 8th September 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Cormack (Con)]

My Lords, I strongly support what my noble friend Lord Blencathra just said about a meeting with Historic England and indeed with English Heritage, which is responsible for a large number of important buildings up and down the land. I support all the amendments, as I did in Committee. To me, it is an anomaly and a contradiction of the phrase “joined-up government” that because something is largely within the province of another department it cannot be covered by an all-embracing Bill.

This afternoon, I will concentrate on an issue that I raised on another amendment in Committee. I do so—and I have discussed this with my noble friend the Minister—because it fits logically under these amendments. When we were debating this last time, I said, and there were nods all around the Chamber, how central and important to the manmade landscape our churches are. The noble Baroness, Lady Jones, referred to a synagogue in London, the most historic synagogue in the land, and she was absolutely right in all she said. I pray that that is not overshadowed, literally, in the way currently threatened.

Central to most of our country towns and virtually all our villages, especially in England, is the parish church. You come closest to the soul of the country in the parish church, particularly through the monuments it contains, which often tell the story of the whole community—one thinks of Gray’s “Elegy”—in that church.

We have a real problem when it comes to the preservation of species and buildings. The National Trust paper, which we have all been sent, refers to habitats, and we have got the balance very wrong when it comes to the preservation of bats—important creatures that they are, despite being a bit of a health hazard sometimes—and the preservation of those buildings that tell the story of our land. I am grateful to my noble friend Lord Goldsmith; I gather he is not going to reply to this debate, but he replied to the earlier one in which I took part and we had a brief discussion this afternoon. I had a lengthy meeting with him during the recess, on the dreaded Zoom, but it was a good meeting and Professor Jean Wilson, a great former president of the Church Monuments Society, took part.

I know there is a Bats in Churches project, but it is creeping forward slowly. We have 16,000 listed churches in this country, most of them Church of England, but not all, by any means. Some of them are being despoiled and defaced—the monuments, the wall paintings, the alabasters and the brasses in particular—by bat urine and bat faeces. We have to get the balance right when we are preserving species and buildings that were not built to house bats; they were built to house worshipping Christians. We are still officially a Christian country, and the parish church means a great deal to many people, even if they do not worship in it regularly. We have to remember that the parish system in our country means that everyone who lives in England lives in a parish and is entitled to the services of the parish and priest, particularly at times of great moment in a family’s history—birth, marriage, death. It is truly important that we recognise how important these buildings are.

In his letter to me, sent following our meeting, the Minister talked about something like five churches a year benefiting from this new scheme. That is good but, measured against the overall number, it is negligible. I hope that the Minister will meet me, Professor Wilson and perhaps others again, because we must try to get the balance right. Getting the balance right is the answer to so many problems in our country, not just heritage and environmental problems, but many others. It would be wrong if, during the passage of this environmental Bill—and I agree strongly with my noble friend Lord Blencathra and the noble Lord, Lord Redesdale—we do not get this on the face of it. I am realistic enough to know that we are not going to get it, but we need a strong ministerial statement. This is casting no aspersions on my noble friend Lady Bloomfield, who will reply to this debate, but we need a statement from my noble friend Lord Goldsmith as well.

We live in a landscape that is mostly manmade and, where it is not, it is man-moulded. Some of the most important features of that landscape are parts of the built environment and the archaeology of which the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, spoke so movingly. Can we please try to recognise the threat to our churches from the overpresence of bats in many of them and do all we can to rescue a priceless part of the nation’s heritage and an embodiment of much of its history?

[The Earl of Clancarty (CB)]

My Lords, I will be very brief. I support all these amendments. We should be proud of our heritage in this country, but I am not sure, as others have pointed out, that we have been doing enough to protect our cultural landscapes in recent years. They may vary from ancient monuments all the way up to the present day, and include the lived environment, which overlaps so much with the past.

There are two real concerns, at present. There may be more, but I will point out two. The first is the lack of local authority funding and the second is the danger of untrammelled development, particularly through the tearing up and sidestepping of planning regulations. It is a disgrace that, in a country not affected by war at home—and the noble Lord, Lord Redesdale, mentioned Afghanistan—we have lost one site of world heritage status, Liverpool’s Waterfront, and are in danger of losing another, Stonehenge, if that road tunnel is built. We still do not know what is going to happen.

On the lived environment, I am put in mind of the 100th anniversary of the birth of the artist Joseph Beuys, who co-founded the German green party. His work “7000 Oaks” involved the planting of oak trees, often in bombed-out sites, across the city of Kassel. This was not a simple tree-planting exercise, as each tree was accompanied by a large stone marker. As the trees were planted—and it took five years to complete the project—the pile of 7,000 stones in front of the city’s museum was gradually reduced. Beuys’s idea for this piece, which was radical at the time, was that of nature being in harmony with humanity. His ideas have been copied in America and Britain. In this context, I just mention the National Memorial Arboretum in Staffordshire. This lesson of sensitivity towards our environment is something that we all need to learn.