Brexit: Environmental and Climate Change Policy

Earl of Selborne Excerpts

Thursday 20th October 2016 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Selborne (Con)]

My Lords, the whole House will be grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Parminter, for giving us this opportunity for a timely debate, and timely it is. I agree with her that full parliamentary scrutiny will be very important as we implement national regulations in place of EU directives as time goes by. I also agree with her that the EU directives have indeed provided a historic framework. That is not to say that they are by any means perfect or indeed cannot be improved with national, regional and local emphasis. I may refer to that a little later.

However, it is clearly essential for the Government to plan carefully for environmental and climate change policy in the context of the new industrial strategy—the strategy which the Prime Minister assures us will get Britain firing on all cylinders again. We are expecting the 25 Year Environment Plan soon. It will be a framework document setting out the Government’s environmental vision and their thoughts on implementation. The 25 Year Environment Plan and strategy was originally proposed in the Natural Capital Committee’s State of Natural Capital report, published last year, with a government response in September 2015. That response was positive. It said that the plan would:

“Help individuals and organisations at local, regional, national and international levels to understand the economic, social and cultural value of nature, the impact that their actions have on it, and to use this knowledge to make better decisions and facilitate the design of sustainable financing models”.

We all agree with the high-flown sentiments but they simply must be reconciled with sustainable economic growth and sustainable financing models. That is the important thing to pick up there.

After the outcome of the referendum, Professor Dieter Helm, who chairs the Natural Capital Committee, wrote to the new Secretary of State, Andrea Leadsom, to remind her of the manifesto commitment to improve the natural environment within a generation, and of the 25 Year Environment Plan. The letter said:

“Following on from the referendum, you are now in a position to take a strategic view of how our environment is managed to maximise the total value of all the benefits it provides—including clean air and water, flood protection, carbon storage, biodiversity, health benefits and recreation—and, in the process, maximising sustainable food production and supporting rural communities. This is the path to maximising sustainable economic growth”.

Again, I think he got the right emphasis on ensuring that we have sustainable economic growth without which you will not get environmental enhancement. The Secretary of State replied positively in August, committing the new Administration to the production of the 25 Year Environment Plan. She said that,

“we must maintain the momentum and enthusiasm”

for the plan. We have, therefore, the prospect of a new industrial strategy and a 25-year environmental plan, both against the background of leaving the European Union with both opportunities and threats in so far as the environment is concerned. I see it as a once-in-a-generation opportunity to plan how we can deliver sustainable economic growth.

We start with some valuable assets to help plan our way forward. Yes, the EU directives and regulations—or most of them—are certainly part of those valuable assets. The work of the Natural Capital Committee is going to stand us in very good stead, going right back to the UK National Ecosystem Assessment, which was commissioned under the Labour Government and published in 2011. This was the beginning of taking into account natural capital, and pointed to a new way of estimating our natural wealth. Natural capital should provide the basis for financial support for environmental outcomes, but with the “polluter pays” principle providing the regulatory underpinning.

Some, but not all, of our ecosystems are still in long-term decline. However, just to look at some of the brighter prospects, freshwater quality has improved —we all know about fish coming up the Thames—and sulphur deposition has declined. I took some comfort from the National Flood Resilience Review, with its helpful pointers on how to deliver integrated catchment management. This has not yet been delivered, and there is much work to be done.

We are familiar with examples of long-term decline: the loss of soil carbon in arable systems and the reduction in insect pollinators, which are important to so many crops. While marine fisheries have levelled out, they have levelled out in terms of historic takes at levels that are way below what they were in the past.

Brexit has far-reaching implications for land management. We should remember that 75% of the United Kingdom is land. Pillar 1, which is most of the take from the CAP that comes to this country, is about £3 billion annually. It is a basic payment scheme, and some would say that there is very little compliance required. Pillar 2, which delivers the agri-environmental schemes, is only about a sixth of the funds. Therefore, I think everyone agrees that we have to move towards refocusing the Pillar 1 expenditure on ecologically sustainable farming systems. I mentioned soil status, for example, that delivers for the farmer, for society and for the environment.

I hope that we remember the economics of farming at the moment. Most farmers—I could not give an exact figure—rely on the basic payment scheme to stay solvent. If you remove Pillar 1 payments too rapidly—and they will have to be removed ultimately—you are going to find small farms, particularly in the uplands and marginal lands, going bankrupt. We should remember the inexorable trends in farming at the moment: one in 10 dairy farms has closed in the past three years, but the number of dairy cows has increased by 113,000. We are seeing farms getting larger, with higher capital, and more intensive. That is necessary if you are requiring farming to compete with low commodity prices globally and to meet a cheap—or anyway, a cheaper—food policy than natural costs would allow.

I do not think that sustainable intensification is an oxymoron: some people find the two words incompatible. Some of the farms that have won prizes for conservation have also been extremely successful, and intensification does lead to releasing land. We have to be quite clear that we are expecting farms to be globally efficient and, at the same time, we have to make sure that we have in place a suitable policy for supporting the environment.

Integrated catchment management is something we talk about a lot, but its implications are never very effectively understood. If you can get the land manager who is responsible for the land involved, then it is going to be much more effective than having somebody from the water company who is a remote character telling everyone who is involved. Since the report of Professor John Lawton, where farmers were encouraged to get together in clusters, there have been examples—voluntary, of course—where farmers have worked together at the regional scale, or the landscape scale, to deliver environmental benefits. That is the only way we are going to achieve integrated catchment management.