Planning System Reforms: Wild Belt Designation

Jerome Mayhew Excerpts

Tuesday 22nd June 2021 Westminster Hall

[Jerome Mayhew (Broadland) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mrs Cummins, and well done to my hon. Friend the Member for East Surrey (Claire Coutinho) for securing this debate.

I have hardly any time, so let me cut to the chase. We have a huge challenge here, which is to stop biodiversity loss by 2030 and, in fact, to reverse it. We talk of nature and natural recovery, but what do we mean by that? Nature for the United Kingdom is truly an overwhelmingly forested land mass, whereas the rural landscape that we have come to know and love is, in fact, entirely man-made and a managed environment. We need a realistic solution. One such solution is a shared approach with improved agricultural practices—that is crucial, because only 6% of our land mass is developed and the rest of it is used for agriculture—plus rewilding of marginal land.

What is the bad boy here? It is farming practices post world war two, when, frankly, we broke the co-existence between nature and food production. That was encouraged by the common agricultural policy, whereby we had subsidies to remove hedges, subsidies to put subsoil drainage in our fields and huge subsidies to bring as much land as possible back into production. That was then followed up by agronomists who had been employed by agribusiness to pitch for the use of agrichemicals on the land in ever-increasing amounts, in the pursuit of yield above all else. The result has been a reduction in long-term rotations, the increasing use of expensive inputs, reduced profitability and therefore reduced margins, both in profit and loss terms and in terms of margins around fields. The result was reduced space for nature. As we have heard, that has led to a 97% reduction in our meadows and an 80% reduction in our chalk grasslands.

What should we do about that? The big answer is that we need to move our agriculture substantially towards regenerative principles and farming, but I do not have time to talk about that now. The second answer is to take marginal land out of production and use it for wildlife restoration.

A wild belt designation, with the consent and support of landowners, will help in the nature fightback. It could build on the concept of conservation covenants, which already exist, but bring that concept into the planning process. It would be a recognition of the new approach to natural recovery, bringing it within the planning system, as my hon. Friend the Member for East Surrey so ably described. Together with ELMS and our new approach to agriculture, that could change mindsets and highlight that nature has a value in its own right.