Community Orchards

Debate between Jesse Norman and Paul Maynard

Monday 27th June 2011 Commons Chamber

[Jesse Norman (Hereford and South Herefordshire) (Con)]

I absolutely applaud my hon. Friend in his call for more community orcharding. I come from the county of Herefordshire, which is thrilled to be the largest cider orchard county in the country. Does he share my view that we should not restrict cider and other orchards to rural areas, but encourage them within urban and suburban areas, where they can also give so much joy to local people?

[Paul Maynard]

Indeed, and I thank my hon. Friend for that intervention. My constituency has no green space apart from a golf course plonked in the middle of it, so I would welcome more green of any variety.

It is also important to recognise that the last Government—although no Labour Member is in their place now—did something to recognise that orchards were a habitat at risk, as they were added to the list of 15 biodiversity action plan habitats. However, as no inventory had been made, we were not sure of the starting point for the action plan. The work that has just been done by the traditional orchard inventory project, helped by Natural England, has allowed us to identify 17,000 hectares of orchards, many of them basic community orchards. One sad aspect of that work is that 45% are considered to be in poor condition, and that is where we start to get into the political remit of this issue.

The natural environment White Paper contained a sole, but welcome reference to community orchards, in relation to Tower Hamlets, which is a very urban area. The issue of protection for these orchards is paramount so, with the authority of many of the stakeholders for these orchards, I ask the Minister what more he can do to offer protection to the orchards. Many people have complained to me about the difficulty of obtaining tree protection orders. There is a failure to realise that many fruit trees grow for many hundreds of years. For example, I had no idea that a pear tree could still be maturing after some 300 years.

We also need to ensure that any fruit produced by these trees is not wasted. That means better liaison with the cider industry and within communities. I was pleased to see that the White Paper mentioned local nature partnerships and nature improvement areas, which could encompass community orchards. I hope the Minister will be able to confirm that organisations such as Common Ground and the Orchard Network will be able to start to bid for money to allow them to assist local groups to conserve their older orchards through small grants for insurance, fencing, stakes and gates—all those things that are needed to put the infrastructure together to help us to build a community.

I am sure that the Minister recognises the importance of these orchards to biodiversity. I recall them from my childhood days as being an edible hedgerow, with so many varieties of fruit on offer in the village, but they are also communal assets. Some of the concern stems from the need for more statutory presumption against the grubbing up of these smaller orchards for in-fill development. We often have debates in this Chamber about back-fill, in-fill and bungalows popping up everywhere. Orchards are very susceptible to this, and I hope that the Minister will be able to guarantee that he will give some consideration as to how they can be more protected.

I recognise that the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs cannot do it all. Orchards have a great potential. Indeed, the Department’s fruit and vegetables taskforce came up with a multitude of recommendations for cross-departmental working that will be very helpful. I am one of the few MPs who has managed to wade through the gargantuan Marmot review into healthy living, which is a 300-page leviathan of nanny-state prescriptions, but which made an important observation:

“Improving the good environment involves addressing issues concerning the accessibility of affordable and nutritious food that is sustainably produced, processed and delivered”.

I have referred to the importance of not wasting the fruit that grows in community orchards. My constituency is the fourth most deprived constituency represented by a Conservative MP and includes a particularly poor estate called Grange Park. It was where the Conservative party held its social action project during the 2007 party conference. That is where the fruit trees in my constituency came from—planted by the party as part of that social action project.

The great lesson I took from that experiment was that for many children on the estate, fruit comes in a bag from Iceland. In this week of all weeks, with Wimbledon being played just down the road from here, the notion that fruit such as strawberries have a season would be incomprehensible to many of the children on that estate. The importance of orchards as educational tools should be considered as well.

Although the Slow Food movement is growing in popularity—I was in Ludlow, not too many weeks ago, enjoying a food festival there—it must not become the preserve of the upper middle classes, or something chichi or fashionable. It has to be something that my constituents can access as well. I am pleased, therefore, that at the recent civic trust awards in Blackpool, a fruit-growing project in Blackpool South, Grow Blackpool, won a civic award. I have many other examples from around Lancashire of people who have written to me about their small community orchards.

There is a recognition that fruits and community orchards have a role to play in our local communities, and that, more importantly, localism is not just about what we ask our councillors to do, and what decisions we allow councils to take; it is also about how we see our communities and about this very important idea of particularism. What makes this country special, in my view, is that we manage to cram so much diversity into such a small geographic area. It is that local distinctiveness that makes this country so special. We should never become estranged from the nature at the heart of our communities, and orchards, in the right places, cared for, nurtured and built up, link people with the place in which they live and the history of that place. It certainly linked me to the history of the village I come from, and I very much hope that the community orchard movement will strengthen and grow, with the Government’s support and protection where appropriate. I look forward to hearing the Minister’s thoughts.