Climate and Nature Bill

Josh Newbury Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 24th January 2025 Commons Chamber

[Josh Newbury (Cannock Chase) (Lab)]

It is an honour to speak on the Bill, given the twin challenges of tackling climate change and ensuring that our natural world not only survives but becomes a far greater part of our lives. Those priorities are shared by the vast majority of my constituents in Cannock Chase, many of whom have written to me over the last few weeks.

As others have done, I pay tribute to the hon. Member for South Cotswolds (Dr Savage), who deserves great credit for using her private Member’s Bill to push for strong ambitions and action on both climate and biodiversity. That decision has enabled a huge amount of discussion to take place on those issues not just today, but over the last few months and, no doubt, in the months and years to come. In particular, she has worked incredibly hard to ensure that those discussions radiate out of this place by engaging with passionate campaigners from up and down the country. I have no doubt that that will make the public debate both wider and deeper, which I am confident all hon. Members in the Chamber welcome.

As I noted in my maiden speech, my constituency is best known for its forest. While there is far more to Cannock Chase and the fantastic people who call it home than that, I am happy to have the welcome excuse of this debate to focus on the natural beauty and serenity that it has to offer. The truth is that Cannock Chase has a far more complex and diverse range of habitats than simply a 2,700-hectare forest. About a third of the wider Cannock Chase national landscape is agricultural land, which I will come to later, and a large proportion is heathland, which is a vital but endangered habitat.

In many ways, the decline and continuing plight of Britain’s heathland is symbolic of the decline of our natural world, which we are discussing today and which the Bill rightly seeks to address and reverse. It is often said that Britain is one of the most nature deprived countries in the world, but for us in Cannock Chase that can be hard to believe because of all the natural beauty right on our doorstep. Indeed, no one living in my constituency is more than a 15-minute drive from our stunning forest and heathland. Having said that, inequality and poor bus services mean that the most deprived parts of my constituency are also the most nature deprived. I hope we will bear that intersection in mind as we continue the debate.

When I knock on doors on new build estates in Cannock Chase such as those in Hednesford, which is often described as the gateway to the Chase, people who have recently moved to the area often tell me that having nature a stone’s throw away is what drew them to our communities, particularly those who grew up in urban areas. The Chase attracts a huge number of visitors—about 2.5 million a year—which, if hon. Members can believe it, means that the density of visitors we receive is four to five times greater than that of the Lake District national park. That intensity of tourism shows how passionate we are about nature and our instinctive need to get lost in it, but also that we can sometimes pose the greatest risk to the natural world. In my area, it is sometimes said that we are at risk of loving the Chase to death, so the agenda of this Bill and this Government to prevent outcomes like that is very important.

As I mentioned, no habitat in my constituency illustrates this better than lowland heathland. Rarer than tropical rainforests, lowland heath is found on Brindley heath and Moors Gorse, just north of Hednesford, and at the iron age hill fort of Castle Ring in Cannock Wood. As well as being a scheduled ancient monument, Castle Ring is home to a variety of rare habitats such as sphagnum bog and acidic grassland.

The UK is fortunate to have a fifth of all the heathland in Europe, yet sadly we have lost 80% of it over the last two centuries. It is particularly concerning that much of that loss has occurred over the last 70 years, echoing the picture of ever increasing species and habitat loss that Members have drawn attention to today, including my hon. Friend the Member for Norwich North (Alice Macdonald). I know, from taking my daughter to see the stunning carpets of purple heather over the Chase every August, that the cutbacks to conservation work due to austerity are allowing scrub and ferns to creep in more and more year after year.

That is why I was delighted that just before Christmas, to mark the 75th anniversary of the National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act 1949, the Environment Secretary announced that national landscapes such as Cannock Chase will be granted new powers to boost nature’s recovery and improve sustainable access to these beautiful landscapes. Refining the role and authority of national parks and national landscapes will benefit our rural economy and mean that more people can enjoy spending time reconnecting with nature. It is also fantastic to see stronger regulations to ensure that public bodies, including water companies, do more to respect and support these precious landscapes.

I am confident that that ambition will be extended to the protection of sites of special scientific interest, of which we have many in Cannock Chase. Often SSSIs are under greater ecological threat than national parks or landscapes because they are more dispersed or designated for a particular species. For example, the Cannock extension canal in my home village of Norton Canes plays host to one of the country’s largest populations of floating water plantain, which I have to admit is not particularly special to look at but is none the less an ecologically important endangered plant that thrives in gently undulating waters such as canals.

As I mentioned, farming is absolutely present in the Cannock Chase national landscape, and in my view, there is nowhere better than national parks and national landscapes to see that farmers are stewards of the land and keen to work in harmony with nature. Support must be in place to enable farmers to realise this ambition, which is why I very much welcome the Government’s announcement of £5 billion over the next two years through the new deal for farmers, which will help to ensure that natural recovery is taking place on every English farm, alongside sustainable food production.

To the credit of the previous Government, they introduced the farming in protected landscapes programme. Four Oaks farm, near Slitting Mill in my constituency, was one of the recipients of the funding, but it was a very time-limited programme, so I hope it will be renewed beyond the next financial year.

Alongside many Members of the House, particularly my fellow members of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee, I look forward to continuing the work of finding a way forward to a financially and environmentally sustainable future for British farming. For protected landscapes like Cannock Chase, funding streams such as the higher tier of the countryside stewardship scheme will be vital. These bespoke, delicately balanced projects need the expertise of Government agencies such as Natural England, and while significant progress has been made in recent months on expanding capacity and speeding up decisions, we still have a long way to go to ensure that all farmers can access environmental land management schemes and improve sustainability and biodiversity in the best way for their farm.

[Jeremy Corbyn (Islington North) (Ind)]

I thank the hon. Member for giving way and compliment him on his speech. Does he agree that biodiverse farming and biodiverse areas near high-production farms are not the enemy of good-quality food production, but in fact enhance that production and reduce the need for the use of chemicals and herbicides on our land?

[Josh Newbury]

I thank the right hon. Member for his intervention. I completely agree that we need to ensure that our farms are properly supported and that we highlight best practice, so that it is spread across the country. Sustainable food production and national self-sufficiency need to go hand in hand with that work. We must encourage and enable farmers to be stewards of the land, which we know they absolutely are.

[Jerome Mayhew]

I draw attention to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests in relation to farming. While I am very supportive of regenerative agricultural techniques, does the hon. Member accept that yield decreases by 25% to a third when we use those techniques? They are suitable in some areas, but not in all.

[Josh Newbury]

This is why I mentioned that the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee is holding an inquiry on the future of farming, as part of which we are looking at this issue of balance and ensuring that we strike the proper balance. The underlying principle has to be that we empower farmers to do what is right for their farm and enable them to make that judgment on the correct balance.

The fact that water quality has been a feature of this debate is welcome. We talk about the state of our rivers, lakes and seas a lot in this House, but there cannot be too much discussion about it. As I am sure is sadly the case in every constituency, in Cannock Chase we have waterways that are rated poor for quality: the River Trent on the edge of Rugeley and the Rising brook. In 2022, untreated sewage was discharged into watercourses in my constituency 254 times, for a total of 372 hours, which disgracefully is typical in this country today. We know that has consequences for wildlife. When I met the Staffordshire Wildlife Trust in May last year, it highlighted to me that in just two decades the water vole has completely disappeared from Cannock Chase, and there has been a 96% decline in records of grey partridge. The consequences for those two species paint a grim picture indeed.

A key ask from the Staffordshire Wildlife Trust, of which I am a proud member, was for Labour to commit to the 30 by 30 pledge and protect 30% of land and sea for nature by 2030. I am proud to say that this Government have committed to that. Unlike the last Government, we are putting it into action. Through the Water (Special Measures) Bill, the Government are ensuring that water companies will be held to account for the improvements that are being promised in exchange for hefty bill increases, while empowering customers, who for far too long have witnessed the decline in the health of our waterways but have been unable to challenge it directly.

I have spoken a lot about nature, but in Cannock Chase we also have a story to tell about energy. In my maiden speech, I explained that the closure of the coal-fired Rugeley power station had a huge impact on the communities I represent, but that a new community on the now-cleared site will ensure energy-efficient homes and new infrastructure, marking a new era for Rugeley and Brereton. There are plans to ensure that the power station’s energy legacy is maintained, with a battery storage facility and, I hope, rooftop solar. On very few sites in the country will there be such a clear transition from the energy sources of the past to the homes, jobs and technologies of the future.

Finally, I will turn to the principles of the Bill. When it comes to the climate and nature crisis, holding people in positions of power to account is perhaps more important than ever. Knitting together work across Government into a coherent strategy will be essential to making sure that the targets in the Environment Act 2021, to which this Government have made an unwavering commitment, become a reality. We all know that we do not have time to waste in the battle to limit global temperature rises and avoid the most catastrophic effects of climate change and the battle to halt and reverse nature loss. The last Government talked the talk to some extent, but they dithered and delayed so chronically that they did not end up implementing much.

As with the last Labour Government, this Labour Government have set a world-leading agenda on climate and nature. As some countries backslide on international commitments, this Government stand firm in asserting the importance of sticking to our targets and making meaningful progress towards meeting them. Whether it is increasing woodland cover, seeing the return of water voles in constituencies such as mine, or stopping islands sinking into the sea on the other side of the world, this Government will always make our climate and natural world their priority and, on behalf of the people I represent, so will I.