Oral Answers to Questions

Julia Lopez Excerpts

Thursday 25th July 2019 Commons Chamber

[Julia Lopez (Hornchurch and Upminster) (Con)]

5. What plans she has to increase tree planting rates.

[Maria Caulfield (Lewes) (Con)]

11. What plans she has to increase tree planting rates.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (David Rutley)]

To encourage more planting, we have modified our main grant schemes and announced additional funding of £10 million for urban trees and £50 million for the woodland carbon guarantee scheme. We have invested £5.7 million in the northern forest. We have also reappointed our tree champion to develop our tree strategy so that we can plan to consult on this later in the year. That demonstrates our commitment to achieving our goal of planting 11 million trees during this Parliament, and our wider aspirations.

[Julia Lopez]

I congratulate the Secretary of State on her welcome return to the top table. Earlier this year, her predecessor visited the wonderful Thames Chase community forest in my constituency and planted a tree to contribute to this growing woodland. With the forest likely to be impacted by the lower Thames crossing, will the Minister provide an update on the Department’s biodiversity net gain plans to ensure that major infrastructure projects have the potential to enhance, not detract from, precious green spaces?

[David Rutley]

I know how hard my hon. Friend works for her constituency. We have committed to mandating biodiversity net gain through the forthcoming environment Bill. That policy will deliver measurable improvements to biodiversity through development including housing and local infrastructure, thereby making sure that development has a positive environmental impact through habitat creation or enhancement. The Government are also exploring the best approaches to net gain for nationally significant infrastructure, including the lower Thames crossing.

Fly-tipping

Julia Lopez Excerpts

Tuesday 17th April 2018 Westminster Hall

[Julia Lopez (Hornchurch and Upminster) (Con)]

I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Tiverton and Honiton (Neil Parish) for providing us with the chance to discuss a hugely frustrating issue.

My constituency marks the point at which London’s metropolis turns to beautiful countryside. As such, it has become the victim of fly-tipping on an industrial scale, as I am sure is the case in many other outer-London constituencies. There is money to be made in the business. Waste management licences are given to what look to innocent customers like legal waste contractors but turn out to be cowboys or organised criminals who dump materials from the city’s building sites into our environment.

Since my election, I have been talking to Conservative council representatives in Havering to discuss what we can do as a team to tackle this problem, which continues to be raised by local residents. In October, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs published figures from 2016-17 that showed that local authorities in England dealt with around 1 million fly-tipping incidents—a 7% increase on the previous year. During this period, my borough dealt with more than 4,000 such incidents. The total cost of fly-tipping to Havering residents and businesses between April 2016 and March 2017, including collection and disposal costs, is estimated to be well over £500,000. We now fear that the overall cost is closer to £1 million, which represents a huge burden on the local ratepayer.

I have been working with Councillor Jason Frost, the deputy cabinet member for the environment, to push for increased local authority fines. I met the Minister at one of her Tea Room surgeries to discuss the problem further, and I was encouraged that she and her Department are taking it seriously. The maximum penalties for fly-tipping on summary conviction are a £50,000 fine and/or 12 months’ imprisonment. However, although sentencing guidelines for environmental offences were reviewed in 2014, the maximum fixed penalty notice that local authorities can issue remains only £400 for small-scale fly-tipping. Councillor Frost believes that the fines need to be much more substantial to act as a proper deterrent.

Havering already uses to the maximum existing anti- fly-tipping measures, including joint police operations with covert officers, round-the-clock monitoring of roads, and surveillance cameras. However, as Steve Moore, our director of neighbourhoods, has advised us and a number of Members mentioned, much fly-tipping is now carried out by serious organised criminal gangs, not just casual chancers. Those gangs use false plates and stolen trucks, so traditional means of combating fly-tipping, such as CCTV, are not effective. Therefore, although increased penalties might help, we may well need to go further. If this is an issue of organised crime, it requires an equally organised response by police and other authorities such as the Environment Agency.

New regulations have given the Environment Agency and councils more effective tools to investigate and prosecute waste crimes, including the power to seize vehicles for a wider range of suspected offences. However, I should be grateful if the Minister advised us what further analysis has been undertaken of police operations to ensure that we understand who is behind such crimes, and what work the Environment Agency is doing to make its waste licensing regime much more robust. Will she also say why she thinks there was such a substantial increase in this problem in the latest year for which we have figures? Was that increase driven in any way by changes to environmental regulations or the cost of processing rubbish? Is it possible that well-intended changes have made waste disposal so expensive that people are cutting corners? I again thank my hon. Friend the Member for Tiverton and Honiton, and I look forward to learning more about the Minister’s strategy to tackle this scourge.

UK Bee Population

Julia Lopez Excerpts

Tuesday 14th November 2017 Westminster Hall

[Julia Lopez (Hornchurch and Upminster) (Con)]

I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Cheltenham (Alex Chalk) for securing the debate. The health of Britain’s bee population is of great concern to a number of my constituents, including members of Havering Friends of the Earth.

I must declare a personal interest in the debate. It is particularly close to the heart of my father, who 10 years ago fulfilled a boyhood dream to become a beekeeper. The two hives at our family home now produce award-winning local honey, and dad has become an active member of his local beekeeping association and a minor bee celebrity with his beekeeping advice column in the local paper. On seeing the debate on the Order Paper, I fired off an email demanding that dad produce me a briefing. In the interests of transparency, I confirm that he acted as an unpaid intern in that assignment.

The threats to UK bees have been eloquently outlined by my hon. Friend the Member for Cheltenham, so I shall not repeat them. However, it is worth noting that, if our national cow herd or chicken flock were declining at as astonishing a rate as the bee population, there would likely have been emergency Government action many years ago. I very much welcome the work that the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and his team are now doing to back further restrictions on the use of neonicotinoids and to continue the national pollinator strategy. However, I have a number of questions about that work that I should be grateful if the Minister answered.

First, we are now three years into that pollinator strategy. Will the Minister advise whether he believes it is working and is adequately funded? Beekeepers want to ensure that the strategy truly deals with the major threats to bees, such as varroa mite. Local beekeeping associations do what they can to fund research into the mite, such as sponsoring PhD students.

[Sir Hugo Swire]

I am following what my hon. Friend is saying very closely. Does she agree that another thing we need to carefully look at and do more research on, particularly as winter is approaching, is colony death in winter?

[Julia Lopez]

Absolutely. I cannot claim to be a bee expert, but I know that my dad often gets very concerned about the winter months, and I agree with what he says.

Beekeepers feel that part of the answer when it comes to varroa mite is to have as many people keeping bees as possible, rather than treating bees with varroa-control chemicals, and then allowing natural selection to produce varroa-resistant bees. We therefore need the next generation to become beekeepers, and to try to promote bees to young people. However, that can be wrapped up in bureaucracy, such as beekeepers who want to go and talk to schools requiring Criminal Records Bureau checks. What plans do the Government have to help education in schools, and is sufficient research being funded into the effects and control of varroa mite?

Secondly, as we know, the next big threat is the use of pesticides, and I reinforce colleagues’ comments that there is no united opinion on the damage being done by these pesticides. Some beekeepers see existing scientific research as inconclusive and fear that, if these pesticides are banned, farmers may go back to using more harmful spraying chemicals. I should therefore be grateful if the Minister expanded on the Government’s current view on whether better research is required into the potential unintended consequences of the ban. Finally, the Asian hornet has been found in the UK and our Government have launched a destruction policy. Does the Minister believe that that policy is working and is properly funded?

I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Cheltenham for raising this important subject, which is central to the proper functioning of any future environmental policy. I am really excited by the energy and vivacity of the ministerial team and its desire to set out such a positive and ambitious post-Brexit environmental agenda. If we are to ensure that there is depth and credibility to that agenda, bee health must surely lie at its heart.