Planning System Reforms: Wild Belt Designation

Katherine Fletcher Excerpts

Tuesday 22nd June 2021 Westminster Hall

[Katherine Fletcher (South Ribble) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mrs Cummins, and I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for East Surrey (Claire Coutinho). Let me put my cards on the table: I wholeheartedly support an additional designation of wild belt within a formal legal framework. I want to focus my remarks on what is true for many things in this place. It is crucial not only to have a good idea but to define what it is, to ensure that it is effective and achieves the aims that it seeks. In doing that, I ask Members to bear with me, as I draw on past experiences to describe the wild belt today.

Trophic pyramids—my hon. Friend the Member for East Surrey once misunderstood and thought that I had said “tropical pyramids”—are a fancy title for the web of life in an ecosystem. From the bottom to the top, any extensive study, or any child, will tell us that all elements of a trophic pyramid are required to be in place for an effective ecosystem, as the chain of energy flows up, from the soils and decomposers, the detritivores and fungi, primary producers, the plants, the chemivores, the primary consumers, the herbivores, caterpillars, grasshoppers and cute rabbits. There are the secondary consumers; omnivores and carnivores—hedgehogs and birds, in English. Then there are the tertiary consumers: carnivores—the wild cats. Any ecosystem requires all of those things.

The only way to return the UK to its natural state is for us to wind back the clock 15,000 years and for all human beings to clear off. That is not going to happen. At that point, we would see bears, wolves, giant elk, wild cats, beavers and a truly natural ecosystem. I hug trees, but we are not going to clear off deliberately. What can we do to manage responsibly a patchwork of natural state environments to a self-sustaining state? What does that mean for the legal framework and the law?

I have highlighted, as have colleagues, the importance of reservoir populations, on a scale that allows for a viable population of at least secondary consumers—the hedgehogs. That needs two things. First, that needs space, in the form of viable access habitat that we can measure in multiples of field. For that to be effective, the dots must be joined up by wildlife corridors. Secondly, the most important thing to make the effective ecosystem is something that no politician can produce or promise: time. To introduce another term, that is sere succession. They need to be left in place to occur—the bramble patch and the foxgloves that are slightly messy on the eye. This is as important as those wonderful mature forests or the wetlands in South Ribble, the salt marsh and peat bog.

What can we do as the House of Commons to highlight their importance? We need additional categorisation: growth renewal protect wild belt, and the space designation to allow it to happen, but also the acceptance that a wildlife corridor even 3 metres deep will allow it to happen. Create the space and time and do not let it swap in and out over five and 10-year periods.