Environment: 25-year Plan

Lord Chartres Excerpts

Monday 29th January 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Chartres (CB)]

My Lords, in following the noble Lord, Lord Framlingham, I have to say that there is a considerable ivy problem in Wiltshire as well and I echo his concern about that. I declare an interest as an ambassador for the World Wide Fund for Nature and someone with more than 40 years’ membership of a series of environmental organisations and initiatives. Like so many others in your Lordships’ House, I hugely welcome the publication of this 25-year plan. The changes that we need to make to the way we live now are urgent but achieving them will take wisdom and a sustained and developing approach over the next quarter century. We have heard some intriguing and delightful ideas. Like the noble Baroness, Lady Young, I relish the notion of a sort of Ent warden for trees—a tree champion. I would love to see the ideal profile for such an Ent.

As somebody who has lived in central London for more than 30 years and who has brought up a family in the heavily polluted square mile of the City of London, I welcome the emphasis placed on air quality. The noble Lord, Lord Oxburgh, looked at this in statistical and global financial terms. For me, it was brought home on a recent visit to a primary school in West Drayton—close to Heathrow but, more significantly, close to the confluence of motorways—where I discovered that on every school journey staff must carry a box of respirators, so prevalent are asthma and breathing problems among the children.

The point has already been made, so I will not labour it, that much of our existing regulation about air quality and so much else is derived from EU legislation and the withdrawal Bill has not been clear about the machinery for enforcement and any sanctions regime after Brexit. We know that these things will have to be reinvented, and the 25-year plans aims,

“to set up a world-leading environmental watchdog, an independent statutory body to hold Government to account”.

This is crucial, as other noble Lords have said—it must have teeth as well as protection from short-termist demands for watering down standards. I believe that we are fortunate in having an intelligent and energetic Secretary of State as well as a Minister in this House who has been widely commended, but such is the churn which afflicts all Governments that we must insure ourselves against a time when the climate is not so benign.

The plan also deals with putting a price on natural capital. We have had several contributions from noble Lords discussing this concept. I understand the proper concern to develop metrics to inform our decision-making, but that is not enough to generate energy for change. Twenty-five years’ involvement in a symposium focused on the health of our rivers and oceans, “Religion, Science and the Environment”, brought home to me that numbers and statistics repeated at a plethora of international conferences do not generate the energy needed for a transformation in the way we live now. The noble Lord, Lord Cameron of Dillington, argued in parallel for this sort of initiative and some sort of inspiration. This plan is ambitious but there must also be understanding and modesty about the limits of any Government’s capacity to deliver the necessary change together with an awareness of the crucial significance of building partnerships with civil society. We have not heard this afternoon about the role of artists and journalists, which is crucial. They have a huge contribution to make, as the recent BBC “Blue Planet” series has once again demonstrated.

For the vast majority of the world’s population the sense of nature as a sacred trust and not just an economic resource is a powerful force which ought to be harnessed. There is scope for translating the themes in this plan into the daily practice of millions of people throughout the world. We need imagination. We need a disposition to build partnerships and to propose imaginative ways forward. We need the imagination demonstrated by Bishop Nathan of Uganda. He insists that each confirmation he performs must be accompanied by the planting of a tree. When he arrives in a village to do his confirmations, the first thing he does is count the saplings, and if there are not enough, he refuses to confirm the requisite number of candidates.

For an ambitious plan such as this to succeed it needs not only metrics but a language and an approach complemented by educational alliances—education alliances are discussed with primary schools—with the wisdom traditions of the world and their day-to-day practices. Yesterday, the Church year turned to looking forward to Lent and Easter, and this is perhaps a moment to recall the words of Pope Francis in his 2015 encyclical Laudato Si:

“Many things have to change course, but it is we human beings above all who need to change. We lack an awareness of our common origin, of our mutual belonging, and of a future to be shared with everyone. This basic awareness would enable the development of new convictions, attitudes and forms of life. A great cultural, spiritual and educational challenge stands before us, and it will demand that we set out on the long path of renewal.”