Environment Bill

Lord Chidgey Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 7th July 2021 Lords Chamber

Finally, I have great sympathy for the farmers involved. All businesses would love to have a framework of certainty and constancy in which to make sometimes risky and long-lasting financial decisions, but this situation has been on the horizon for years, if not decades. I repeat again: some of our rivers are in a very precarious state and the time when you can expect compensation for not causing environmental degradation has, in my view, long since gone.

[Lord Chidgey (LD)]

My Lords, it is always a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Cameron of Dillington, in this House. He speaks with great knowledge and conviction. It is equally a pleasure to listen to the words of the noble Lord, Lord Carrington. I cannot think of another occasion when I have spoken in this House, following two clearly eminent and very experienced farmers. As a civil engineer, I have to just look at the mechanics of it. Nevertheless, it is easier to be supportive of Amendments 176A, 180A and 187ZA, rather than the perhaps more holocaustic view of “what will happen if” that we have heard in earlier remarks.

These amendments, which we support, would provide for the power that is set out in the amendments to be available earlier than given in the Bill. Given the damage that is already occurring—as has been so eloquently put by the noble Lord, Lord Cameron—the impacts of over-abstraction can be long lasting and profound. I speak from the point of view of someone who, while not farming, lives close to the farming community in Hampshire. Noble Lords will have heard me speak earlier of the issues concerning the catchment area of the rivers that we live with. Fish and wildlife can be lost from channels that experience low flows, and take many years to recover. We are already experiencing, in Hampshire, salmon failing to meet conservation limits. So it is not a guess that things will be bad—they are already bad.

Sustainable abstraction will the support the Government’s 25-year environment plan commitments and species recovery targets. Many farmers already farm under sustainable licences, and we must use the techniques and innovations adopted by those farmers to support best practice. For example, as the noble Lord, Lord Cameron of Dillington, has mentioned, with forward planning and investment, on-farm reservoirs are one of the options that can be used.

Amendment 187B would apply to abstraction of water from a river or aquifer that is used by businesses for commercial reasons and related in some sense to agriculture. I am thinking here of businesses such as those that process and distribute cress—watercress and so forth—or fish farms. Water is abstracted, used and then returned to the river by the licence holder. The cost of monitoring inflows and outflows, we believe, should be met by the licence holder as a regular means of, if not controlling what the users are doing, at least being aware of what they are doing.

This has been a very serious issue in our locality. Hampshire is famous for its watercress, but it is reliant, very much so, on pure water. When there is a situation where a successful international commercial company uses your local area as its base for international processing and distribution of their salads, because it has the benefit of a licence to use the water from the chalk stream to clean and remove chemicals and pesticides and so forth on their product, which is then distributed all over Europe, if they are then found to be abusing the licence, and end up by polluting the river, you have a serious problem. I think the Government need to have the means at their disposal to control that. In the particular case I mentioned, it was controlled because individuals mounted a private prosecution to demonstrate the abuse was carrying on, and this exposed it and eventually stopped it.

The terms of the licence will be determined at a level recognising the activities on a particular river or chalk stream, matching or improving on the water quality, and ensuring, by using settlement ponds or recirculation systems, that there are no additional chemicals, nutrients or sediments in the outgoing water compared to the incoming water.